Solving the productivity puzzle: Embracing change

How embracing change can increase productivity

Business leaders are facing many challenges in today’s uncertain landscape — including labour shortages and keeping up with organizational growth. Thinking differently about how work gets done within your organization can help you use your resources more efficiently and achieve positive results.

Your business may have always performed work in a certain way, and it is easy to get complacent when things are going well. However, taking a step back to consider how you are using your resources and introducing thoughtful, deliberate changes can significantly increase its productivity.

You can get started by looking at the basic functions of your business — such as its finance or administrative functions or overheads. Then consider if there is an opportunity to do more with your existing resources or reduce your overheads. You may be able to restructure or reorganize how work gets done in your business to improve its productivity.

The examples below show how thinking differently and embracing change can help increase the productivity of your business. However, no two businesses are the same — and these changes may not be the best fit for your specific situation. It is important to be deliberate when assessing different ideas and options to achieve the desired results.

Are you aligning your people and processes?

Businesses are struggling to attract and retain new talent in today’s competitive marketplace. Labour shortages can impact your ability to meet deadlines, provide excellent customer service, and grow your business. Asking yourself if there is a different way to achieve more with your existing staff can help you use limited resources more efficiently.

Evaluating the processes in your business can help identify areas for improvement. Start by evaluating administrative and operational processes — which often evolve over time to accommodate organizational constraints or personal preferences, inadvertently leading to inefficiencies.

These questions can help you get started:

• Should this process still be done?
• Is the process being performed by the right person or function?
• Can it be a learning development opportunity for a junior team member?
• Is this process achieving the desired outcomes?

Consider a small business that has one individual responsible for sales — handling everything from business development to marketing efforts and client relations. The business grows and hires additional support for the sales department to deliver more deals. However, the sales leaders struggle to define the scope of the individual roles. This causes the sales team to lose sight of the work being done by others and operate in silos, leading to duplicated work, the poor allocation of effort and resources, and gaps in service delivery.

To address this challenge, sales leaders can assess the portfolio of activities to determine whether these activities are achieving the right outcomes or can be performed by another team member. Customer resource management (CRM) functionalities can reduce manual work and scheduling sales calls can be performed by a junior team member to support professional development. The most important consideration during this assessment is to identify processes that are not achieving desired business outcomes and understanding why they are missing the mark.

Aligning your people and their skill sets with your processes to improve productivity requires diving into your operations, asking these questions, facing some challenging realities, and being willing to make change. Teams that have the right people doing the right level of work are more efficient and productive, are better positioned to deliver quality products and services, and are satisfied with their work experience.

In another example, a grocery store may be struggling to hire enough people to manage the cash registers — impacting the time it takes to check out each order and decreasing customer satisfaction. The owner of the store decides to install to reduce the number of people the store needs to work the cash registers. This enables the grocery store to redeploy its existing staff to restock the shelves or answer customer questions, which helps increase customer satisfaction.

Your employees know your business — and asking them which processes they find painful or cumbersome can provide valuable perspectives. However, it is important to act on their feedback by evaluating those processes, considering whether the processes still make sense and are achieving the right outcomes, and reviewing alternatives.

A change management consultant can help you embrace change by providing a fresh perspective on the processes in place within your business, identifying opportunities for improvement, and implementing change. This helps ensure that the processes in your business are being performed by the right people and achieving the right outcomes — enabling you to do more with the same number of employees.

Where can you invest in technology?

Our previous article discussed why technology is not the only solution to increase the productivity of your business. However, there are some situations where investing in the right technology can help you accomplish this goal.

Consider a restaurant that has historically hired wait staff to manage the front desk, seat customers and bring their orders to the kitchen, and then serve those orders to customers. Introducing an app that enables customers to order on their phone can help reduce wait time and give existing staff more time to handle other tasks such as answering customer questions.

However, it is important to consider the risks and context before you implement new technology in your business. The app in this example may work well for a restaurant that provides fast service but may not be appropriate in the context of a restaurant offering a fine dining experience. It is important to review the full picture of increasing productivity and consider how to balance that goal with potential risks in other areas of your business.

Another example of where technology can help improve productivity is of a medical office that implements a web portal that enables patients to book appointments and virtually check in online. This gives administrative staff more time to organize medical files or answer phone calls from patients.

These are just two examples of how leveraging technology can help free up more time for existing staff to handle other important tasks. However, it is important to remember that this technology can be costly — and consider whether the benefits to your business will outweigh the costs. This includes the cost of maintenance and upskilling your staff to use this new technology effectively.

Take the next steps

Thinking differently about the functions of your business and exploring new ways to organize work can have a significant impact on its productivity. However, this is only the second piece of solving the productivity puzzle. Our final article in this series will discuss in further detail how leveraging technology can help boost the productivity of your business.