Today’s bosses can no longer give themselves the excuse of not knowing all the details and aspects of their business to create the best environment with the maximum possible productivity.
They must know in near real-time the productivity of their employees and their attachment to the company, the state of its machines and maintenance prediction, the evolution of its market and the tactics of competitors, the geo and socio-economic impacts it could suffer from wars, pandemics or financial recession, the tastes and evolving expectations of these customers, as well as the potential for improvement in penetrating new markets, improving productivity, changing business model, training employees for upgrading, automation and so on.
This may seem too much to know at the same time. But this does not need to be overwhelming because, with the help of certain tools and transformations, you can have control of all these elements with minimal investment and long-term evolution.
Internal monitoring tools.
Several tools for monitoring and evaluating employee productivity and satisfaction exist today, including artificial intelligence products and more, particularly “computer vision,” which uses the imaging of office surveillance cameras to recognize the emotions expressed by employees during the working day and their level of concentration depending on the tasks of each. Examples of these technologies include the Viso AI tool for analyzing emotions on camera flows or Huawei’s “eSight” platform for monitoring the performance of the company’s various resources through real-time data analysis.
There are also software tools to assign these tasks and track the progress of their execution, based on a median comparing the execution time of similar tasks by similar collaborators in your company or even elsewhere, to allow you to compare the productivity of your teams to the average of the sectoral labor market.
The same applies to the monitoring and follow-up of the condition of your machines, in the case of industrial sectors, where it is recommended to use the Internet of Things to report machine operating data in real time and analyze potential problems based on comparison to the optimal operating benchmark. This even allows you to know in advance which machine could fail, which part needs to be replaced before it breaks, and what type of maintenance to do.
There are even augmented reality technologies that allow remote 3D guidance of machine repairs, so even your non-specialist workers can perform this maintenance without long interruptions to the production cycle.
External monitoring tools.
External monitoring is very important in the evolution and success of any business. This includes market intelligence, which is not limited to the markets in which the company already operates but also encompasses those in which it wishes to operate and expand and the different opportunities and threats these markets may present.
This also includes competitive intelligence, studying the different movements of competitors ranging from their marketing, sales campaigns, recruitment, sector targeting, business models, expansion, acquisitions, and so on.
Concretely, you can activate these external monitoring operations through competitor analysis programs on social networks, which collect the number of Linkedin employees affiliated with a particular competitor, to identify the number of recruitment offers and the positions recruited or to detect the feelings of their customers towards them by making “sentiment analysis” comments on their Facebook or Instagram pages. You can also use financial data recognition tools to analyze the quarterly and annual statements of your various competitors and compile them to give you a comprehensive idea of the state of your market.
Continuous improvement tools.
Based on this data and much more, you can make your business well-oiled, resilient to future disruption, and growing steadily. However, you can’t use these tools without transforming your organization to take maximum advantage of them, giving you the flexibility to adapt quickly and smoothly to different circumstances while keeping your growth strategies on track.
This necessary transformation is not only digital, it is a transformation that must also break the miscommunication between the different functions and departments and a synchronized alignment with the multi-faceted strategy of the company. It must be accompanied by change management to remold your executives of agility, open-mindedness, and innovation. You also have to discover what is being done elsewhere in your sector and transform your business models while contextualizing this transformation to your local and regional market.
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