Productivity is More Than Just a Mathematical Formula

Wikipedia defines “productivity” as a measure of output from a production process, per unit of input, and this is where the fundamental problem of the modern day business begins.

Without real & measurable business benefit as a subsequent output of labor input, then what you are measuring is simple activity & NOT "productivity".

True productivity starts at "why", gains momentum at "what" and accelerates on continuos & measured improvements.

The Power of "Why"

People don't do what they're told, people do as they believe! The way we exercise our thoughts are through actions, likewise we exercise our beliefs through engrained habits or behavioral patterns. Ever go on a road trip that you weren't convinced was right for you? How did that workout for you? Were you enthusiastic about overcoming the challenges that appeared along the way? Did you look on the bright side of ever set-back?

“Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.” - John Fitzgerald Kennedy; A strong sense of purpose, something you can identify with, believe in.. is always a sure bet to get you enthusiastic about the journey your company is about to take you on. It's purpose that gives you faith & courage to seek alternative paths and make proactive efforts to achieve your milestones faster. Purpose is the first key to engagement & commitment to excellence.. it's the self imposed response to an employee who briefly asks themselves "why bother".

What's your company's "why"and how do remind everyone every day of it? And this is just the 1st step..

The Direction of "What"

"If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don't have to be pushed. The vision pulls you." - Steve Jobs; Follow-up strong purpose with a clearly articulated & understood vision, and your powerful formula is more than half-way there.

People more quickly propel themselves toward something they can visualize.. almost touch & feel.. than into a dark tunnel or foggy cloud. How quantifiable is your company's vision? How absolutely clear is the short, medium & long terms goals / objectives of your organization.

What mechanisms are you using on a regular basis to remind people of what your vision is.. the end point of your journey'.. and most important, what are the regular (rhythmic) interval checks or pulse-checks that measure your progress and as well what's left to achieve? Yet this is merely your 2nd step..

The power of metrics.. measurements & continuous improvements

What doesn't get measured doesn't get done, because people don't do what you EXPECT.. they do what you INSPECT!

That's the reality of human nature, and to assume anything else is a guaranteed formula for disaster. If purpose (Mission) & vision need to be quantifiable, then even more so does execution. As Thomas Edison once said, "Vision without execution is hallucination." But how do you know that you're executing? After-all, how do you know whether your teams are being "productive" or simply busy (activity)?

If you've got your act together in what regards setting & measuring against performance, how are you ensuring your team is continuously measuring progress and growing through key learning?

“Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is simply passing the time. Action with Vision is making a positive difference.” - Joel Barker.. Action with vision is measurable! It's when you can identify whether employee's behavioral patterns at work are producing business results. For this, you need to be able to measure activity that drives results and not just activity working on the applications or environments you've deemed productive. I can spend an entire day in a word processing application, just like I can in a spreadsheet, but unless I'm producing business results, it's all just a hallucination.

On the contrary, in parallel to measuring where I'm investing my time, how many uninterrupted & focused work sprints I'm able to generate in a day, if i can associate my activity to quantifiable increases in business results.. then I can confidently state that I'm productive.

How-To Fix the Open Space Syndrome

Let's be honest.. the advent of Open Space Offices had more to do with economics than productivity. That said, other than death & taxes, every challenge has a (or various) solution(s).

The current work environment provided by most employers who support an Open Space layout is highly unproductive for getting work done at work. Interruptions & easy distractions are only a few inconvenient truths of why an open space working environment can become highly unproductive. That's what I call "Open Space Syndrome".

Open spaces are economical solutions for housing employees, and in the right configuration can still gain effective transversal (cross functional area) awareness without compromising the concentration required to deliver effective results.

Here are some solutions I've found to help open spaces become more productive.

Focus Time

If you have to do work that requires focus & concentration, find a quite & unused space in or around your office building. The secluded corner table of the coffee shop downstairs, the park bench across the street, the conference room that's not in use, the library down the street or even the office cafeteria during off-peak hours. These are all spaces that you can move to in order to get important work done.

The pre-requisit is that your management team has realized the benefit of fitting out the office with laptop computers connected to docking stations or keyboard, mouse & screens. Given the increased computing power of portable computers and the flexibility of cloud computing based storage solutions, Desktop computers are dinosaurs / anchors that just don't cut it anymore.

Visual Hints

Have you ever seen an "on-air" sign in a radio or television station? Do you remember the last time you walked into a bank, took a number & headed to the information desk? Those are only a few practical reminders of things you can do in your open space office environment in order to get more work done. If you're part of a work team, agree amongst yourselves a rotating "customer service" schedule to take questions and issues from other departments & functional areas. Make it visibly clear who's "on-call" by placing a bright tennis ball on the screen of the person providing Customer Service.. or get even more creative and make-up a sign to hang somewhere visible.

Another effective tip is to put headphones on, even if you don't want to listen to music, so that people will assume that you're taking an online course, speaking on Skype or indeed focused on a task whilst listening to music.

Semi-Open Spaces

Glass partitioning works best to provide an open-plan feel and still be conducive to "noise" cancelation. Glass partitioning also provides the added benefit have creating more "white-board" space to draw up brilliant half-baked ideas & capture spur of the moment brainstorms.

In an earlier article this year, I highlighted how the MCI Group has developed a really inspiring open-plan workspace in their Zurich offices.

The above are only a few effective solutions & I'd like to hear yours. If you're working in an open space & have found handy tricks to maximize your productive moments in-spite of the challenges, I'd love to hear / read your experiences.

How your business is slowly dying

Every business expert will agree that "you can't manage what you cant's measure", yet most of you reading this post are slowly killing your companies prospects to profitably grow because you don't have the appropriate measurements in place.

In your case, "the gap" is the space between your perception and reality. According to a recent survey conducted by 3S in 305 Iberian based mid-size companies, only 37% of senior executives categorized their companies as very good or excellent at executing strategy. When we scratched deeper below the surface, we found that more than 50% of employees were disengaged with their company's strategy, and that 31% recognized they didn't have the necessary measures in place to ensure effective execution of their strategies to reach required business results for success.

Flying Blind

76.8% of the companies admitted to flying blind (perception based), without the necessary performance measurements to determine if their strategies were successful or not. The same figure of 23% blamed the current economy as the cause that limits their capacity to grow.

With numbers that evident, you can only cringe at the wasted productive capacity, and it's no wonder that companies are in the troubles they are in today. Imagine +76% of the planes in the sky flying around with no radar for day.. would you get on a plane that day? This is shear madness, yet having worked across 5 continents over the past 26 years, I can confirm this isn't unique to Iberia, it's just more severe here.

Flying with Radar

What are you currently doing to measure the performance & productivity of your team?

You don't have to go immediately overboard and jump straight into a full fledged Human Performance Technology Program. You should start out slow.. take baby steps with a Productivity Management tool like WorkMeter. Easy to implement & even easier to use, it engages your employees in discovering how to transform learning into more productive habits. Unlike other "performance monitoring" tools, WorkMeter is an educative "performance analysis" tool, and the best one I've used to date that helps me quickly experience increased results. It's employee friendly nature fosters internal healthy competitive growth & development without management having to step in. Once you set the strategy, your team does the work & the learning themselves.

Eliminate the Gap

Don't hold your finger to the wind to figure out if a storm is coming! Plan purposefully with concrete data & facts that will have you better predict the future of your organization based on historical trends. Join the new era of empowered organizations that confidently determine their own future success based on solid metrics. The execution of an idea is always more important than the brilliance of the thought, so stop dreaming about being more productive and get down to measuring it so you can manage it.

The growth of an organization is simply the accumulated growth of the individual relationships that constitute it, and it now rests on your shoulders to eliminate the gap created by perception by empowering your employees with metrics (measurements) they can learn, develop & grow from.

Internet usage & Productivity; Compliment or bitter rivalry?

Can you recall before the advent of the internet, and this is still true today in many public service locations, how you could walk into a workplace & spot at least 1/2 of the employees reading a newspaper or standing by the water-cooler in idle chatter?

Yes folks, before the internet came to be, companies already had productivity issues! All the internet did, as with every other positive aspect it also brought about, was accelerate what was already right or worng about our organizations.

The great debate is on.. and every man and his dog has an opinion, so let me share with you my own. The internet, like anything else in life, is only a distraction in the workplace if your organization lacks the disciplined effort to engage it's key-stakeholders in the activities required for both employee & employer to succeed. The fact is that the internet is a significant & key enabler of innovation, including finding new ways to become more productive by sharing best practices. But don't take just my word for it, let's explore the messaging that's prevelant out there today.

Surprise: Internet monitoring reduces Internet use

And if you declare a police state, putting armed officers on every street corner you'll reduce crime. But is that what you really wanted? What's your objective? To have people use the internet less or for them to be more produce more work that drives desirable results? If the latter is your choice, then focus on getting your team on-board with a sound game-plan for achieving success. Give them the skills, knowhow, resources & effective communication strategies that will keep them highly engaged, motivated & productive. The internet isn't the real issue.. it's more than likely that you're just not doing a great job of motivating people to do the right things at the right time required to achieve success.

Social networking at work leads to productivity loss

So I guess when I last connected to someone on LinkedIn, which in turn resulted in a transaction where I was engaged to perform a key (remunerated) project, that wasn't productive? Or when I tweeted a question about what best product / service to use in order to execute on a particular task.. and I received valuable feedback that reduced the chance of my wasting time on a product that someone else had already deemed poor.. I wasn't really being productive? Social networking at work can only lead to productivity loss if your people aren't focused & engaged, or don't have the skill set / knowhow to leverage social networking to their benefit.

To Lee Fayer, and others alike who make claims that "social networking costs 14 billion pounds a year in lost work time", I would say that you're just looking for excuses to cover up ineffective people management & engagement. For the record, let me say that if your people are spending more than 1h per day on the likes of Facebook when "they should be working" (and this phrase is key), then you've got a management, motivation and or engagement issue.. and not an internet usage issue.

Why Your Employees Are More Productive When They Facebook at Work

The sciences of biology & psychiatry prove that human beings need recovery breaks intermingled with intense work segments in order to maximize their effectiveness & productivity. It's a proven fact that when you allow people to perform completely unrelated tasks in-between work-tasks, they increase their focus and output as a consequence of reaching a higher state of concentration & throughput immediately following their break.

Dr. Brent Coker's work entitled "Freedom to surf: workers more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure" is more than just common sense, it can also be proven by the practical nature of the following factual diagram brought to us by our friends at WorkMeter.

Because you can't manage what you can't measure

As this graph shows, when a control element is introduced there is a natural tendency for reduced activity. Yet when the appropriate effective management tools, engagement principles & strategic initiative motivate a workforce, what you begin to witness is true productivity (driving company results) which can actually supersede previous levels of "activity".

What are you focusing on these days? Activity which might not be directly contributing to desired results, or productivity by using the right empowerment & engagement principles that guarantee your team get's on-board with your strategic plan?

 

Guest Blog by JC Duarte; The Strategy Guy

Quick Win Productivity Tip-of-the-Day; Digitalize

This morning's bank experience... I'm not naturally organized when it comes to finical matters. That said, it doesn't mean I can't be great at it, it's just going to take me extra effort, energy, a framework & discipline until it becomes a newly engrained habit. That's how life works!

So when I went to my bank this morning to establish additional accounts (buckets) for segmenting & putting funds aside for my various obligations & plans, my digitalization strategy.. which I put into effect some years ago.. came into very productive use!

The Challenge

For whatever reason, my identity details in the bank records had expired, and without the physical documentation I would have had to come back another day.. wait in another line to be attended to.. and start explaining my needs all over again.

The Solution

Fortunately I've digitalized my life, so with the stroke of a few keys on my smartphone, tablet pc or Laptop (in this case laptop) I accessed my Dropbox account & promptly handed (emailed) over my previously scanned legal identity.

The Reward

What turned out to be a 1h exercise, which I initially estimated at 45m, could have been double or triple (including more inconvenient trips to the bank) had I not had all my relevant information at the (extended) tips of my fingers.

I don't do back-ups anymore.. my working files (directories) in my laptop are permanently & instantly synced with Dropbox, which means anywhere in the world, from any device, I can access my information. I share files (or directories) with clients for immediate productivity. No longer do I need time-consuming file transfers or deal with e-mail limitations. This morning's practical example is only one.. Dropbox & digitalization (virtualization) of a significant part of my life has given me more time for me to do the things that really matter to me.. providing me a significant increase in work-life balance.

How are you virtualizing? How are you digitalizing? If you're not, then how are you still getting stuck in your traditional off-line world / frameworks? How are they empowering or limiting you?

Guest Blog by JC Duarte; The Strategy Guy

The Productivity Paradox – STOP blaming the Internet!

Whilst reading "How the Internet Affects Productivity" by Mika Hannula & Antti Lönnqvist, I was compelled to share my outrage at the irresponsible "blame-game" ineffective typical management insists on playing to cover-up their own inefficiency & mismanagement.

For the record; "the execution of an idea is always more brilliant than the thought", and the Productivity Paradox that so many books & papers have been written on has more to do with the false measurement methods and conceptual misunderstandings applied, than it does looking for someone other then ourselves to blame!

In this blog post you'll find examples of, and learn how / about;

• The Internet is NOT to blame for productivity loss


• The do-or-die relevance of having a strategic plan


• The mistake of ignoring critical measurements


• Productivity is NOT about speed

Reality Check #1 - The Internet is here to stay!

The use of the Internet is NO longer an option! If you haven't figured this out yet, then you might as well find the rock you just crawled out from beneath and quickly get back under it. Better yet, just bury your head in the sand like an ostrich and wait until the next ice-age hits.

Think about your last purchase for a minute,  what's more productive? Placing an add in a magazine, billboard or an intrusive pop-up in a web browser.. or a recommendation from a trusted source? Imagine an online marketplace, such as Linqia,  where companies identify, connect and engage with masses of highly targeted consumers participating in online communities and groups. A +30% engagement rate would be proof enough for me to realize that the Internet is The Place to promote my offering instead of old-school printed media.

When you're looking to wine & dine your sweetheart, or evaluating your next holiday option, do you search on-line before going to the travel agent? That's if you even bother to leave your house & go to the agent in the first place. Who do you trust more? The experiences of your peers as recounted through pictures & stories, or those looking to profit from you booking a picture postcard illusion?

The issue with the Internet these days is that corporations don't take the time to establish an effective strategy, including the necessary education for you to be effective. You can either spend the rest of the day doing Google searches and be overwhelmed by information overload, or you can be educated & given the narrow focus that will lead you to the promise-land of scalable / highly valuable on-line content.

Reality Check #2 - You HAVE to have a plan!

Jim Rohn is noted for stating; “If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.”  As in life.. in business! Is there really any difference? If you don't have a plan, better yet.. an effective plan, than I can guarantee you'll soon find yourself on someone else's journey!

1st, don't blame your employees if they're surfing the internet instead of doing "productive" work unless you've thought about the expected outcome (effective = outcome focus) of the tasks they're performing as it relates to your over-all success strategy.

2nd, guarantee your staff understands (have them repeat it back to you) your strategy, how it relates to their tasks, and how their individual contributions will contribute toward your success. That's called the buy-in process, and it's the primary difference between successfully executing on an idea vs. just having a brilliant thought!

Oh, and if your plan is to block "non-productive" internet sites, such as YouTube, Facebook, etc.. think again.. you better confiscate their smartphones when they walk through the doors in the morning as well. Unless your people are part of your success plan, then it's not a success plan to begin with.

Reality Check #3 - If you can't measure it, you can't achieve it!

“In life, as in football, you won’t go far unless you know where the goalposts are.” – Arnold H. Glasgow

Have you ever driven around in circles because you didn't have a GPS System? Well that's about as effective as you'll be if you don't have appropriate measurements of where you are.. where you want to be.. by when.. and in what condition when you get there. There's far too much focus on throwing tools at problems instead of first understanding them. A faster car will only increase the speed at which you drive around in circles!

The majority of productivity issues I've seen in organizations have absolutely EVERYTHING to do with lack of planning & strategy, and less to do with lacking technology. Technology is a facilitator, and it's also been known to facilitate / speed your rapid decline when you aren't conscious how quickly that hole you've dug yourself into is getting deeper by the second.

Of the most effective measurement tools I've found to-date to improve productivity has been a little app called WorkMeter. WorkMeter WORKS because it's much more than just about comparing input vs. output. Thinking that productivity is that simple a consequence is just as fool hearted (as Peter Drucker would say) as the single greatest error and deception of our modern accounting system. Which is that PEOPLE are listed in the "liability" column as compared to the "asset" column of corporate balance-sheets.

Reality Check #4 - Productivity is NOT about speed!

Have you ever heard the phrase beauty is in the eyes of the beholder? Well, unless you realize that value is to beauty as beholder is to customer, then you'll NEVER be productive. Worse yet, you'll never be effective! Productivity is LESS about how fast you achieve something, and more about how EFFECTIVELY you achieve it.

Who is your customer? If you're in business, regardless of leadership role, you have both internal & external customers. Internal customers are the colleagues that are co-dependent on you in some form to get their own job done. Whether a colleague awaiting your revision of their concept, a component in a larger over-all process, or the guy in the next cubicle who's mood you influence with your own. External customers are those who see the beauty, and therefore value, in your products.. leading them to purchase more.

Take the example of a Hollywood screenwriter whose productivity is measured in words typed per minute instead of the quality of the output. What's the goal? To get a script written quickly, or to have an interesting script that an audience is willing to fill a movie house to watch? In the first case, the pace at which it's written counts, not the quality of the screenplay itself. How likely are you to shell out your hard earned cash to go watch this movie? This is a typical example of poor productivity measurement. The effectiveness of the output of a writer contributes to the productivity of the writing process, since the customer finally defines the writer’s unit output. The effectiveness of the text written by the writer is without any doubt noticed by the customer, and the over-ruling measurement of productivity!

In summary, if you want to have effective productivity.. true productivity, you need

1. An Effective Plan


2. Employee Buy-in (Momentum, Enthusiasm & Alignment)


3. Understand Your Internal & External Customer's True Needs & Perceptions


4. Measure, Act / Adjust & Measure Again (Incremental Progress Toward a Predefined Outcome)


5. Educate, Acknowledge & Celebrate Success


6. Forget Your preconceived Notion of Productivity / True Productivity = Customer Value Perception

How many of these can you CONFIDENTLY "tick-off" as complete or under-control?

Guest Blog by JC Duarte; The Strategy Guy

How to get Work done at Work!

Have you ever tried to get meaningful work done but just couldn't seem to accomplish it during a normal workday? Why is it that you have to save really important work for "quite time"? The plane, train or automobile ride home / your next destination? Why do we reserve quite time after dinner when he kids are put to bed, or come into work early in the morning before the barrage of colleagues, phones, e-mails, meetings, etc.. (i.e. INTERRUPTIONS start)?

Jason Fried's insightful Ted Talk

Having started off last Friday listening to Jason Fried's insightful Ted Talk entitled Why work doesn't happen at work, I'd like to share with you some key tangible solutions that go a bit beyond Jason's simplified solutions of No Talk Thursday, Passive Communication & Canceling Meetings. These quick fix / band-aid solutions can actually be very damaging to your company when you never address the root cause of your problems.

Don't get me wrong, I respect Jason / his accomplishments. In fact, I've used & benefited greatly from some of his collaboration products, such as Basecamp. That said, I'm concerned at having often picked-up the pieces from over simplifying a deep rooted problem in today's professional environment. This is the kind of stuff that creates high employee / customer turn-over, not to mention, eventually drive a company out of business when not adequately addressed.

No talk Thursday

At the root of the issue is either (a) no effective plan / strategy in place for people to be able to link daily tasks to in order to progress toward a successful outcome; (b) there is a plan but it hasn't been effectively communicated / bought-into by the team, and therefore they don't understand which tasks will make them successful; (c) the work environment is indeed not conducive to performing effective work & therefore you have to understand the root causes of the interruptions in order to eliminate them, including the dismissal of employees who just don't have the skill, the will & the motivation to improve. This last bit could be as simple as disciplining the office socialite that wants to foster healthy interexchange between colleagues which needs to be reserved for "programed" breaks, lunch of out-of-office time.

The term "programmed breaks" now leaves it to the individual to decide if he/she is willing to interrupt productive work to go off and have a break which they hadn't planned. It also means blocking all of the pop-ups (e-mail, instant messaging, etc) that people typically have programmed on their computers. It could even be as wide-spread as educating people about noise levels from impromptu meetings in open spaces which distract others who are trying to concentrate. No talk Thursday will fix the latter, but it's neither effective nor scalable because most companies I've seen, the significant challenge has more to due with lacking effective plans, strategies, outcome focus and or buy-in.

The best tool that I've seen to effectively nail-down the root cause / impact of breaks / interruptions on productive work is the tools WorkMeter based on grass-roots empowerment principles.

Passive Communication

I've bought into the collaborative tools, as long as the strategy or plan their working towards has effectively been thought-out and individuals / teams have bought-into (Clarity, Unity & Agility) the tasks that are necessary to reach a predefined successful outcome. What I don't see as effective is the use of e-mail or instant messaging, especially in getting things done that are best served by two people actually having a face-to-face discussion. I would also promote the use of a tools such as Yammer in place of, or as a compliment to, the traditional bulletin boards. Lastly, when communication isn't handled properly, Jason's approach lulls your teams into passive thinking, which means that solutions to BIG problems will take much longer to resolve. You don't want passive, but rather active / pro-active & apply rhythmic processes.

Canceling Meetings

Yes, the majority of the meetings I've witnessed are ineffective and disrespectful of people's time, but again, simply canceling meetings won't address the root cause of the problem. If you have (a) an effective plan / strategy, (b) staff alignment & bought-into the necessary / appropriate processes & tasks, and (c) rhythmic processes, then you won't have a need for ineffective meetings.

Rather than canceling meetings, how about you educate people on the power of effective meetings? At minimum, an effective meeting has:

1. A predefined & stated purpose


2. A logical agenda & timeline that leads to...


3. Who, What, When & Where of SMARTER Decisions / Action Items


4. Preferably is organized so that relevant people come in & out of the meeting as needed


5. A conclusion, wrap-up (for buy-in) and next steps processes

 

I'm also a fan of auditing meeting outcomes. Randomly spot-check meetings to ensure they cover at least these "5 basics", and in addition, review the decisions / outcome (action items) and measure them as to how they relate to the stated & agreed company strategy. This will save you a lot of head-aches down the road, and give you much more than just "feel-good" meetings.

So what do you think? Anything here that you'd consider new & you could learn from? If so, please act on that thought and put it into action. Also, if you know anyone else that could benefit from this post, please be generous & pass it along! I'll guarantee you the recipient will be grateful!

Guest Blog by JC Duarte; The Strategy Guy