PRODUCTIVITY IS ABOUT YOUR PROCESSES, NOT YOUR PEOPLE.
Productivity – and the ability to constantly improve it – sets top organisations apart from their competitors. The desire to boost productivity underpins many corporate initiatives – downsizing, outsourcing, functionalising, automating, re-engineering, training, etc. Yet, often these efforts don’t deliver the promised return, despite the massive upheaval (and cost) required to implement them.
If anything, people are battling more than ever with increasing workload and greater stress, inundated with emails and text messages, overwhelmed with information overload and facing burnout. In many cases, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the situation, blurring lines between home and work, and rapidly changing how teams are expected to get things done. The usual time management techniques are no longer enough, and burnout rates continue to climb. As Daniel Markovitz says in his 2021 Harvard Business Review article, the problem isn’t with the intrinsic logic of any of these time management tools. It’s that they fail to consider that most of us don’t work in isolation – and people can only work as well as the system allows them to.
So how do we work smarter and not harder?
How do we prevent quality, cost and delivery problems from recurring? How do we help people achieve more, with less stress?
There are no silver bullets, but we can learn from world leaders in productivity.
“We get brilliant results from average people managing brilliant processes, while our competitors get average or worse results from brilliant people managing broken processes.”
Think about your key value-chain processes, like Order-to-Cash, or Procure-to-Pay. Even in a manufacturing environment, much of the work to manage these processes happens invisibly – in systems, databases, and emails. Only in the smallest organisations are they managed by one individual or even one department. Typically, no single person has an end-to-end view, and the real problems are often in the handover between process steps anyway, making them difficult to see. This leads to higher costs, longer turn-around times and frustrated employees – and dissatisfied customers. As managers, not directly executing most of the process steps, we often think a process is simple, and struggle to understand why things go wrong. And when they do, instead of figuring out how to improve the process so that such mistakes cannot occur in the first place, our default solution tends to be one of the following:
Build in checks-and-balances for ‘governance’, such as extra authorisation steps, that mean the process takes longer and becomes more complex.
Hire more highly qualified people, who can be difficult to attract and retain, and of course increase payroll costs.
Invest in more frequent and intensive training and re-training exercises, which are time-consuming and don’t always directly lead to performance improvements.
Apply more punitive performance management and disciplinary measures, which make people less likely to be open about problems.
Opt to automate a process – often at great cost and often without a notable return, as we make the mistake of trying to automate a ‘broken’ process rather than fixing the issue at source.
But Chairman Cho’s message points to a deeper solution – is the work to be done designed in a way that makes it easy to do it right, for every step in the process and for everyone involved? As the expert statistician (and arguably the original data scientist), W. Edwards Deming pointed out:
"over 90% of the opportunities for improvement belong to the system we operate in, not the individual."
Just imagine if your key business processes were:
Simple and intuitive to follow correctly, even for people new in the job.
Able to deliver ‘right-first time, on time’ outcomes, to internal and external customers.
Almost entirely fool-proof, even in different situations.
Able to reveal problems and risks in time to fix them.
Embraced by the people who need to comply with them.
Easy to adapt when better ways are suggested.
This might sound impossible, but it is within any organisation’s grasp. Work processes should be designed in a human-centric way, which – as this recent article by Gartner confirms – leads to a 3.8x increase in likelihood of high employee performance. Simple process mapping tools are used by the teams themselves to track, visualise and analyse processes, making it easy to spot and rectify potential risks or pain points. Error-proofing techniques then eliminate typical causes of human error, making processes robust and easy to follow correctly. The result, known as a Standard Operating Model (SOM), is a set of standardised, optimised business processes for an area or department, with clear roles and responsibilities, complemented with relevant decision support tools, and documented correctly for training and auditing purposes. These are supported by simple visual management tools that make work easier, and also flag issues for early resolution by the people doing the work – freeing up management time and speeding up delivery to customers. Involving people in redesigning their own processes builds a sense of empowerment and engagement – leading to sustainable capability in these teams for continuous improvement of their own processes.
Get this right, and you’ll often find the urgent need to ‘automate everything’ falls away – and there will be a far clearer idea of where a focused automation solution will deliver measurable benefits for users and the organisation.
So, while it is no silver bullet, a simple mindset shift – that we need to focus on improving our processes, not just performance-managing people – can unlock the most effective possibilities to solve productivity challenges, creating a win-win for companies and employees. Who would want to lose out on that?
