Solving the productivity puzzle: Prioritizing your people

How can prioritizing your people improve productivity?

Your employees are one of your most important assets. They play a key role in ensuring your business is running smoothly and that tasks are achieved on time and on budget. Taking steps to improve processes and ease bottlenecks not only improves the performance of your business, but also contributes to improved morale and workforce retention.

Develop a workforce planning strategy

Workforce planning involves ensuring that you have the right people in the right positions in your business — both now and in the future. It involves asking yourself where your business will be in the next five years and then comparing that against its current state to identify gaps that need to be closed to achieve those goals.

For example, your business may be planning to expand to a new location or integrate new technology in the future. This means that you may need to hire more staff to avoid workforce burnout or provide training so that your employees have the skills they need to work effectively with new technology. Workforce planning helps prioritize your people by offering opportunities to learn new skills and ensuring balanced workloads — therefore improving productivity.

Assess your organizational structure

Assess your organizational structure to identify workflow bottlenecks, pinpoint overlapping responsibilities, and determine whether your decision-making processes are slowing down operations. Additionally, review your existing span of control to determine whether your management team has too many direct reports to supervise effectively. An ineffective span of control can lead to both management burnout and decreased employee productivity.

Employee surveys can help ensure you centre people throughout the process and identify common pain points and areas for improvement. This enables you to adjust your organizational structure to ensure clear responsibilities, improve communication and collaboration, and streamline decision-making. These adjustments can lead to higher performance, engagement, and productivity.

Invest in process improvement

Processes are the formalized activities that help your business run efficiently — and include everything from product assembly to financial reporting. Reviewing your processes with your people in mind can help reduce employee stress, increase efficiency, and contribute to a positive work environment.

You can get started by reviewing the processes within your business to identify any pain points, bottlenecks, or redundancies. Gathering data and feedback from your employees can help you identify the root cause of these issues and redesign the process to make it more efficient — such as by adjusting workflows to reduce delays. Provide training on the new process to employees and monitor the process on an ongoing basis to ensure continuous improvement.

Provide change management

It is crucial to ensure that your team understands the purpose of the changes to the processes and organizational structure of your business. A lack of understanding can lead to fear and resistance to change — even if those changes are creating new opportunities for your employees. Change management can help you navigate this process while prioritizing your people.

Clearly communicating the purpose of these changes can help bring employees on board and ensure transparency throughout the process. Additionally, providing learning and development opportunities helps ensure that employees gain the skills they need to navigate new processes or responsibilities. Ask your employees to provide input to identify potential challenges and ensure everybody has a voice throughout the change process.

Take the next steps

People play a key role in the success of your business — and taking the right steps to prioritize your people can help boost its productivity and overall profitability. However, this is only the first piece of solving the productivity puzzle. Our next articles in this series will discuss how embracing change and leveraging technology can contribute to productivity.

For more information about how to increase the productivity of your business, contact MNP’s Melanie Fix.