Services Organizations Can’t Be “Customer-centric” Without Being “Employee-centric”
Many services businesses claim to be “customer-centric”, but what exactly does that mean? In this age of customer authority, putting the client first is a given – but it’s just a meaningless buzzword if the proper supports aren’t in place. Services firms cannot empower their clients without first empowering their employees. Services delivery – and consequently, revenue – is dependent on employee time & work, experience, skill, and availability, and team members must be provided an equally “employee-centric” environment to thrive. But what constitutes a truly “employee-centric” environment? It’s more than having a coffee machine. And in this increasingly uncertain climate, holding a Zoom meeting or two won’t cut it, either. A supportive, employee-focused organization must begin from the ground up and account for every minute of employee time, interwoven into the very workflows, technologies, metrics, and sources of truth that keep everything running smoothly. Here’s how that can happen:
Planning and Teamwork Make the Dream Work
Everyone loves a plan until it runs off track – and realistically, it almost always runs off track. Laying the foundation for a happy client begins long before the work even starts, beginning with detailed planning, research, and communication among employees. That last one – communication – is especially important, and often the culprit when things go downhill. Effective communication between team members, departments, and other resources across the globe is key in setting the stage for success. Clients cannot enjoy transparency unless team members are also enabled to provide input anytime, anywhere – and this starts with an organization choosing a project time tracking solution built to support collaboration and communication using workflows across teams, departments, regions, and countries. A flexible, centralized platform to streamline processes will keep everyone on the same page and help to eliminate incomplete data from siloed systems. By combining a complete view of resource timesheet with a configurable framework for an organization’s unique workflows, teams can rely on one consistent pool of data to optimize productivity and collaboration.
Clear Metrics for Smooth Sailing
Helping project managers understand business trends within key metrics is a lot easier when there’s something to visualize. Clean, graphical representations of project data let business leaders drill down into both current and historical data for a real-time, consolidated view of progress and productivity to help manage budgets, costs, and resources without sending workers on a wild goose chase for answers among colleagues and across departments. Analyzing this data reveals a wealth of information employees can benefit from; noting seasonal upticks or downtrends in workload demand to anticipate staffing requirements; visibility into resources’ skills sets to ensure that each project gets the right people for the job; setting productivity and billable hour profitability targets to manage expectations; and most importantly, setting employees up for success.
Cloud-based, Mobile-first
As today’s circumstances have demonstrated, nothing empowers an employee base quite like a modern, mobile time tracking solution. Ensuring that all workers – especially those working remotely – can be tracked with 100% visibility has always been important, but never so critical as it is today. A mobile-enabled enterprise solution can uniquely enable instant visibility into project time, support rapid employee adoption, and prompt supervisor approvals when working in sync with an organization’s ecosystem. Allowing employees everywhere to capture accurate, up-to-date time tracking information makes all the difference – rather than waiting for data to come in, team members can reference real-time data to enhance collaboration, and supervisors can use the information they receive as it happens and use it to create the biggest impact on productivity.
Clients require transparency into project progress, costs, billing status, and more in order to maintain trust in an organization. But before that, streamlined processes, effective resource management, clean metrics, and more should be readily accessible to employees as a means to enabling their best work. Mastering this balancing act can allow services organizations to realize their true profitability potential – and make it a reality.
Interested in how Replicon’s Project Time Tracking can help meet your organization’s project and resource management needs? Request a free trial to learn more:
