Productivity
David Amerland 🇺🇦
Working on a new book. Can't tell you on what just yet, but I currently share snippets of the insights I gleam as I write.
Productivity is the dirty word of business. The moment it’s mentioned it is misunderstood. Business owners think that poor productivity is the result of lack of commitment from their workforce and must, therefore, somehow push harder to get more out of them. Employees think it’s the latest initiative put in place by their bosses to somehow squeeze more unpaid work out of them and therefore resist every initiative that’s put in place while paying lip-service to the idea.
Yet, productivity is simply the amount of effective work that is performed after friction is taken into account. Friction, in a business setting, is measured as the degree of difficulty encountered when exerting effort to complete a task. The easier the task can be accomplished the less friction there is and the less time (and effort) is consumed by it which means that more tasks can be accomplished in the allotted work time.
Despite this simplicity or because of it, productivity is a multi-dimensional issue that takes into account business culture (and that all-important trust), digital transformation, business connectivity and decision-cycle time. Each of these seemingly simple elements devolves, in a fractal way of sorts, into environment and expectations, dreams and hopes, incentives and actions that feed back and reinforce each other in a complexity that seems to be designed to defeat us.
Yet, because friction is the deciding factor here: its presence or relative reduction can decrease or increase productivity, a focus on identifying what causes it and working hard to reduce it and mitigate its impact always brings benefits.
I have given you no easy answers here, I know. But this is the reality we are in.
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4moProductivity is just as big an issue for solo practitioners. About ten years ago, I was in a six-month leadership program. One of my colleagues and I coined the word #rhinowork for all the things we do that clients never see. But, if that background work isn't done, then the business fails. For instance, just this past week I spent hours creating links, webhooks, and the like to completely revamp one page on my author website. Site visitors will never know.
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4moCoincidentally, this has been on my mind recently - prompted by some weird experiences trying to do some freelance work for a large agency. 'Business' declares itself opposed to government red tape (you know, the stuff that stops them harming people) yet organisations manufacture all sorts of pointless internal processes because they don't trust the people they employ.