Driving productivity and resilience through tougher economic times
In these lean times we find ourselves in right now, what choices do we have as we steward our organisations through the inevitable discomfort?
The default option is often that we tighten our belts in the quickest way we know how. We go into rooms with a small handful of people, talk about which services we can cut, which jobs we can cut and how much money that will save us. We cut off anything we consider non-essential. The usual victims being training, recruitment for open vacancies and off-site events to bring geographically dispersed teams together. Productivity grinds to a halt as these drastic changes kick in.
Then we get a second hit on our productivity, because working in this context completely kills the vibe and everyone’s morale takes a dive.
What’s the alternative? How can our organisations, that make up our everyday economy, find a way to thrive through these tougher economic times?
Drive productivity, save jobs and create more ‘bounce-back-ability’ is the strategy I think we need. Not the traditional quick fix, which we all know is deep, painful and hard to recover from.
Our productivity statistics here in Aotearoa are stubbornly low. The big idea to shift that is to support tech businesses and redress the balance that is currently skewed towards industries with very real supply-side constraints. Agriculture, for example, is deeply constrained by the availability of land for farming, but a tech business doesn’t have those same brakes to its ability to scale up quickly.
Although a tech company doesn’t have those same constraints, is it a good idea to wait for a few tech savvy people to save us all? As good as they are, that’s a lot of pressure. And it’s not healthy for the rest of us to be hanging around, waiting to be saved.
So, what about the everyday economy? What about the regular, valuable jobs that everyone is doing every day? In our public services, our utility companies and every day small businesses? What if we could drive more productivity there? We want better quality work for everyone, in every job, across the whole country to get us through tougher economic times and come out the better for it in the long run.
With a focus on driving productivity in every businesses, we can save jobs and create more resilience. The ‘bounce-back-ability' for our organisations will be much higher if we drive productivity instead of cutting jobs and killing morale.
Drive Productivity
Driving productivity means we need to focus our efforts at the team-level. Each team has their own purpose and performance goals. Productivity therefore means something unique to every team in every organisation. Andrew Barnes, in his original 4 Day Week trial at Perpetual Guardian, took this approach and it worked a treat. It fails when senior leaders hold too tightly and don’t give the teams the ability to look for more productive ways of working. Those who are closest to the work know it best, so let them come up with ways to make it work better. It has to be bottom-up for this to work.
Save Jobs
If we get smarter and more productive about how we work we can allocate resources more effectively. Cutting jobs is a quick fix in financially constrained times, but it often does more harm than good. Morale takes a dive when we go through painful restructures, the changes themselves create productivity dips as everyone adjusts to the new world, and we find ourselves lost to our talent when we’re ready to scale back up again.
Instead, what if we offered people the opportunity to reduce their working hours, if they want to? There has been a long-term decline in part-time work over the last decade. There are many people who want access to high-quality, part-time work, so why not give it to them? You get to cut costs, keep good people and have the ability to scale up again if and when you’re ready.
Keep Hiring
The other quick fix is often the recruitment freeze. Although it’s well-intended, all it does is put more strain on the teams with the highest level of turnover. These teams are often the engine room of your workforce too, so it’s incredibly harmful to the delivery of your work. These teams are never going to have smarter, more productive ways of working, if they are struggling to simply stand still and manage the basics of their delivery. Avoid this quick fix if you can and be cautious about which roles you leave vacant.
Come out Stronger
Let’s ride out these economic times with more creativity and vision than we’ve done in the past across the whole economy. If we drive productivity, save jobs, keep hiring where we need to and create resilience in our organisations, we will come out even stronger than we went into it AND save the money we need to along the way.