If it cannot be measured, it cannot be managed. Most contact centers have very sophisticated reporting, recording, and surveys that enable contact center agent productivity to be optimized. The same cannot be said for most professional workers, and part of the problem is the lack of sophisticated reporting, recording, and feedback in most Unified Communications applications.Internally-facing UC projects base part of their business case on improving employee productivity. Since most organizations do not have a baseline for employee productivity, quantifying an improvement and the associated value is difficult.
In most organizations, it takes a team of people collaborating together to accomplish something. Communication plays a big role in the collaboration process. By tracking the communication and soliciting feedback, the degree of collaboration can be assessed. For example, there can be two project teams of 8 people given an equivalent assignment and one can get it done in 4 weeks while the other can struggle for months with a lot of finger pointing going on within the team.
Imagine professional employees that could be measured on:
* Total communication--meetings, calls, messages, and chats per day
* Results--Average time to reply, quality of response, participation
* Professionalism--Politeness, attitude, ease to converse with
A key part of these measures is feedback from peers, managers, and/or subordinates. As more organizations use cross functional teams and matrix management, having both short term and long term feedback enables more accurate reporting on employee productivity. In order to optimize organizational productivity, everyone needs to be fully engaged and motivated. A single "bad apple" can derail a project team.
Collaboration is about people working together towards a common goal. Senior management continually tracks manufacture lines, sales, and call center productivity, with any variability addressed quickly. In the future, professional employee productivity will be another key metric that senior managers will monitor. Once this metric is in place, quantifying UC projects and value will be easier.
