Enabling employee adaptability is the first step towards becoming a truly agile enterprise.

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The enterprise landscape is more dynamic than ever. New technologies, cultural trends, and even complex geopolitical factors are changing the way organizations work, often in multiple ways simultaneously.

Achieving consistent, profitable success in this environment means being able to adapt to a wide range of situations and flexibly deploy resources to meet new challenges. Not all of these challenges are easy to predict.

Today’s most successful organizations aren’t always the most rigidly efficient ones, or the ones with the greatest economies of scale. Often, they are the ones who can adapt to new challenges and effectively deploy resources towards overcoming those challenges. In short, they are agile enterprises.

Your company’s employees are its most valuable asset. Fostering a  workforce culture that’s founded on agility is the crucial first step towards building a flourishing agile enterprise capable of innovating when faced with disruptive challenges.

Agility Enables Innovation and Sustainable Growth

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Technology continues to shape the way people interact with one another. The rate at which innovation occurs is more frequent than ever, leaving large organizations with little room to rely on the rigid corporate structures of yesteryear. Now, enterprise teams must excel in the moment while preparing themselves for the next change.

Every organization is only as agile as its employees. This makes it important for enterprises to equip their teams with multiple skill sets and the technical capabilities necessary to handle new challenges.

This transformation empowers teams to respond decisively to new technologies, cultural innovations, and even unpredictable global disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic. It gives you the power to grow consistently, even in the face of uncertainty.

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Five Things Enterprise Leaders Can Do To Improve Workforce Agility

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Enterprise leaders have a unique opportunity to cultivate workforce agility by gathering and analyzing data on how employees do their best work. This data helps leaders understand the effectiveness of processes in real-time, implement changes that improve productivity and efficiency, and evolve with industry demands. 

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Encourage People to Leave Their Comfort Zone

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Disruptive new technologies can make people feel uncomfortable. So, that’s why rejecting new changes and sticking to the way things have always been done is tempting. However, history has shown that this makes organizations rigid and vulnerable in changing times.

But that doesn’t mean you should suddenly delegate unfamiliar tasks to team members and force them out of their comfort zone. You need to identify which employees are best-suited to taking on new and challenging tasks, then nominate them as the best candidates to take on new roles and responsibilities .

Companies that monitor employee activity using employer tracking software are best placed to identify high-performing employees who are predisposed to going beyond their comfort zone . Encouraging employees to leave their comfort zones and equipping them with the technologies they need to do so can help build a resilient, agile workforce that is ready to take on new challenges.

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Personalize Talent Management

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When you monitor employee activity, you gain the ability to gather and analyze the data generated by your productivity tracking software.  This enables personalized talent management that better equips employees and keeps then engaged while offering them valuable opportunities to progress through the company.

Individual productivity data can help project managers better understand how to optimize team efficiency. If certain employees are better-suited to specific tasks than others, it makes sense to shift workloads towards the individuals who have strengths in those areas.

Large, distributed teams will often have talent and productivity gaps that can only be uncovered through the use of employee tracking software. When you gain the ability to recognize individual strengths and weaknesses on a task-by-task basis, you gain the ability to personalize your approach to talent management throughout the organization.

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Retain Expertise Even If Turnover Is High

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When a team member with deep expertise leaves your company, it often leaves your team with a disruptive skill gap. Until the HR team can onboard a new expert, everyone else has to cover for that gap to the best of their abilities – which isn’t always practical.

Improved employee retention is one of the benefits that staff monitoring software enables for enterprise leaders. But simply having employers monitoring employees won’t make your company immune to turnover.

Instead, you need to plan ahead for turnover and make sure that experts leave their expertise with your company even if they leave their position. Virtual training sessions, recorded operating procedures, and documented processes all contribute to workforce agility by making sure you keep valuable expertise in your company – even if your experts leave.

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Find Dependable Managed Service Providers

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Large enterprises often invest in their own in-house capabilities in order to benefit from economies of scale. However, this leaves them significant amounts of capital locked in investments that they cannot easily divest themselves of. If market conditions change in the near future, those investments may turn out to be liabilities.

Managed service providers enable companies to access a specialized talent pool on an as-needed basis. This offsets some of the responsibilities that your company’s internal team has to handle, enabling them to spend more time focusing on higher-impact, strategic issues.

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Dedicate Time Specifically for Innovation

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Your company does not just have to respond to change – it can drive it, too. If you have delegated high-volume, low-impact processes to managed service and Business-Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS) providers, you can now enable transformative agility for your internal teams by empowering people to focus on innovation.

Implementing productivity tracking software allows you to strike a balance between productive and innovative work. The best employee time tracking apps allow you to establish task-based workflows that reflect multiple priorities, so you can easily have your innovators dedicate 10-15% of their time purely to collaborative brainstorming.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have long advocated for explicitly encouraging innovative side projects on company time. The company’s 20 percent rule is actually responsible for its greatest successes, like Gmail, Adsense, and Google News.

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Upgrade Talent Management to Achieve Workforce Agility

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Making the most of your team’s strengths requires rethinking the way employees interact with your company and with one another. Many enterprises use popular time tracking tools like Hubstaff to keep track of their employees, but fall short of enabling true workforce agility.

In order to achieve that goal, you need a more robust platform for tracking, analyzing, and visualizing your team’s daily activities. You need a Hubstaff alternative capable of providing deep, granular insight into your workforce and its potential to achieve enterprise agility.