Daily Workplace Frustrations….

How to Reverse Them When Your Productivity Tools are Working Against You

As a business professional, you aspire to move your work forward, but you feel you’re constantly taking steps back. You took pictures of the whiteboard with your mobile phone, and now you can’t find them. Your team spends the first 10 minutes of every meeting wrestling with conferencing technology. “Who has the latest document?” is a common meeting opener. Annabel from the UK, on conference call, must interrupt to get her idea on the table. Your best thought just hit, and the whiteboard markers stopped working. Always-Prepared Ted cleared the wall before his meeting, so gone are your designs from last evening’s working session. Millennial Harper is “working remotely” from a coffee shop. The COO needs your room right now, and it’s the only one with AV technology.

Need I go on? You’ve been there. You get it.

You may be smiling, but the problem is quite real and adds to productivity loss. That’s concerning considering that the average worker is productive for only 3 hours each day, according to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Even in workspaces like huddle spaces designed to encourage creative thinking and informal collaboration, employees still struggle with cross-team interaction and sharing,” said QuirkLogic founder and CEO Nashir Samanani. “It’s highly inefficient. We believe there is a better way – a way that modernizes and accelerates how everyday work gets done.”

Three Must-Haves to Enable Productivity

To better connect the extended workforce and take full advantage of collective knowledge, office productivity technology needs to meet three big requirements:

1. It must recognize “people first” and fit to the natural ways humans work. People don’t enjoy sitting in a cubicle all day. They prefer to be active in the office, either to interact with others or find a quiet space to go deep. They write down what’s on their minds to brainstorm, get “in the zone” on projects, and identify courses of action. There are many studies that indicate that writing helps with the creative process. For us to let go of the familiar feel of pen and paper and instead engage using technology, it must be portable, familiar, and be easy to use.
2. It must be nimble to match to the dynamic habits of today’s workforce and traits of today’s workspaces.Today, teams are often collaborating around content – whether that is a page of notes, a document, or a conceptual sketch – and moving about spaces. Technology needs to be flexible, not anchored to a wall, allowing teams to take their content down the hall and even change the orientation of it. And let’s not forget about how mobile workers are. Technology needs to recognize that remote participants need to engage with the content and give them a true “seat at the table.”
3. It must treat the outcomes of people interactions – ideas, notes, drawings, strategies, lists – as valuable corporate assets to be shared and re-used. An HBR article on preserving institutional knowledge recommends creating “a living and evolving body of useful information” that’s accessible by all and discoverable by employees who are new to the organization. Technology solutions should enable workers to quickly pick up exactly where they left off and share ideas across the team or organization. Don’t let Talented Tom’s notes, stored on his personal tablet and written in his spiral notebook, walk out the door with him.

There Has Got to Be a Better Way

That’s why QuirkLogic is innovating to give corporate teams the tools they need to work together in new ways to capture thoughts and turn them into strategies, actions, and solutions.

We’re creating a brand new product space – a Connected eWriter. “There’s no technology in the marketplace today that captures the essence of writing in way that replicates pen on paper and has digital capabilities to work with content,” said Samanani. “That’s important because a-ha moments and big innovations start with a free flow of ideas, unhampered by tools to record and develop them.”

Come and see our a-ha moment come to life as we launch the Connected eWriter at CES 2017 in Las Vegas on January 5 – 8.  Visit us at the LVCC South Hall Booth #31646 and try it out. For more information, feel free to contact us.