Current workplace practices are failing business leaders, says Andy Bailey, VP of Marketing
It will come as no surprise to anyone working in senior management to hear that business leaders in the UK and US are overworked, frustrated and spend most of their time at work reacting to change.
A survey of 400 senior managers conducted by independent research company Loudhouse on behalf of Attunity, found that 86 per cent of respondents have to deal with requests at short notice. Nine out of ten people agreed that unexpected things happen during their working week that they must deal with. While it is commonly understood that a manager’s day is largely focused on managing and assessing the out of the ordinary events and the issues that arise, the research results highlighted the constraints that management have in being able to focus on the critical activities and important business issues that they believe are the most important to driving the organization forward.
Unsurprisingly, two-thirds of senior managers feel that working in this type of reactive and continually changing environment has an impact on their company’s overall competitiveness. After all, these are the same people that organizations reward well for their experience, knowledge, relationships and connections; the individuals that represent a company’s intellectual property and its competitive differentiator.
To add to senior management’s frustration, the majority of senior managers in the UK and US described spending 25% or more of their week gathering and compiling information. While they acknowledge there are more important activities for them to focus their energies on, they have limited time available. On average, senior managers spend 11.5 hours each week – equivalent to 78 days a year – preparing and collating information, which more than half consider too much.
A third of business managers also complain about a lack of collaboration in their workplace – even though collaborative working and knowledge sharing are seen as having the biggest impact in terms of competitive advantage. For example, only a quarter of workplaces have shared learning resources or cross-department teams.
Yet being able to share knowledge effectively and draw upon historic actions and learning is what companies need in order to regain some competitive advantage. Long-term corporate value resides in a company’s human capital. It’s not outputs and widgets that matter in today’s economy, but the collective knowledge, intelligence and human capital that resides in an organization.
Part of the problem in the UK is that it is still largely a process-driven society – more so than the US, in fact. But process-driven activities are not the only activities that take place inside an organization; more importantly, they are not the most vital either.
People-driven activities – otherwise known as ‘management actions’ – are what give one company a lead over another. But these actions are typically not process-led or structured and, as such, cannot be improved through automation or systemization.
Technology is seen as a key enabler for senior management effectiveness – particularly email and intranets. However, technology innovations are also contributing to the frustrations of senior management with the rapidity of data that is disseminated to management constantly. .
To enable senior management to do their jobs more effectively, organizations need a new type of technology that focuses on improving the people-driven activities within their company. These applications are called workplace applications and enable business leaders to quickly and easily access all relevant information, share it, assign tasks to act upon it and monitor all decisions, actions and results in real time.
Workplace applications bring together the standard tools of the knowledge worker: search, data access, business intelligence, collaboration, messaging and knowledge management. By enabling real-time access to information, decisions can be made on an informed basis and managers can spend less time searching for information and more time acting on it. Ultimately, it presents an opportunity for organizations to gain back some of that competitive advantage many feel they’re currently missing out on.
Want to comment on this article? Contact marketing@attunity.com