Productivity

Since the advent of email on our mobile devices work has gradually crept into more of our lives. One piece of research said the working day had increased by 27% up from 7.5 hours to 9.5 hours as we find ourselves adding email to every waking moment of travel and lunch.

The graph above, too small to read, shows productivity in the OECD 2007 using GDP per hour worked.  Source OECD StatExtracts.  It shows we in the UK are 11^th.

Wikipedia says labour productivity, is used by many as an indicator of economic growth and competitiveness.

The HBR says, “At its most basic, productivity is the amount of value produced divided by the amount of cost (or time) required to do so.”  

Ever feel like you’re so busy that you can’t get anything actually done?

Think about it. Employees today are in and out of meetings often; constantly having to respond to emails; regularly swapping between different platforms and tools; and working on tens of tasks, activities and projects.

At the end of the week, what outputs do they have to show for their time? Is it less than they think, despite feeling shattered at the end of the week?

That’s exactly the position many teams are in today.

For businesses today, the requirement to be able to change is integral. Continuous Improvement (CI) can be a means of ensuring your organisation is keeping up-to-date with the world around them. Although the challenges are numerous, CI can be successful if organisations consider the following 4 recommendations:

Many organisations embarking on an enterprise-wide transformation to agile working, struggle to sustain or scale the benefits they initially achieve. The journey towards agility is a marathon, not a sprint, and it requires continued commitment, at all levels of the organisation, to ensure agile ways of working stick.

The first six to 12 months of introducing agile throughout an organisation will result in visible improvements in speed to market, productivity, efficiency and employee engagement.  

How often do you think about your employees in respects to the experience they have from the beginning to the end of their employment with your organisation, from the moment they hear about your company to the time they walk away? We're launching a series of blogs that focus on the elements within the employee lifecycle and as we've covered a lot about attraction in the past, we're moving on to onboarding.

To remain competitive in the modern era, staying still and simply functioning is practically prehistoric. Businesses must be efficient and ahead of the curve, which can be done in a number of ways, one of which is through implementing a culture of Continuous Improvement (CI). Firms are competitive, not by their product/service, location or process, but by what it knows about how it behaves in various situations and understanding how to improve the efficiency of this behaviour. CI provides this knowledge and allows an organisation to constantly act on this knowledge.

Large corporates are, at best, 30% efficient in delivering change. From launching a loan product to landing a new bakery range on a supermarket shelf, big organisations are failing to deliver change at pace and realise value from it.

One leading credit card provider told us they’d last delivered a major new product eight years ago. ‘We were the leader in the market,' said the project manager. 'However, others have caught up and now we’re struggling to respond.’

'It takes us two years to do what our competitors can do in two months.' MD - FTSE100 organisation