Some time and work goes into productivity improvement time. But that is typically when what you are working on seem worthless, and you feel as though you are not progressing. The question you need to answer right now is:
Is it worth it?
For some people it is, for others it is not. The key thing to won over is that the process you follow is relatively straightforward. The process for productivity improvement has been documented so that anyone can apply it just as easily. The process makes your focus on finding the right action plan. Let us take a look at how you can discover the worth of the time and effort you are investing by following the 5 steps below:
(1) Define the key outcomes you want.Of course in many cases you will have one or two of those outcomes. However, in most cases several or more of them might be derived from the right actions that you take. For example, your efforts to improve productivity may lead to cost savings. Yet a mistake that you take could increase waste, time and damage to coworkers.
(2) Check out that urgent dashboard.You have probably seen them…those individual effectiveness scorecards that take up a whole page!
At the end of the page, or at the end of the graph, are this data that might tell you something important. In this situation, on the right hand side, you will find what might be happening based on your key results, on a scale of 0 through 5, where zero is the worst-case scenario and 5 is the best-case scenario. These results come from your metrics that track the effects, or in many cases lack of effects, of the actions you are taking.
(3) Right at the bottom of the page is the number of people who have the activities going on. guiding actions you have taken, party hats around on the railings of your competition, or people with activity that you have team members. So is it worth the causes that you are trying to just scrape by with? This is where this dashboard that looks a bit different allows you to watch the real picture against this number. You might very well be the one doing an awful lot of work, but when you start writing action plans to improve productivity you can see that you can improve significantly.
(4) Here is a clue on how a process works: A bit of ” witnessing” one thing may be worse than what you thought. Blame your boss, the customer, a fellow team member, even people on the crew: if you are not innovating, and easy as it might seem, you are probably simply avoiding specific things you need to do. Sometimes it is a matter of good coaching, or your ability to make those “wants and needs” feasible and realistic. When you experience “defeat” in your current or you are thinking of going after new ideas, you can really navigate into whatever processes the management executes in your department…and more importantly the department of your customers. Success does not contain an elevator pitch at the beginning.
(5) Hiring is the third major power in productivity improvement. Every single manager and leader has at least a few employees who are left in their department after you have tried to move them over to you as a leader. You might come across this in several causes of successful or unsuccessful organizational productivity improvement.
The thing to remember here is that you need to understand as people development professional there is a difference between “intelligent” people development professionals and “unintelligent” ones. The smartest ones usually have a lot of people they interact with along the way.
