A successful business heavily depends on productive employees, enthusiastic about their work and engaged with achieving company goals. Still, a Gallup poll found that only 34% of U.S. employees are committed to their work, while some calculations estimate the overall cost of lost productivity in the U.S. companies as high as $550 billion per year.

Often accused of being the sources of distraction in the workplace, the latest technology trends can have quite the opposite effects and significantly boost the productivity of your employees if properly leveraged.

Here are 5 tech trends you can benefit from.

Use a time tracking app

One of the first techniques to implement in your workplace is time tracking, as it can be of enormous value to your employees who want to organize their daily work and manage their activities better. The fact is that our perception of time is often vague, and after a day at work, we can’t be certain how much time we’ve spent on each task.

By making a practice out of logging time spent on each activity with an app, you and your employees will have clear insight into how much time it takes to get every task done, which can be quite useful for planning future activities. Also, it will be easy to determine how much time is lost due to different distractions and how to best overcome them.

Use task management tools

With so many various task and project management tools and apps on the market, you will have a hard choice to make, but it’s worthwhile. Switching to digitalized solutions, such as Asana, Slack or Trello, instead of traditional to-do lists, will make communication with your employees and team much easier and faster. Using these innovative collaborative tools in the workplace, according to research by McKinsey, can boost productivity by 20 to 30 percent.

A flexible work schedule

Using cloud-based collaboration tools, and removing the usual time and place obstacles, your workplace can become more flexible, as you can now allow your employees to work remotely, from their homes, several times a week.

This can significantly boost the overall productivity and satisfaction of your employees, as some of them find commuting to work tiring and unpleasant, while the others are simply more productive when curled up in their own bed.

Switching to cloud-based collaboration solutions can also give you access to a wide talent pool when hiring new staff, as you won't have to choose only among those who live nearby.

Quiet zones

Some of the tasks require a peaceful environment to be done, and offices can sometimes be loud and noisy places. Your employees fight different distractions every day, coming from their colleagues, mobile phones, computers, and clients, and it all affects their productivity. Still, by applying some technological solutions, you can easily eliminate such interruptions, without making some major office changes. Using noise-isolating headphones, such as high-quality Shure SE846 earphones, you can have all the piece and quiet you need, without any chatter coming through.

Dual monitors

Some employees, such as programmers or researchers, would find dual monitors a major boost in their productivity. Switching from one tab to another to find a piece of information is a waste of energy and time, not to mention how frustrating it can be. Having a document you are working on displayed on one monitor, with other important documents open on the other one, can significantly speed up the process, and reduce the stress levels.

While some of these solutions will have an immediate effect on the productivity of your employees, implementing time-tracking and task-management solutions can take some time and some willingness to adapt to change. But with first measurable results, the enthusiasm among the staff will grow, as well as their efficiency and productivity.