Workforce productivity is one of the key factors that define the success of an organization. Whether it is about meeting sales targets, timely delivery of service, or meeting customers' expectations, everything relies on the productivity of the workforce.
Even while making new recruitments, a candidate's aptitude towards productivity is closely analyzed. However, productivity depends on two many factors like employees' health, attitude towards work, skill-set suitability, and work environment, all these have positive or negative impacts on the productivity of an employee.
Modern organizations demands fast-forward productivity
In the current times, the definition of productivity has changed a lot. For instance, consider a maintenance technician; it is his duty to visit the client site and provide the maintenance service. But the traveling part is often not counted as a part of his productivity. checking emails, filling forms, coordination, verifying documents, likewise, there are many support operations that employees need to perform just to support their primary jobs. Although such jobs need to be done, yet those are considered productivity leaks. According to a report, such kinds of jobs are responsible for wasting 16 hours per week for 55% of employees.
Tools to maximize workplace productivity
Thankfully, nowadays, some tools can control productivity leaks, or you can say maximize workplace productivity. Listed below are five such tools that every field service business should have in order to address the productivity issues in field operations
Automated maintenance scheduling software: Manual ways of job scheduling is a major productivity leak for the service manager who is responsible for scheduling and dispatching of field technicians. Verifying technician's availability and their skill sets for a job, and then managing the territories, can take the whole day of the manager. Automated job scheduler makes job scheduling an act of a few clicks or some simple drag and drop practices. The tool can automatically identify who is the rightly skilled, nearest available technician for a job, and can accordingly assign the jobs to the technicians.
Maintenance Management Software: This kind of tool is a comprehensive software program- a perfect productivity enabler. In fact, most of the maintenance management software suites have the automated job scheduling & dispatching feature also, along with other features like:
Route planning & tracking
Work order management
Pre/Post inspection reports
Customer management
RFQ & quote management
Time-tracking & timesheet
Invoice & payments
Contract & warranty management
Inventory management
Claims & reimbursement
Reporting & analytics
Collaboration tool: every business operates through distributed teams nowadays. Gone are the days when every team member used to be in the same office premises and could meet for the morning scrum to update each other of their work status. But now teams are distributed, especially in field services, where the major section of the workforce is always out in the field. So, every business needs a collaboration tool, which must support multiple collaboration formats like group chat, private chat, calling, data sharing format like image, doc, video, etc. Besides, collaboration tools should also have features to assign tasks, track tasks, job status updates, etc. so that everyone can be on the same page.
Time stamping tool: Indeed, employees work best when they are self-motivated, but it is also important to keep them under surveillance. This helps them from getting distracted. So, a time-stamping tool is very necessary to validate an employee's check-in and check-out time into a job. Especially in field services, where the field technicians are always on the move and attending multiple jobs at multiple locations. So time-stamping along with location tracking provides the much-needed field visibility.
Automated notification alert: Field technicians are assigned multiple jobs. Maintaining a log of each job, like what is the job, when it is scheduled for, who is the client, address to the job site, or details of service history, etc., can consume their valuable time. An automated notification alert system can do the note-keeping for them. The tool can send them automated reminders and notifications of the jobs scheduled to them. This confirms that they don't miss any jobs.
Conclusion
Not inventing technology or tools to maximize workplace productivity is one of the biggest mistakes that a business can make. It is just the same as using posts to deliver mails, instead of using electronic mails. Field services check out the custom maintenance management systems available in the market and get handy with a comprehensive application that can multi-function and if not all can at least have the capacity of most of the tools mentioned above.
