A Productivity Mindset

Rarely you find people and organizations who are clear about what productivity mindset means for them and how it can be achieved. Clarity comes with the purpose of why productivity is important today — and what needs to be done to get there.

It’s a productivity mindset that drives any organization towards superior performance, profitability, and growth. While the focus of the last century was around building efficiencies, OEE, people efficiencies etc. But that’s not about productivity.

Organizational de-layering, working on span of control etc., rejiggering capacities etc. don’t help as isolated initiatives.

This requires a paradigm change from “efficiency”-centric thinking to adopting a “productivity” mindset. There is no silver bullet, no magic wand, however. It requires transformation in the way people and teams are structured within the organization.

Reduce organization drag: demolish bureaucracy, and build agility and speed:

Here are three “recipes” for creating a productivity mindset:

1. Reduce organization drag: demolish bureaucracy; agility and speed are needed to unlock the time which is otherwise getting wasted in non-value-added processes which are pulling down productivity of people.
2. Channel your star talent to the right roles. Two steps. First, you can’t afford to go wrong in identifying who they are, therefore invest in right talent management capabilities. Secondly, you can’t afford to deploy them on non-critical roles, and thus think of building your own skill-based organization strategy.
3. Inspire your employees – the classic push mindset doesn’t work, satisfied and happy employees alone is not sufficient to bring the change of mindset. It is inspired people, who weave the magic. One Inspired employee > 2X of one satisfied employee