The traditional nine-to-five, cubicle farm workplace of old is quickly being filtered out by the rise in many non-traditional companies and a younger generation beginning to enter the workforce. In response, many companies are implementing alternative work schedules and cultures, which can lead to organizational issues that can be solved by custom office management software.

According to Harvard Business Review, many companies are using alternative methods to increase productivity. For example, technology and engineering giants Google and 3M will grant engineers sabbatical to work on personal projects and develop their skills, known informally as "innovation time off."

Another software company in the United Kingdom called Red Gate started a "coding by the sea" project, where a group of software engineers took out a beach house for a week to fix problems and bugs in their products and advance on new ideas. That idea expanded to "down tools week," where every employee puts their regular routine on hold and commits to a new project or issue about the company that's been bugging them, attempting to solve it within the week.

Other businesses have begun to give employees more loosely defined roles, which allow executives and managers to partner up with other departments and add a variety of skills and experiences to solve problems in more unique and creative ways. According to the source, "truly innovative companies avoid giving people job descriptions, or they find creative ways of encouraging them to join multiple projects."

While many businesses are beginning to use these alternative ways of pairing employees, it's critical that an organization is still able to stay efficient during these innovative times. By consulting FileMaker developers, companies can create custom database software that allows them to manage and organize employees and task lists so supervisors can gain a clear look at the productivity and performance of workers and how well these techniques may be working.