By Douglas Kruger
OVER the past 20 years, British productivity has been slipping. Output per hour worked is 20% below that of France and Germany.
That’s a worrying stat. What’s harder to quantify is how much opportunity, and profit, has bled out of the Isles as a result.
Chief executive of Jersey Business Paul Murphy mentioned it from the stage last month, at our Chamber’s Profit and Productivity event. He added that “throwing more people at the problem” is the wrong solution. Instead, it’s about smarter approaches to work.
I agree. So much so, that I’ll be speaking on the topic, because there are some fascinating solutions available, and they are not as well known as they should be.
Jersey Business and BDO will be hosting me on the 24th of this month, presenting on “Leadership Breakthroughs for Revolutionised Productivity”. Or in laymen’s terms: smart ways to get more done. For those who can’t make it, I thought I’d share some of the principles.
On the simple side of the scale: Unnecessary meetings are the single greatest destroyers of productivity. For the average UK office worker, meetings that could have been emails wiped out 213 hours last year, or 27 full working days.
Other than canning pointless meetings, what else might your leaders do?
Here are two answers, from the field of behavioural economics. If you lead a team, why not give them a try this week?
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Don’t try to “fix” poor employees. Instead, replicate bright spots:
This one comes to us courtesy of Harvard Business Review. The key finding is that most managers waste large amounts of time trying to “fix” the worst performers in their teams. It’s frustrating, exhausting, and can take up around 80 per cent of their time, while yielding only a 20 per cent return in productive improvement.
The more effective approach is to study your top performers. They are called your “bright spots”. Document their actions and what they do differently that makes them so effective. Instead of fixing the underperformers, teach them how the bright spots go about it. This subtle shift in approach yields dramatic improvements. It also extends the sanity of your managers.
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Import solutions from outside:
True story: There was a hospital in the United States with an unusually high mortality rate. The leadership team commissioned an audit to determine what was going wrong.
They discovered a bottleneck during the hand-over between two teams. There was a three-minute period when no one was in charge, and the ambiguity was lethal. They realised that if they could speed up the handover, they would solve their problem.
At first, they studied how other hospitals did it. This approach helped, but it wasn’t revolutionary.
Then one young maverick asked what seemed like an outlandish question: ‘Why don’t we go see how they do it at those Formula One events?’ So they did. They commissioned a study into how teams of mechanics were able to fully service a car in a pitstop in under three seconds. Then they extracted the principles, and applied it in their scenario.
It worked like a bomb. As a result of importing solutions from the outside world, they were able to reduce their own handover time to a mere seven seconds. Not only was this innovation industry-leading, but it proved lifesaving. The high mortality stats all but disappeared.
There are learnable behaviours here. For starters, it matters how you define the nature of your problems.
Next, you can broaden the pool of potential solutions by asking: “Where has this problem been solved before?” Every problem has been solved, in one way or another, by someone, somewhere. The ideas are out there, and needn’t be reinvented every time.
As a bonus tip, this exercise is best carried out with a team of diverse thinkers. Pay special attention to the sarcastic or impatient person. The one who says, “Why don’t we just…?” They often excel at bypassing problems with lateral solutions, and that’s what you’re after.
So, declining productivity may be a costly issue. But it’s also a solvable one. Our species has been collecting leadership insights for decades, in and out of the office.
What’s needed now is an aggregation of all the most effective ones, and managers bold enough to try them.
For my small part, I’ll share six of the best. It’s an hour out of your managers’ mornings, in order to win back several hundred hours of productivity. Hope to see you there.
Bookings are open via Eventbrite, at: eventbrite.co.uk/e/breakthroughs-that-speed-up-everything-tickets-870907667277
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Douglas Kruger is the author of several business books, including “Own Your Industry” and “They’re Your Rules, Break Them!” He has won awards as a speaker, including an induction into the Professional Speaking Association’s “Hall of Fame” for his region. Meet him at douglaskruger.com.
