What is the New World of Work?
Now more than ever, competitive advantage comes from the ability to transform ideas into value, through process innovation, strategic insights and customized services. We are evolving toward a diverse yet unified global market, with customers, partners and suppliers that work together across cultures and continents. The global workforce is always on and always connected, requiring new tools to help people organize and prioritize their work and personal lives. Business is becoming more transparent, with a greater need to ensure accountability, security and privacy within and across organizations. And a generation of young people who grew up with the Internet is entering the workforce, bringing along workstyles and technologies that feel as natural to them as pen and paper.
All of these changes are giving people new and better ways to work, but they also bring a new set of challenges: a deluge of information, constant demands on their attention, new skills to master and pressure to be ever more productive.
For example, "information overload" is becoming a serious drag on productivity. The typical information worker in North America gets 10 times as much e-mail as in 1997, and that number continues to increase. A recent study showed that 56 percent of workers are overwhelmed by multiple simultaneous projects and interrupted too often; one-third say that multi-tasking and distractions are keeping them from stepping back to process and reflect on the work they're doing.
It's also not easy enough just to find the information people need to do their jobs. The software innovations of the 1980s and 1990s, which revolutionized how we create and manipulate information, have created a new set of challenges: finding information, visualizing and understanding it, and taking action. Industry analysts estimate that information workers spend up to 30 percent of their working day just looking for data they need. All the time people spend tracking down information, managing and organizing documents, and making sure their teams have the data they need, could be much better spent on analysis, collaboration, insight and other work that adds value.
The 4 dimensions of the Factor 4 Index
If organizations have the desire to change, what is the most effective way to do so? How should this be approached? Many people within organizations have their own ideas about how they can work more efficiently, how to make the best of their abilities. Studies show that people within organizations would gladly increase their productivity, but that they encounter a number of barriers in the process. These barriers can be found in the following four spheres:
- Inspiration: the degree to which people are inspired to make the most of their abilities.
- Organization: the manner in which the organization is structured.
- Culture: the manner in which people within an organization treat one another.
- Technology: the degree to which technology is supportive.
The Factor 4 Index has been developed for measuring the ambitions of companies and their employees with regard to these 4 dimensions. These dimensions are directly related to the vision of the New World of Work. The Factor 4 Index reveals the aspects that go well within an organization and an organization’s potential for improvement.
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how does the Factor 4 Index measure the productivity of your organization?