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Need more productivity? Here are 3 steps to getting the most out of your workforce

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With an increasingly competitive market you know you need to spend more time on improving workforce productivity; the problem is you probably don’t know how to do it.

Instead of looking at the challenge as a whole, you need to think about how you can get the most out of each individual, team, and manager, so that there is a critical mass of improvement moving your company’s high level metrics, like the EPS, sales revenue or ROI into a healthy upward trend.

So how can you get the most out of your workforce?

Step 1 – Understanding your changed workforce

Take a look around you.  Look at who is working with you.
You are likely to have some old late-Boomers, more Generation X’ers, some Generation Y’ers and an increasing number of Millennials. These folk want independence, freedom and opportunities to make a difference socially respectively.  In other words each age group, roughly, is motivated by something different.

Acknowledging their needs and expectations is a ‘must have’ these days.  As you see, there is too much competition from your competitors already to not serve your internal customers. Along with harnessing the capability of new cheap technology, some good solutions are very possible.  Think telecommuting and Flex programs, onsite health support. These things make life easier for the production or front line customer facing staff.

Step 2 – Get clarity

Clarity helps human beings relax and with that comes more creativity, more energy – and more engagement:  And much greater productivity. This clarity helps at many levels and is the third step for getting the best out of your workforce.

We are talking about clarity concerning:

  • The company’s objectives.
  • The job description.
  • The expectations.

When asked only 40% of the workforce sampled knew what their company’s objectives were.  It is very hard to get engaged with your job when you don’t know how what you do fits into the whole.  What about you as you read this – do you know how your work makes the whole company flow and bring in profit?
There needs to be a direct link between what the company is trying to achieve and what any person or team is engaged I doing at any time.  And for that everyone needs a good job description.

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Step 3 – Increasing productivity by using external talent

In an ideal world all managers would be great communicators, good at understanding different psyches and needs and inspirational in their leadership so that they would motivate and engage their people every day.  On site or off site.
In the real world managers are people too and they are not always at that level of performance themselves.  They can be as disengaged, distracted and as ready to jump ship as the rest of the workforce.

For many reasons companies have had to pare right down to be lean, mean machines, dumping buildings, capital equipment and people on their way to survival in a world economy gone mad.  This has fitted well with the changes in work habits such as telecommuting, flexitime and hot-desking.  It also fits well with the more recent focus on deliverables and results as measures of productivity instead of using what is accomplished in the 8 hour day as the only gauge.

With this has come another solution to getting the most out of your workforce which is an explosion in the use of ‘Just in Time Talent’.  In the same way that Just in Time purchasing changed inventory control and Just in time training gave a far better ROI than a training calendar of events. External (or Just in Time) Talent is changing the workforce requirements of companies.

Freelancers, contractors and temporary contract workers need to know the parameters of their project just as much as an employee needs to know the expectations of the company about what they should deliver and when.  The beauty with the freelancer is that they deliver what the company requires and leave!  No more costs.

Onboarding external talent quickly is important and the clarity gained from the objectives and targets above make it simple to set out the projects and create meaningful metrics to track progress along the way.  They work alongside the employed staff, usually virtually, and their productivity is easily tracked on a project management system where deadlines become the deliverables.

Performance Analyst and Professional Writer at The Human Development Consultancy SA. Dr Elizabeth Morris is a Human Resources specialist and professional writer. She is based in South Africa and works with many organisations; including small social enterprises where social impact is a key indicator of success and large corporates who want to develop their CSR activity, while not losing productivity!