TapChief: Collaboration and Productivity at the core

The Importance of Productivity in the Workplace  

At TapChief, productivity is analogous to collaboration. For any team that consists of more than one person, collaboration and productivity are two sides of the same coin. Work, after all, is just the output generated by people who are coordinating, creating, and strategizing together. The advent of digital work has enhanced the need for a collaborative and productive workplace, as employees can now create and communicate in a matter of minutes. 

With the rise of email and other digital means of communication, many of the barriers to productivity, that had haunted humans for centuries, fell overnight. Workers no longer had to wait for hours or even days for messages to be relayed from one office or job site to another. However, the problem of storage and versioning remained, because while one could share documents via email, any changes to the files or documents still had to be made on an individual level and then shared with the group. 

This problem was resolved with the advent of cloud solutions like Dropbox and Google Docs. Documents and files could now be pooled in the cloud, instead of each worker keeping a local copy in their hard drive. Any changes or progress made by one employee would, hence, be immediately visible to everyone else on the team, making the process of collaboration infinitely easier and faster. 

Now, the atomic unit of ‘documents’ seems unnecessary and archaic, a hold-over from the pre-cloud world. TapChief believes that for greater productivity, seamless and speedy collaboration in the workplace is a must. And such collaboration can be facilitated by productivity apps joined with a common layer that increases and streamlines their collaborative functionality across the board.  

The Pursuit of Productivity Enhancement  

One of the major challenges faced by TapChief in their quest for quantum increases in productivity is the arduous task of helping new recruits unlearn old and inefficient workplace practices that they had been taught at previous jobs and offices. TapChief is growing rapidly and is constantly adding new departments, teams, and functions that require a large and efficient talent pool. Helping new employees learn and assimilate with the systems and processes that have helped TapChief improve productivity is an ongoing challenge.  

Another major challenge is the need to optimize the workspace for maximum focus and deep work. While open offices might facilitate collaboration and easy access to colleagues and team members, they often hinder concentration and focus, which in turn harms productivity. Cubicles and booths are just cosmetic solutions that do not provide long-term relief in the digital age. Fully remote offices that allow for maximum collaboration and deep focus, as and when needed, are the best possible solution to this modern productivity problem. 

One of the major future challenges to productivity that TapChief foresees is the isolation of workers, as more and more companies transition to become partly or fully remote. Passive ideation, casual conversations, and team building, all of which are essential for effective collaboration and productivity, will take a hit as remote working becomes more and more popular. The psychological impact of this type of employee isolation will have to be combated with the help of more humanistic technology and software. 

Strategies for Productivity Expansion 

One of the most effective strategies that TapChief has implemented for the expansion of productivity is the alignment of teams by an objective rather than by function. This new method of team creation and alignment has led to the development of effective tribal centers for productivity and performance. These teams are characterized by fast-paced execution, shared context, and shorter feedback loops.  

Therefore, TapChief aims to abandon the practice of creating function-based professional teams in the workplace. Instead, they focus on developing cross-functional pods of diverse professionals who are motivated to achieve a single organizational objective. In effect, this means replacing traditional departments such as the marketing, product, HR, or sales with a demand growth team, a customer success team, or a supply growth team. This allows each team to optimize for the drive their own goals and objectives, functioning independently and with seamless collaboration. 

Levers of Productivity Enhancement 

Some of the most important levers for productivity enhancement used by TapChief are as follows: 

Asynchronous Communication: This allows for more efficient workflow management within the organisation without the needless interruptions necessitated by synchronous methods of communication such as calls, meetings, and video conferences. Asynchronous communication allows for the prioritization of importance over urgency and prevents superfluous distractions, needless anxiety, and bloated meetings.  

Optimizing for Deep Work: Workspace design, policies, and collaboration can help make the modern office ideal for deep work and focused productivity. Workers at TapChief are encouraged to think of each project or task as a hill. Figuring out what needs to be done is the uphill journey, requiring heavy collaboration, meetings, brainstorming, etc. The downhill part, on the other hand, is pure execution and allows each employee to put their head down and work without the fear of interruption.  

Partial Remote Working: TapChief works as a partially remote company with physical offices that serve as their headquarters. The partially remote nature of their workflow allows for deep work phases, collaboration zones, workplace flexibility for employees, and asynchronous communication methods. All these factors contribute to productivity expansion in a major way.  

Efficient Employee Onboarding Processes: Constantly improving and iterating their employee onboarding and induction process allows TapChief to facilitate faster context-switching for new recruits. This allows all new employees to hit the ground running as soon as they join the company and become fully productive within a few days for starting their new job. This helps boost confidence and enhance individual as well as team performance.  

Investments in Innovation and Research Driving Productivity 

TapChief has made investing in productivity-related research and innovation a top organizational priority. Leveraging technology to achieve quantum increases in productivity and efficiency has always been a long-term goal and vision of the company. Therefore, TapChief spends 20 per cent of its revenue on R&D for improving productivity. Huge investments have been made on the development and implementation of organisation-wide tools that can be used for the purpose of managing deep functional workflows.  

These tools, which come equipped with inbuilt collaborative features, have been implemented in each pod and department. The leadership at TapChief is constantly trying to improve and iterate the way in which workflows within the company. Candid monitoring and unfiltered feedback on these investments have been made possible by the implementation of strong lines of open communication between employees and the management.  

The Role of Up-skilling and Teamwork 

TapChief treats each employee and worker as a multiplier, in that their skills and knowledge enable them and others to do better and more fulfilling work, enhancing productivity across the board. Hence, the company is indifferent to skill and function when it comes to their upskilling programs, allowing each employee to learn any skill that will allow them to improve their own performance or the productivity of their team.  

This up-skilling is accomplished through the renowned TapChief Level Up Program, which is divided into multiple distinct initiatives. Three of the most important initiatives undertaken by TapChief to enhance productivity through teamwork and skill development are the team-wide mentorship programs the structured learning paths, and the annual learning and development allowance allocated to each department. Teams are set up as cross-functional, multi-skill, professional pods in order to further aid collaboration and teamwork and allow colleagues to learn from one another more easily.