Are all your pistons firing for productivity?

For those of you who haven't had the chance to read or don’t subscribe to The Australian newspaper, Bernard Salt AM wrote a thought provoking piece on productivity recently.

There seems to be a never ending stream of advice everywhere to invest invest invest in technology, especially AI, with the promise of more efficiency, effectiveness, better experience.

Technology certainly has its place and I have seen it used many times to transform businesses and improve efficiency. Coupled with good organisation design practices, technology can become a key enabler to make things more efficient and more effective.

Although Bernard mentions technology investment being key to productivity improvement, the focus of the article was about something else - Organisational Culture. We have all experienced mis-aligned culture and the impact it can have on productivity, and the flip side the amplifying impact a tuned-in one can have. And also how certain cultures can maintain mediocrity and repel improvement.

Bernard Salt:

“How can we accelerate the rate of growth in labour productivity?”

“... maybe we can create a culture that seeks out, celebrates and rewards the myriad steps that make a difference to overall efficiency. Is it possible to mobilise and/or incentivise a workforce – a nation – to adopt a culture of finding ways of making businesses and government departments a little bit more efficient every day? Is there a way of making every meeting, Zoom call and report explicitly and celebratorily inclusive of a culture of productivity?”

“Let’s reproduce the DEI business model and build another cultural piston to drive and lift Australian prosperity and quality of life. Let’s build – from grassroots to big business to big government – a culture of productivity, enterprise and initiative (PEI). Let’s task individuals with the job of finding ways to improve output relative to costs. Let’s monitor this kind of efficiency on a business-by-business basis. Let’s create a culture that upskills workers, finetunes management and invests in technology to deliver better productivity.”

Organisational Culture, like your technology is something that either works for or against an organisation achieving its goals. There are a set of choices there about how we execute work, how we process information, deal with uncertainty, and what we pay attention to as leaders. All this should be about achieving strategy and we should be particular about culture settings to set ourselves up for productivity.

Do we need to be easygoing to open up innovation, or have strong discipline in the way we execute to cut waste? Do we need to drop the paperwork and be more goal driven? Do we need to be less insular and bring more ideas in from the outside world, or do we need to minimise distraction?

An important consideration - Each organisational culture is unique and must be tuned in to strategy, the environment and countries that the organisation operates, staff and customers served. An oil rig is very different from a creative agency. A pharmaceutical manufacturer is different from a Military unit.

I believe this is the piston that Bernard is talking about. Matching organisational culture to strategy and paying particular attention to the unique settings to best achieve productivity. A focus on culture is also key for opening the organisation up to embrace innovation, redesigning systems and making the best use of technology investments.

Is this piston firing the way it needs to for your business?

Link to the article in The Australian Newspaper (Paywall): https://www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-australian-magazine/diversity-equality-and-inclusion-policy-can-lead-us-to-become-a-more-productive-nation/news-story/5905a4fe3f99c4627c8b7750d31d097c