8 Expert Tips to Improve Employee Productivity

Many organizations face daily inefficiencies that are more productivity-squashing than faxing 1,000 memos. But you can change the way your team works. You can improve the response to inefficiencies by thinking about how you can work smarter, and help your team to do the same.

To understand how you can encourage others to work smarter, we had a wide-ranging conversation with Erin Wright, Senior Director of Marketing, Global Alliances at Dun & Bradstreet, and Doug Rybacki, Chief Product Officer at Conga. Read the full story in the latest issue of the AppExchange magazine, The Exchange. Hold onto your rolodex (or don’t), because here are the highlights.

Productivity tips: Leadership and Workflows

1. "Find a small group of people inside of a bigger part of the organization – two to five people – who will take that opportunity to go and explore some new innovation and work out the kinks. Learn how it should really work – optimize it – so we learn how to deploy to the broader organization." - Doug Rybacki

2. "Ultimately, we think about the speed of the sales process, how to speed things to market. That can translate into things like improving your employee experience, having a really good set of data to rely on, a good use of Salesforce – and all of those workflows that originate from that lead to improved customer satisfaction. So I think the people, process, and technology are important." - Erin Wright

Productivity tips: Strategy and Trust

3. "It all comes down to context and trust. If you give teams the information they need to make good decisions, and teach them to interpret the findings using technology, and trust the employees to make those right decisions, you’re headed in the right direction." - Erin

4. "I ran across the concept of 'Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose' and how employees reach their most productivity. If we think about mastery, they understand the context in which they’re working so they can be efficient with their work. They don’t have to go and research a bunch of things in order to get their job done. Autonomy means they understand the rules by which they’re supposed to work. Then, lastly, is purpose. What is the mission that they’re on? Are they motivated by the adventure that we’re taking?" - Doug

Productivity tips: Technology

5. It’s in everything we do, really. If you look at D&B Optimizer, the Dun & Bradstreet business information that flows into the customer’s Salesforce instance helps to accelerate sales by offering continuous data hygiene, enriching data in real time, and improving the ability for analysis, data visualization, and reporting. That’s just the high level. - Erin

6. Conga Contracts helps leverage a bunch of that data we just heard about getting into the system to be ingested by Salesforce and made use of by the salesperson. If we think about the life of a deal, we’re typically putting together a proposal that starts to indicate here’s what we are trying to sell you. A quote oftentimes will have the details of that quote with the quantities and price and so forth. There are usually terms and conditions in there and oftentimes they’re supported by either a master subscription or master services agreement. - Doug

Productivity tips: Trying New Things

7. "You see leaders and laggards in every segment of business...The early adopters are the ones who are visionaries, the risk takers, the ones who want to move fast and break things. And that’s really going to be interesting to see their reaction as this type of technology takes over." - Erin

8. "People throughout society essentially have a budding relationship with new technologies as they get introduced. And people react to them differently. Some fall in love with them. Others say, “I hate that thing.” It will happen here too." - Doug

Say so long to your filing cabinets, because these insights from Doug and Erin show you can work smarter with help from your management, or from technology brought in to remove roadblocks. Read more from these two productivity heroes in the AppExchange magazine, The Exchange.