WAYS TO INCREASE YOUR
BUSINESS PRODUCTIVITY……..
Would your business be interested in a 30
percent boost in productivity? That’s right, being able to do
30 percent more of whatever your business does – from building widgets to
treating patients – with the same people, equipment, space, and so on? And, as
a bonus, you’d be able to do this work in less time, from start to finish?
I suspect the answer to this question is
a resounding “yes”— as I can’t imagine any business that isn’t trying to
increase productivity and output, while lowering the cost of providing
their product or service. So what does it take to capture 30 percent more
productivity? Let’s take a look at two important ways to make this happen.
Eliminate tasks and work that
offer low returns or no value to your business.
Your business is constantly evolving.
Customers come and go. New products and services are added. People are hired
and fired. There are countless changes like this that take place almost every
day. In response to our changing environment, we are constantly adding to and
modifying our daily work. We create new reports, have more meetings, develop
new projects, handle new information to add to new systems, and so on.
Unfortunately, we rarely apply the same energy to getting rid of obsolete work
that adds little or no value to the business. The result: probably 10 to 30
percent of what we do every day at work adds very little value and could
potentially be eliminated, with no ill-effect to the business or to our
customers.
Of course, less time spent doing the non-value
adding work will allow for more time to be applied to the things that really
matter, which will improve productivity and output.
Finding non-value adding activities
requires a hard look at the day-to-day processes of the business. From
start to finish, each process task needs to be reviewed, and the question asked
“does this step add value?” Much like sorting through a garage full of “stuff”
we have accumulated over the years, this process requires a mindset that
challenges the status quo and is willing to “let go” of the practices and tasks
that we’ve become comfortable with, but no longer add any real value.
Synchronize work to achieve a smooth and steady flow.
The last time you took a flight for work
or vacation, I bet the experience was something like this … line-up at the
check-in kiosk. Print your boarding passes, then line-up to drop off your bag.
Line-up at Security, go through, then line-up at Starbucks for a coffee. Wait
at the gate until it’s time to board and line-up again to get on the plane. In
other words, the hurry up and wait process is repeated over and over.
Many of our daily work processes are very
similar to this analogy. There’s lots of stopping and starting, and waiting as
certain steps in the process must be done in sequence. Not only does this slow
down the overall process, but it destroys productivity. What’s the point of
being as efficient as possible at, say, dispensing boarding passes and baggage
tags when the passenger is just going to wait in the bottleneck called security?
However, if the rate at which passengers move through the boarding pass kiosk
and the rate at which they are processed through security are designed to be
synchronized, then the result is that both activities run at a high level of
efficiency. In this situation, if a queue of passengers forms in front of
either activity, then this is taken as a sign that something is out of synch
and needs attention, rather than being considered just another typical day.
In business, we need to build processes
so that work flows continuously. Indeed, almost every time work stops and
people are in a holding pattern, this is a sign that the people involved in
doing the work are out-of-synch. And, just like our trip through an airport,
being out-of-synch reduces productivity and increases lead-times.
Achieving synchronization requires a hard
look at our day-to-day work processes, with particular focus on the path that
the work follows, and the capacities of the various work activities. A process
is only efficient if it is productive and has no bottlenecks. To ensure
activities flow work capacity both up and down-stream must be balanced.
These two tactics have a long track record of
success in the manufacturing sector where they were developed (from Henry Ford
and the Model-T assembly line to Dell and their almost inventory-free supply
chain). Now, it’s time to apply these proven tactics across all
businesses.
Sincerely,
Chris Wilkinson.
Certified Business
Behaviour & Attitudes Analyst.
Business Coach.
