What do businesses get wrong about productivity?
Photo by cottonbro studio
Productivity is one of those things we hear so much about as being the ultimate benchmark for a booming business. There’s a huge variety of productivity tools and tactics out there, whether this is operating with an 80/20 mindset (the Pareto Principle) or the Pomodoro timer, productivity is ultimately something that boils down to business attitude. There are a huge wealth of mistakes that businesses old and new can make when it comes to their overall productivity, but here are some of the key ones.
Lack of structure and planning
It is incredible how many companies evolve with a lack of structure. One of the main causes of this is when a business seldom has the finances to invest in new approaches. There are an abundance of enterprise service management tools available that can ensure quick work of certain components but one of the issues lies in a lack of structure as they evolve.
The bigger a business gets, the more it needs to understand how pivotal the organisation is. These companies tend to work purely with the customer in mind, rather than addressing their own internal processes.
Failing to prioritise
Organisations can make the mistake of not focusing on high-value work. This can partly be attributed to a culture where employees feel like they need to be seen to be working hard. This often means that if a task needs completing, and there is a very strict process in place, employees may not feel they have the backing to question or indeed criticise a working practice. This means that when a specific approach is in place and cannot pivot, the lack of prioritisation becomes clear. Many organisations can benefit from project management techniques such as Agile, Scrum, or Kanban to make the most of their prioritisation practices.
When we don’t understand what’s important, this can lead to a lack of progress on the most important things. This is where something as simple as the Eisenhower Decision Matrix can work wonders. There are four different quadrants where work is either important and urgent, important and not urgent, not important and urgent, or not important and not urgent. When we determine what quadrant a specific piece of work goes into, we then start to prioritise properly.
Lack of accountability
Employees who are not accountable for their work and responsibilities can undermine the whole concept of productivity and progress. But when we endeavour to point the finger at our employees, they can easily bite back and say that we’ve not given them everything they need to thrive. If you want an employee to be accountable for their work you need to increase their level of responsibility. What’s the best way to do this? Pay them more.
While the peanuts/monkeys analogy has been trotted out a million times, the fact remains that if we have a culture of blame in our business it is because we’ve set the precedent. To increase employee accountability we need to give them a reason to take on more responsibility. Typically, the more you get paid the more responsibility you have, and this means that employees who are looking to help your business actively want to take on more responsibility.
Not working to the employee’s strengths
We are at a point in time where there are still many people who believe that the office is where everything should be. However, there is a major case to be had for how productive people are when they work from home or hybrid.
The company Zipcar moved away from a traditional desktop-based workspace in favour of a mobile working environment and actually had employees physically smash their desktop computers as a symbolic gesture of embracing a more flexible and agile way of working. As a result, Zipcar’s employees’ work-life balance and productivity went through the roof.
When we work to our employees’ strengths and recognise that our employees are people who are not going to be chained to their desks because they actually have lives outside of the business, we will get the very best of them, not just in terms of their work but their creativity as well.
Lack of decision making
This can be down to paralysis by analysis. If we remain indecisive because we spend too long tweaking our components we invariably hinder progress and productivity. Learning to make better business decisions is partly about gathering relevant data and analysing it objectively, but we also need to clearly define the problem or decision that we want to make.
Improving the decision-making process is about setting ourselves a clear goal with a major sense of finality however we need to still be able to pivot if a problem comes our way. Indecisiveness is a big problem when there are too many cooks.
Decision by committee very rarely works because there are so many people pulling in different directions. Lots of us choose things that reflect our inherent needs rather than the needs of the business, and this means that indecisiveness reflects poorly on the organisation anyway.
A lack of proper reward
Productivity is a solution by way of innovation. We should encourage innovation and productivity without harshly penalising employees for straying off course. The UK Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) launched a gamification platform to encourage internal innovation and productivity among employees and by making the work more engaging and rewarding through game-like elements they were able to foster a culture of creativity and continuous improvement.
When employees feel justly rewarded for their efforts, they will then pursue more innovative solutions. Running a successful business is about so many different components but productivity is one of those things that we’re all striving to perfect, but cannot see the wood for the trees. Unproductive or excessive communication or ineffective time management can reduce productivity and lead to wasted time, as well as burnout. Businesses can often struggle with issues like a lack of structure, indecisiveness, and so much more. To improve business performance, we’ve got to be productive, and this means addressing these common mistakes.
