Business productivity is a metric that's directly tied to a company's bottom line, but improving labor productivity isn't always so easy. For example, in Q2 of 2022 there was a 2.2% decrease in U.S. business productivity, marking the largest productivity decline since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics started recording the metric in 1948.
Faced with these productivity challenges, it's important for businesses to leverage new technology in order to boost workplace productivity. Though far more often associated with business security than business productivity, camera systems offer several ways to help create a work environment optimized for maximum productivity.
This article gives you everything you need to know about improving workplace productivity with cameras.
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Why Use Cameras for Business Productivity?
Improving the productivity of business processes requires business leaders to first have the right data and insights available. Without an understanding of how your employees are performing, how your workflows typically unfold, the amount of time that important tasks usually take, and other key insights, it's hard to know which productivity measure to implement.
This data can come from a variety of different sources, and businesses commonly use methods such as employee surveys and productivity analysis to gather the insights needed for a targeted approach to boosting productivity.
With a camera system designed for monitoring employee performance, business leaders are given unmatched transparency into their business processes. This transparency allows for insights these leaders can use to guide employee feedback and coaching, improve the efficiency of workflows, and create a business plan for boosting productivity based on actionable data.
When you use a camera system that offers AI-powered video analysis features, these insights are made even more available. Rather than having to manually comb through hours of footage, hoping to find something useful, security camera systems like Spot AI, enable you to automatically analyze your surveillance footage for key insights.
This ability to automatically convert the video footage your surveillance cameras collect into actionable data and insights allows business owners to optimize numerous aspects of their business, including the productivity of business processes.
How To Set up Cameras for Productivity
While it is certainly possible to design a camera system that performs multiple functions, a system that is designed for improving business productivity is going to look a little different from one that is designed for security.
Rather than focusing on locations within your business such as entrances, restricted access areas, and other areas of security concern, cameras that are set up for boosting productivity need to be focused on where the work is happening.
What this looks like exactly will vary a lot from one business to another. Car washes set up cameras at key areas like pay stations and entryways to understand how long vehicles are idling before being helped, and to understand how quickly their team members help customers.
Warehouses use cameras to drive productivity and safety. For example, forklift detection and people presence provide ways to ensure teams are safe and performing at high rates.
As for the specific type of cameras and camera system that is best for boosting business productivity, this brings up all the typical factors that go into choosing the right camera system.
You will want to choose quality IP cameras capable of capturing high-resolution footage and, if your cameras are going to be placed outdoors or in any other harsh environment, they need to be durable and weatherproof.
You will also need to make sure you have the appropriate storage system in place and plenty of space available for storing the video footage that you collect. Using cameras for boosting productivity typically entails reviewing historical footage more than it does real-time monitoring, which means you may need quite a bit of storage.
Speaking of reviewing historical footage, the most important element in a camera system designed for boosting productivity is video intelligence features. Reviewing surveillance footage manually in search of productivity insights is simply too difficult and time-consuming to be feasible.
If you want to set up a camera system that is designed for improving productivity, you will need to use software such as Spot AI that is capable of providing those insights automatically.
Ways To Use Cameras for Business Productivity
With the right setup and software, there are numerous ways to use cameras as a tool for boosting business productivity. Here are a few strategies that you can employ to boost productivity via your business's camera system:
1. Use Cameras To Improve Employee Performance
Improving employee performance is usually the most actionable way to boost productivity at a business. Whether it's providing your employees with better training so that they are able to do their jobs more efficiently, identifying and addressing low-performers, or simply holding employees accountable with monitoring and feedback, there are several ways to go about boosting productivity. Each one of them, though, starts with the ability to monitor employee performance.
With a camera system designed for monitoring employee performance, you'll be able to gather insights that you can use to inform both one-on-one feedback and company-wide training initiatives.
Using a camera system to monitor employee performance means that you will be able to identify and address instances where your employees are not spending their time productively and work toward solutions to increase efficiency.
2. Use Cameras To Improve Workflows
It isn't always employee performance that prevents a company from being more productive. Sometimes, it is the business processes themselves and the workflows that employees are asked to complete.
Maybe the layout of your business is not optimized for productivity, requiring employees to spend too much time traveling back and forth between distant locations. Or maybe there's a bottleneck in one of your processes that is slowing the entire rest of your workforce down.
These are the kind of insights that an AI-powered camera system such as Spot AI is capable of automatically providing, making it easy for business owners to identify and resolve any issues with their workflows and business processes that are harming productivity.
3. Cameras Can Boost Security Measures - Preventing Theft And Vandalism
A single incident of vandalism costs companies an average of $3,370, while theft from both employees and customers is even more prevalent and costly. It isn't just your company's bottom line that these incidents impact, though, but also its productivity.
Responding to incidents of theft and vandalism takes time that your staff could otherwise spend on more productive tasks. Beyond just the employees tasked with responding to them, these incidents can also lead to disruptions that impact your entire company.
Features such as real-time monitoring and automated security notifications offered by leading security systems such as Spot AI will help prevent theft and vandalism at your businesses, eliminating both the direct and indirect consequences of these incidents.
4. Camera Insights For Feedback And Coaching
According to research from Gallup, employees who receive meaningful feedback on at least a weekly basis are four times more likely to be engaged than employees who do not. Keeping your team members motivated and engaged is one of the best ways to optimize productivity, and providing meaningful feedback and coaching is a vital part of any employee engagement strategy.
Of course, meaningful is the operative term here. In order for the feedback and personalized coaching you provide for your employee to have any real impact on their productivity, it needs to be based on actionable insights - the kind of insights that AI-powered camera systems such as Spot AI are great at providing.
With Spot AI, business owners can continually help improve employee performance. Using these insights as the foundation for employee feedback and coaching allows business owners to take a data-driven approach to improving employee productivity.
In addition to boosting employee engagement, using video intelligence insights can also boost productivity by uncovering the most important issues you need to address.
Whether it's better time management, better teamwork, more efficient workflows, or any number of other solutions that your employees need to implement for improved productivity, basing your feedback/coaching on camera insights allows you to provide employees with the exact productivity tips they need to improve.
Boost Business Productivity With Spot AI
Thanks to advances in AI technology and video analysis software, surveillance cameras have now become a powerful tool for boosting business productivity. With Spot AI, you'll be able to design a camera system for your business that will provide the transparency and insights you need to improve employee performance and boost business productivity.
With features such as unlimited cloud storage, AI-powered video analysis, and high-quality IP cameras provided free of charge, Spot AI is the perfect platform for any company that wants to boost productivity via surveillance cameras. Get started using Spot AI to improve the productivity of employees at your business, and contact us today!
