Employee productivity is an assessment of the efficiency of an employee or group of employees to determine whether the individuals are performing up to their maximum capability. Employee productivity in an organization has three angles, the effective use of organizational time, attracting high-quality talent, and maximizing organizational energy. Times have changed; the financial capital is no longer scarce resources. For most companies, the truly scarce resources are the time, talent, and energy of their employees, and the ideas they generate and implement. While managing financials is required in the modern organization, it is insufficient for success. Even when the capital is available, if these resources are not properly managed in any organization, the organization would not stand competition.
In the book Time, Talent, Energy, Michael Mankins, and Eric Garton provide solutions that business owners can use to maximize their businesses’ productive power by managing their scarce resources, overcome organizational drag, and gain an advantage over their competition.
The management of these scarce resources (Time, Talent, and Energy) is what differentiates between an average organization and a top-notch organization.
Time
Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.
—Peter Drucker
The term organizational drag was used in the book to describe all the ways in which an organization eats up people’s time. Organizations can reduce organizational drag, boost productivity, and maximize output by actively managing how their people utilize three important resources: time, talent, and energy. Employees occupy their days with unproductive and unnecessary phone calls, emails, meetings, and teleconferences and find little time for activities that really add value to the organization.
It is when Organizations manage their time more closely that they realize that they have been spending time on unnecessary interactions that would not contribute positively to the company in any way. Organizations can realize tremendous time savings by investing their time as carefully as they invest their money. An average company loses 21% of its productive power to time-wasting interactions.
How do companies then prevent these losses?
There are various imaginative practices that can help, such as:
- Be ruthless in setting priorities. Organizations often fail to achieve goals and strategic planning targets that are set because they fail with respect to setting priorities. Managers can save time by requiring a strong business plan for each activity and assigning an official to regulate every activity’s advancement and adherence to the assigned budget. Today, companies have time-tracking tools at their disposal like Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple Calendar. These tools help to provide information about an organization’s time budget.
- Creating a fixed time budget and reducing it where possible: A fixed amount of time should be established for meetings and all other similar activities. The efficiency of the company’s regularly scheduled meetings should be accessed and unnecessary ones should be eliminated. Employees should be more conscious and more selective when requests making for new meetings.
- Establishing clear delegations of authority for time investments: Restrictions should be placed on who may call for meetings. In addition to that, participants that would take part in decision making should be scrutinized and meetings guideline should be set. This method has been proven to be effective in reducing an organization’s time budget.
- Creating a new protocol for e-communications: Some employees waste their bare time reading and responding to emails that they should never have received in the first place. Companies should reduce the number of messages, demoralize answers to messages that are implied basically for enlightening purposes, and discourage individuals from replicating unessential beneficiaries.
- Providing real-time feedback to manage organizational load: To be able to manage time, organizations need to have a baseline measurement of productivity to scrutinize the activities that contribute positively to the organization and also set targets for improvement.
Meetings That Work
Not all meetings are unnecessary, meetings are important to foster collaboration and make critical decisions. Meetings should have a clear agenda and purpose which should be communicated to all the selected participants prior to the meeting time and it should be strictly followed. Participants should prepare in advance. Also, lateness and any form of time wastage should not be allowed.
In Time, Talent, Energy, the key to becoming a profitable and successful company is not getting more money so you can invest in more resources. In fact, financial capital is excess as argued by the authors. It is how best the organization can manage its scarce resources (time, talent, and energy) to reach a higher level of performance.
What can harnessing Talent and Energy do for an organization in the journey from becoming good to great? Read more in part 2 of Secret to Winning Organization Culture: Harness Time, Talent, and Energy
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