For some time I was a member of the governing Council of a UK professional body.  We had regular meetings about the forward direction and strategy for the organisation, which at its peak had abut 25,000 members.  We Council members talked, pontificated, debated important issues.  As ever, on such bodies, everybody thought they should make some contribution to

Some managers think they need to keep an eye on their staff, fearing that, if they don’t, those staff will nor give their maximum contribution. One of the problems is that the staff will know they are being watched and will lose motivation immediately, fearing they are not trusted to work to the best of

I talked last week about giving people decent work to do if you want them to be self-motivated. I stand by that but, of course, it’s not the complete solution. Many businesses overload key members of the workforce so that they burn out and either leave or go off sick. Thankfully, in the last few

I have said may times in this blog that expecting higher productivity through exhortation is unlikely to be successful. Organisations or nations need systematic processes that address the causes of low productivity - and actions to reverse or eliminate those causes. In addition, though, employees need decent work to do … they need clear tasks

Many governments Introduce productivity or efficiency drives. They aIm to reduce the size of the state not by cutting services but by cutting the cost of those services. However, few, if any, of those drives have the intended results. Why? Well, those governments rarely introduce systematic productivity improvement processes, and even more rarely attempt the

Many businesses (too many) concentrate on efficiency at the expense of customer service.  We have all waited too long on a customer service call or had difficulty talking to a person we want to rectify a problem. If we mess with our customers, they may not return.  And they will make negative comments to their friends -

Platforms for digital communication and collaboration (everything from e-mail through Google Docs to Zoom and Teams) can be very useful.   The problem is that when organisations use several of these, individuals can lose focus and productivity. They find they can’t find messages or files because they can’t remember on which platform they originated.  They end up

Those of us charged with improving productivity can sometime get anxious about our own, personal productivity.  Are we working hard enough? If so, why isn’t the productivity of the organisation higher? These are the wrong questions to ask.  Beating ourselves up is no way to a better future. We should ask: What have I done today? What

Productivity requires employees to be fully trained in all aspects of their work role, preferably  including being aware of the organisation’s declared mission snd overall strategy. The problem for the organisation is that training can be expensive - especially in terms of taking an employee away from the workplace. One standard answer is “If you

Many of us have computers at home. We may use them for work-rerated tasks (especially now more of us spend at least some working time at home) or for social/leisure purposes. We tend to use a small set of applications on a regular basis - a word processor, a spreadsheet app, email, messaging, task management,