Improving Employee Productivity: Availability

In the post about improving employee productivity seven key factors were proposed for increasing employee productivity (Cummings, Donovan, et al., 3rd ed. Toronto. McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2006). In this series we extrapolate these 7 key factors to the Workplace Domain. This week key factor availability will be discussed.

Availability

If Facility Managers want to improve the productivity of employees the availability of services plays a significant very important role. Tradionally, Facilties Services are only available during office hours and requests for service can only made when calling a Facility Management Professional or a call center employee. However, as both the office as well as the labour force is becoming more virtual so should the Employee Services. One Centralized Call Center alone just won’t do the trick.

This however doesn’t implicate that a customer call center is totally unnecessary but that it would be far more effective when combining it with an online version of the Employee Services Desk because:

1. Employee Services Requests are available 24×7 thus delivering a higher quality of service to your Employees.
2. Online Employee Service Desk can give insight in the status of an employee service request thus increasing the transparency and reducing incertainty
3. Organizational Processes can be automated so that no human interference is necessary thus reducing costs
4. The Facility Management Professionals only have to deal with challenging exceptions instead of routine calls thus increasing their motivation (routine jobs tend to get boring)

An Integrated Workplace Management System supports Facility Managers in improving employee productivity by allowing Facility Managers to distribute their products and services catalog to the intranet. As a result of this controlled availability organizations can save up to 15 minutes per employee per day!

Next week: Accessibility