In today’s business environment distance is measured by time. It’s 45 minutes to O’Hare; 20 minutes to downtown. San Francisco to Chicago is 4.5 hours, not 1,850 miles. If we are able to respond to our client’s questions down in Brazil faster than our competition across the street, aren’t we then in fact closer to the client than our competition?
The definition of productivity is: “The measurement of efficiency from input to output.” Never before have we been able to measure the efficiency in communicating among team members like we can today. For example, if a team is working on a proposal, the standard method of communication is that someone will begin the proposal, send it to a colleague for revisions, and then that person will send it back to the original author. Within an average document like a proposal, the back and forth communication will happen an average of six times per document. However, if both people working on the proposal are working collaboratively in Google Docs, the document can be created within one meeting among both colleagues. Therefore, the productivity on creating one document can be increased by five times. The reduction of time would amount to approximately five hours to complete the document verses one hour to complete the document.