The UK’s rail franchise system (where private companies bid for the right to tun rail services on the national infrastructure) was introduced to improve competition and efficiency. However, the bids - and the assessment of them - were highly over-optimistic. They looked to offer value-for-money for the government/taxpayer and a good return for the franchisee ….
Many companies are looking to improve manufacturing productivity by improving the efficiency of their various machines and other manufacturing facilities - by, in turn, improving their data driven management … monitoring the performance of those facilities in real-time. Connecting and analysing all that data is a big challenge. What we need are standards and
Agricultural productivity is one of the globe’s (and the twentieth century’s) great success stories. Over that century from 1900 to 1999 the number of people employed in agriculture dropped dramatically, yet yields rose just as dramatically. This was just as well since the global population also rose significantly and all those extra mouths to feed
There is quite a bit of debate about whether working from home is good or bad for productivity. Are working-from-home employees as efficient as those in the office? The jury is still out.... but perhaps we are asking the wrong question. We need employees to be innovative and creative as well as, or even rather
Many employees seem to want to ‘hide in the shadows’ - to get on with their work without disturbing their supervisor/manager. Many supervisors/managers seem equally happy with this approach, feeling that employees who ‘raise their heads above the parapet’ are likely to do so for negative reasons - because they have made a mistake or
Anyone with a hyperactive child knows how wearing it can be to have to cope with the demands such a child can make on a regular and continuing basis. Well, email and continual zoom meetings have been like that for many remote workers. Everyone gets copied into emails or invited to zoom meetings which are of
Before the pandemic, evidence suggested that many employees were not really engaged with their work/workplace/employing organisation. The results of a lack of engagement are absenteeism, poor quality of work and a lack of concern for customer service. So, what has happened during the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, engagement has not increased. It is difficult to maintain engagement over distance
March 15th was National Napping Day and March was National Sleep Awareness Month. A Pew Research Center survey found that 34% of Americans take daily naps. Many peple find a midday snooze flips off their power switch and reboots their work engine for the rest of the day. Its certainly less harmful to your body
Can a personal productivity guru help you reach new productivity heights? Many of us look to new tools and rtechndquwes, new technologies ologies, new approaches to stimulate our thinking about how to get more done in the same time. These new ‘things’ seem to work for a time and then run out of steam …
Before lockdown many firms were experimenting with networking/collaborative tools, hoping to improve the inter-connectedness of departments, people and processes. When the lockdown hit, many of them accelerated the move to the various tools and technologies simply to keep the organisation functioning from lots of home locations. Even those who were not already experimenting were forced to