How to Improve the Productivity of your Business (without hiring extra staff!)
There is a huge variation between the most and least productive staff – taking into account such things as attendance and efficiency, the difference can be as much as sixteen-fold. Why such a difference? There are two main reasons. Perhaps the most obvious one is what could be described as a person’s ‘competence’.
Competence
Competence is a combination of:
- Experience: someone in post for five years is likely to be more productive than someone doing the same work for five days, and
- Skills: a person who has had the correct training to do the job will be more productive than someone whose training has not been as thorough.
But competence is only part of the picture. In many cases, the main reason for low productivity will be any or all of the following:
- Little or no enthusiasm for the job
- Low energy
- Time off: for illness, or just taking ‘sickies’
- Getting in to work late, leaving early.
These are all signs of a lack of motivation.
Motivation
Some people just are motivated. They get in to work and they get stuck in. They love their job – there is a real sense of “round peg, round hole”. For others it is not so easy. They may seem unhappy or angry, and they may not get on with the rest of the team. They might moan about customers, management, colleagues, life.
Of course most people are usually somewhere in between these two extremes. What happens at home may affect people’s emotional state, their motivation and therefore their overall performance at work. Most people have periods when they will feel demotivated and other times when they are the round peg in the round hole.
Productivity
The following rough and ready guide can represent how productive a member of staff will be:
Productivity = Competence x Motivation
Scoring both Competence and Motivation on a scale of 1 to 10, gives a value for their percentage of productivity. Some examples:
- A completely competent (10) and fully motivated (10) member of staff will be
- 10×10 = 100% productive.
- A fully competent (10) and totally demotivated (1) member of staff, could be
- 10×1 = 10% productive …
- Which might be exactly the same as an enthusiastic (10) school leaver in their first week at work doing the job for the very first time (1) –
- 1×10 = 10% productive
- Perhaps most significantly, someone who is half-way competent (5), and half-way motivated (5) …
- 5×5 = just 25% productive.
What to do?
So if members of staff can become more productive, the business will be able to grow without increasing overheads. Once this is realised, for a business owner the most interesting question becomes: I know I can sort out the training of my staff, but can I do anything about their level of motivation at work? Is there any way I can help my staff to be more motivated and so more productive?
In fact, there is a way to do this. Motivational Maps® provides a set of tools that identifies:
- What motivates people in their life
- The rewards individual staff could be given at work that would actually motivate them
- How individual differences in what motivates people affects how they work together in teams
A Motivational Map® assessment takes just 15 minutes and can be done online. If you are interested in a Motivational Map® analysis for an individual member of staff, a group/team/department, or the entire business, contact Ailnoth on 0117 230 1458 or info@ailnothconsultants.co.uk for a free initial consultation.
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