The ongoing challenge of improving and maintaining productivity comes in many forms. In 2022, the Harvard Business Review reported on a study that followed 20 teams across three Fortune 500 companies for up to five weeks—they discovered that each week, workers were spending “roughly 9% of their work” simply toggling between applications. Web apps solve this problem by centralizing tasks and reducing the need for constant application toggling.
What are the Key Features of Web Apps That Improve Productivity?
In the following sections, we’ll explore how cloud-based web applications help businesses achieve significant productivity gains by streamlining your operations, automating repetitive tasks, centralizing data, enhancing collaboration across an organization, reducing costs, and ultimately leading to business growth.
How Do Web Apps Allow Better Data Centralization and Analysis?
Since web apps are based in the cloud, data centralization is made easier and real-time analysis can be performed by anyone and anywhere.
- No On-Premises Storage: Cloud computing allows web apps to store their data on a cloud server, removing the need for physical storage devices.
- Easy to Access Data: Organizations can easily store, access, and share data with each other regardless of region or time zone.
- Enhanced Decision-Making: With data being available in real-time, stakeholders can make important data-drive decisions.
As reported by the MIT Sloan School of Management, a study from the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy observed that cloud adoption “pays off, helping firms improve productivity, increase revenue, and build a foundation for initiatives such as artificial intelligence and supporting a remote workforce”. In line with this observation, the additional aid of AI and machine learning in a web app can enable faster and deeper data analysis, revealing greater insights and allowing an organization’s leadership to make better-timed and better-informed decisions.
How Are Workflows Streamlined with Web Apps?
Precious time is wasted from doing repetitive tasks outside of a person’s job-specific duties. Web apps with a focus on project management allow businesses to streamline workflows so that they can prioritize their project duties.
Aside from prioritizing specific project tasks, an internet application has other ways of streamlining your workflow:
- Task Automation: Online apps can automate repetitive processes such as task assignments, status updates, reminders and calendar events, and emails.
- Standardization of Processes: Workflow templates and repeatable processes make consistency easier to maintain across your projects, saving time on planning and structuring your team’s tasks.
- Avoiding Workflow Bottlenecks: Automated notifications can make sure project stakeholders are aware of when their feedback or input is required, preventing project delays.
- Real-Time Workflow Adjustment: With real-time insights into a project’s progress and team productivity, project managers can adjust workflows on the fly.
According to a study done by Hubstaff, employees spend only 39% of their work time performing role-specific tasks because the rest of their shift is occupied by repetitive tasks such as file organization, adding events to calendars, or composing emails. Project management web apps can automate these tasks, helping businesses recover that missing 61% of time.
Companies are losing over half their workforce capacity to administrative busywork that could be automated with web applications – representing a massive untapped productivity opportunity.
How is Collaboration and Communication Enhanced with Web Apps?
With remote work becoming the new standard, the modern workplace is becoming increasingly distributed. According to a 2023 survey by the Harvard Business Review, “Nearly all surveyed workers (91%) work remotely at least one or two days a week. To best support this new world of work, 85% of employees cited collaboration tools as one of the most critical areas of focus.” Web apps are a key part of meeting this need by transforming how teams share information, communicate, and work together.
Beyond communication, online apps offer powerful collaboration tools that drive several key improvements:
- Real-time Communication: Digital tools enable instant team communication through messaging, video, and threaded discussions, replacing slower email chains.
- Shared Workspaces & Document Co-editing: Cloud platforms allow multiple team members to simultaneously access and edit shared documents in real-time.
- Centralized Communication Hub: Using a single platform for team communication reduces distractions and improves focus by eliminating the need to switch between multiple apps.
- Project Management & Task Tracking: With visual tracking and organization of tasks, deadlines, and progress, teams can coordinate better and deliver their projects on time.
- Reduced Communication Bottlenecks: Centralizing information and communication in web apps minimize time wasted searching for information or waiting for responses, allowing teams to focus on important work.
Research shows that web apps enhance team collaboration, leading to higher completion rates and faster timelines through streamlined communication. This improved workflow typically reduces costs by optimizing resources while boosting employee satisfaction through greater transparency and fewer workplace frustrations. The extent of these benefits varies by implementation, but the positive impact on collaboration is well-documented across different contexts.
How Do Web Apps Facilitate Business Process Automation?
One major obstacle to productivity is the sheer volume of repetitive tasks that consume valuable employee time. Web applications offer a solution by automating many of these processes, freeing up employees to focus on more meaningful work. Some key areas where web apps excel in automation include:
- Creating reports
- Syncing data with other platforms
- General form filling and data entry
- Calendar scheduling
- Real-time monitoring
- Automated integration with other apps
- Automatic data gathering for analysis
- Automated communication channels
According to a 2012 report from the McKinsey Global Institute, it was found that 28% of an employee’s workweek is spent just on reading, writing, and replying to emails. A 2021 study from Computers in Human Behavior Reports observed, “email is a great tool for both work and personal communications, but its use comes at a potential cost – an increased sense of being overwhelmed by email and higher levels of stress.” Both pieces of research highlight the significant potential for productivity gains through automated communication web apps.
By automating these and other tasks, web applications help businesses save time, improve data accuracy, break down communication silos, and reduce errors.
How Do Web Apps Scale for Increased Productivity and Growth?
Thanks to their cloud infrastructure, web apps can keep up with your increased productivity and scale incrementally as your business grows in data and traffic. With cloud scaling, online applications become very cost efficient and save you the trouble of needing to pay for additional physical servers to accommodate growth.
What Are Examples of Web Apps Enhancing Business Productivity?
Here’s three examples of companies that used cloud-based web apps to improve their business and user productivity.
Airbus
Airbus had the goal of enhancing their data management, security, and collaboration. But in the face of the COVID pandemic, remote work had become commonplace, and so Airbus had the additional goal of keeping work productive on “any device, anytime, anywhere”.
Solution: To handle the massive amounts of data they had, keeping data secure under a zero-trust security model, and empower their remote workforce, Airbus chose Google Cloud and Google Workspace. With their choice, they had the means to define trust rules for security, they were able to comply with internal data policies as well as external standards and regulations, and finally, they were able to keep their remote workers productive. With its mobile compatibility, Google Workspace offered a means to work both at the computer desk and on the move, meeting the needs of Airbus’s initiative to being able to work through “any device, anytime, anywhere”.
Morningstar
Morningstar needed a solution that enhanced collaboration, increased productivity, and saved them money. They were having challenges with operational inefficiencies that were making it hard to meet their aggressive growth goals. They also had workers using different tools, which kept priorities from being made clearer and it was siloing important information. Team roadmaps were also unclear, which made it hard for leadership to make properly informed decisions. Altogether, Morningstar was in need of a standardized way of managing their projects, tracking progress, and keeping teams on track to meet their deadlines.
Solution: They chose Asana as their project management web app. With a project management tool, they were able to keep their teams collaborating smoothly, following their projects and their progress in a format that was easy to interpret, and leadership was able to execute data-driven decisions to keep work on track and adjust their strategies as needed. As reported by Asana, Morningstar productivity and efficiency improved significantly, saving “an estimated $758,600” and “1,972 work days annually”.
RBC Wealth Management
RBC Wealth Management was plagued with inefficiencies in their custom onboarding process. In order to prepare for meetings with new clients, for example, they had to draw data from 26 separate systems. The problems didn’t stop there—clients then had to go through a 100-page physical document with various places to sign. RBC Wealth Management believed there had to be a better way to streamline the entire process, automate the case management workflows, and improve customer experience.
Solution: Using Salesforce’s Agentforce financial CRM and its automation capabilities, RBC Wealth Management was able to consolidate all the data from across 26 systems into a single platform. The resulting consolidation and streamlining led to cutting the onboarding time from weeks to an average of 24 minutes. RBC Wealth Management was also able to give their clients access to the analytics dashboard of their own financial advisors, allowing clients to view their own cases and portfolios, ultimately building greater trust.
Fidelity Investments
Fidelity Investments needed a way to streamline and modernize their on-boarding processes. Their old process of emailing PDFs to prospective customers and having them print and mailing them back was taking up a lot of time. It was concerning their Risk Team that they needed a way to reduce the cost of paper, automate the nature of their onboarding, and ensure that more of their prospects are kept onboard with their services.
Solution: Using PerfectApps, Fidelity Investments was able to save time, cut down on errors from manual data entry, reduce paper waste and the cost of that paper, automate their workflow processes and digitize their forms, and keep customers engaged, successfully onboarding “seven new clients daily, eliminating hours of manual emailing and data entry”.
Choosing the Right Web App with a Decision Making Matrix
Finding the right web app to improve your business productivity requires making sure that the online application possesses the proper productivity-saving features in six key categories.
- Workflow Automation: Email automation, calendar scheduling, task assignment, project progress monitoring, Kanban charts, and automated notifications and status updates.
- Real-Time Collaboration: Instant chat communications, video conferencing, file sharing, and co-editing capabilities.
- Security Features: Web apps should have security measures such as proper authentication and authorization mechanisms, data encryption, input validation and sanitization, and a web application firewall.
- Data Centralization: Cloud infrastructure, cloud data storage, proper data governance, data analysis tools or features.
- Mobile Compatibility: Ability to run the web app on a mobile device’s browser properly.
- Scalability: Able to leverage cloud computing to handle incremental increases in user data and traffic.
Free Web App Decision Making Matrix Workbook
Use our Web Application Decision Matrix Workbook as a kind of checklist to ensure that a potential web app will solve your productivity challenges.
No tricks, no endless spam emails, no catches. Just a free workbook for you to use when evaluating your digital maturity and transformation readiness.
How To Use The Web App Decision Making Workbook
- Define Weights for Criteria: In the Weight (1-10) column, assign a value to each criterion based on its importance (1 = least important, 10 = most important).
- Score Each Option: For each criterion, evaluate how well each option meets the criterion. Enter scores (1-10) under Option 1 Score, Option 2 Score, and Option 3 Score columns (1 = poor, 10 = excellent).
- Compare Totals: The option with the highest total score is the most suitable choice.
- Adjust and Analyze: Modify weights or scores to explore how changes in importance or performance affect the results.
Taking the Next Step Towards Increased Efficiency
Before taking the next step towards enhancing your organization’s efficiency, take a look at the decision matrix workbook that you filled out. Make sure that you’ve accounted for every category within it before looking for a custom software developer for your web app. The Provato Group is a developer who can assess your decision matrix and determine how to best build a custom solution that will meet your business’s unique needs.