Treasure
Hunt, Part 2
Productivity and
Effectiveness
The Problem: When businesses invest in their personnel, they are taking a far-sighted view of success. But when a company doesn't send clear signals to its personnel, or people don't have the authority, resources, tools, job support, guidance, cooperation, equipment, information, or incentives to do their jobs properly, they’re faced with obstacles to success. They may spend endless hours of precious time fighting battles with hurdles they may not ever win. All the while, potential profits, as well as morale, simply disappear down the drain.
Directions: For each item, select the answer that best describes your organization. At the end of each section, get your clues!
Section A:
| In this section, discover whether your organization has already mastered the secrets for stellar productivity and effectiveness. Each performance opportunity shown below has a range of possible responses. Your business may fall at a different point on the spectrum for each one. |
| We define our jobs around specific roles and skills. People should maintain their roles indefinitely to help keep costs down. |
 |
We believe that developing expertise is essential to the success and prosperity of the enterprise. Encouraging employee talent is our goal. |
| People should work around any obstacles and missing information, not bother management with them. | |
One of management’s main jobs is eliminating barriers to productivity and personnel success. |
| People should use simple common sense to decide what to do, ignoring any mixed signals they get. | |
It’s management’s role to ensure that desirable actions are consistently encouraged, and undesirable ones aren’t. |
Clues: Do you see more alignment with the approaches on the left or the right? If you picked the right, you are well on the way to enjoying peak productivity and performance in your environment.
Section B:
Next, ask yourself...What happens in your organization? Try to think through how your company either encourages or discourages personnel development, removing obstacles, and aligning consequences.
| 1. |
Are personnel held back from developing real job expertise? Are the advancement opportunities, training, and job support systems rare? |
| 2. |
Conversely, is training a “Band-Aid” for all performance gaps? That is, does the company assume that one can simply “throw some training” at every unmet performance expectation? |
| 3. |
Are people stymied by missing or incomplete information? Do they constantly need to guess or improvise requirements, standards, procedures, or data to do their jobs? |
| 4. |
Are work activities mired in procedural bureaucracy? Are task sequences long and convoluted, with no logical reason for it? |
| 5. | Do people complain of hassles getting in the way of their jobs? Do they constantly need to jump through hoops to get anything done? |
| 6. | Are consequences out of alignment with policies and practices? Does the enterprise fail to “walk its talk” about the actions it supposedly encourages or discourages? |
Clues: If your answers tend to be “yes,” it indicates productivity and effectiveness issues appear to be limiting the progress of your organization.
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