World Productivity Day, celebrated on the 20th of June each year, is an occasion that highlights the significance of productivity and its impact on global economic growth and overall well-being. This special day serves as a reminder for individuals, organizations, and nations to reflect on their productivity levels and explore ways to enhance efficiency and effectiveness in various sectors. By recognizing and promoting productivity, World Productivity Day aims to foster innovation, inspire collaboration, and drive positive change across industries worldwide.

To gain insights into the importance of productivity and its relevance in today's dynamic business landscape, we reached out to a few industry experts. Here's what they had to say:

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Paul Trulove, CEO at SecureAuth

"Resetting passwords can cost millions of dollars and affect employee productivity. Unfortunately, legacy alternatives to password-only authentication such as 2FA or multi-factor authentication create significant friction, leading to frustration and reduced productivity.

Adoption of passwordless authentication solutions is on the rise, but they need to be underpinned by continuous risk assessment in order to provide users with frictionless access while improving security posture."

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Justin McCarthy, CTO and co-founder, StrongDM

"We are entering a magical moment in the world of technology where AI can be used to offload initial tasks that take five hours for humans to slug through, but it might take an AI five minutes. Artificial Intelligence has the potential to ease the burden on IT teams by automating access policy development and accelerating product innovations. It can also improve the effectiveness of Security Operations Centers (SOCs) by filtering out irrelevant activities and focusing on genuine threats thanks to a secondary layer of reasoning helping to filter out the thousands of activity notifications. Security teams may soon begin seeing lightened workloads and more productivity thanks to AI, and that’s something to look forward to as we celebrate World Productivity Day."

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Tim Prendergast, CEO, StrongDM

"Detailed planning, setting aside time for specific tasks, and queueing up a solid project playlist are all productivity hacks that can lead to faster turnaround times, higher quality work, and better work-life balance overall. However, all of these tips and tricks are futile if you cannot access the files and systems necessary to do your job in the first place.

Access issues significantly impact productivity. Over 60% of organizations have productivity impacted daily or weekly due to access issues, with almost three-fourths of employees requiring 15 minutes or more to access infrastructure. Poor access practices translate into missed deadlines, mistakes, and unhappy end users and employees.

On World Productivity Day, I would encourage all organizations to evaluate their approach to the ‘access-productivity’ gap and adopt a people-first approach. By approaching access with a mind for the people who need it, organizations can make it both easier, more secure, and eliminate friction. Doing so will create synergy between teams, end users, and partners."

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Raghu Ravinutala CEO and co-founder, Yellow.ai

"It’s not a surprise that AI is a hot topic for World Productivity Day, and we can only expect to see this continue to rise over the next few years, particularly in the area of customer experience. AI will always serve as a powerful enabler for humans, enhancing productivity and augmenting capabilities. It assists in streamlining processes, improving decision-making, and accelerating innovation across various industries. More tactically, AI can also empower customer support agents with generative AI-powered summarizations where agents can get the entire context and current status of a query without the customer explaining the issue multiple times. This can make human agents 50 percent more productive and reduce operational costs by 60 percent, as we have recorded at Yellow.ai. From an employee experience perspective, incorporating automation helps take the load off of them by eliminating redundant tasks and focussing on strategic and high-value ones. It can help achieve 80% of employee queries being self-served and boost employee productivity by 30 percent. As companies consider employee productivity, they should actively look for ways to leverage AI to support their employees." 

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On World Productivity Day, these industry experts and countless others will continue to emphasize the value of productivity and inspire individuals and organizations to harness their capabilities for the betterment of the global economy.