4 ways to make your millennial workforce more productive

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This post was written by Taher Behbehani, chief digital and marketing officer at BroadSoft.

In Mary Meeker’s 2016 Internet Trends Report, the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) venture capitalist notes that, “Messaging is evolving from simple social conversations to business conversations.” The way I see it, we need messaging to be about more than being entertained — we need to get stuff done.

Messaging is penetrating the business market, and it is evolving from being just another application to a dynamic platform that will serve as the foundation for how your workforce communicates.

Businesses are drawn to messaging applications for a number of reasons, but a key driver is that the increasingly mobile and millennial workforce is gravitating from email and desk phones. I often look at my kids in wonder that they are already doing this stuff.

In the workplace, expecting productivity gains by swapping one application (email) for another (standalone enterprise messaging) is like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. This is perhaps why we’re already seeing backlash from users of standalone messaging apps, as it doesn’t take long for the volume of messages and messaging threads to exceed the number of emails employees used to receive.

To improve business productivity for a workforce drowning in distractions, business decision makers must deliver a single, integrated experience that empowers users in four key ways.

1. Let workers enjoy life and stop multitasking.

On average, employees receive 90 business emails a day, on top of having to track and manage multiple IM threads, files stored all over the place, and disparate business applications that don’t integrate with one another. It’s little wonder that analyst firm IDC says the typical knowledge worker spends 2.5 hours a day searching for information.

The number of applications is a problem. A Forrester Research study of enterprise IT leaders found that workers were managing 10 apps to communicate, retrieve data, and complete tasks. The number of apps employees use for work is up 25% in two years.

The sheer volume of information and applications leads to unproductive meetings, and lots of them. Nearly half of workers say they feel overwhelmed by the number of meetings attended, which makes sense, because employees spend, on average, a whopping seven hours each week in unproductive meetings.

2. Improve focus by reducing digital distractions.

Knowledge workers are interrupted every three minutes, and it takes up to eight undisrupted minutes to reestablish focus. With the average employee suffering through 20 interruptions an hour, it is easy to see why these distractions are adding up big time for businesses in the form of lost productivity and efficiency.

While technology vendors remain focused on building better mousetraps for each application and service, businesses need a messaging-based collaboration solution that centralizes the apps and services they need in one place. Standalone messaging applications have collaboration capabilities but lack a virtual workspace that supports the user throughout their workday — in the office and on the road — whether it is personal productivity, one-on-one, or team collaboration.

3. Take a hint from your kids.

A recent US Census Bureau population report showed that millennials have surpassed baby boomers as the nation’s largest living generation. For businesses, this generational shift is extending to the workplace with profound ramifications for how employees work.

Consider that 75% of millennials (and your kids) prefer texting to talking and would rather give up voice calls than the ability to text. In 2015, 65% of employees who didn't interact directly with clients took JPMorgan Chase up on its offer to eliminate voice mail altogether.

As millennials move from applications such as email and voicemail — where an immediate response is not expected — to those that demand real-time responses and continual tracking such as business messaging, it is critical to provide employees with a virtual workspace that centralizes a user’s real-time communications, collaboration, conferencing, and document sharing.

4. Keep them engaged.

According to analyst firm IDC, mobile workers will account for nearly three-quarters of the US workforce by 2020. Business decision makers, to their credit, have sought to enable remote workers rather than restrict them through mobile technology. The next step is remote-worker engagement, which depends on extending beyond investments such as internet, email, and network access to arming the mobile workforce with technologies specifically designed to simplify collaboration.

Today’s available communication and collaboration solutions manage one aspect of work — communications, tasks, and content — leaving teams disconnected from real-time work conversations and separating them from the flow of information.

To fully unlock productivity, business requires a workforce collaboration platform that synthesizes all three of these vital and interrelated aspects of work management into a holistic, integrated experience.

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For more information on how to ensure your workforce's productivity, click here.

This post is sponsored by BroadSoft. | Content provided by BroadSoft.