Why I need to be more productive?
Usually I hear people say that everybody needs to be more productive. The same question applies for personal and business areas but I usually don't see people explaining the reasons behind that. So, I decided to research them by myself and I would like to share the results with you.
The globalization and technology are changing the face of the business world. According to McKinsey (see picture above), the global traffic data increased 500 times in a period of 12 years and Facebook reached the 50 million users mark in one year. Radio reached this mark after 38 years. The same study estimates a market between 5 to 7 trillion dollars for automation of knowledge work by 2025 and presents the speeding up of technological breakthroughs comparing the first phone call with the first IPhone. The path toward mobile internet took 115 years to reach the first website from the first phone call but spent 16 years to get to the first IPhone. The time to achieve a disruptive innovation is decreasing quickly and the consequences from now on are that a worker will have less time to learn, handle huge quantities of information and improve his productivity to adapt to these changes.
There is no easy way to accomplish productivity improvement but beyond the pressure above, the literature shows four basic challenges:
a) not lose the focus, or commonly said as time management: the tendency to lose focus is a constant threat for performance together with multitasking and task switching that are regarded — by cognitive psychology — as a source for a 20% -40% loss in productivity;
b) absence of generic key set of performance indicators which could be applied to worker universally;
c) better communication: because expertise is too costly if its owners are unable to communicate in a way in which it can be applied in a practical way to get results;
d) quality and the use of a process to manage or improve it: in process management or process enterprise, the core idea is that once the objectives and goals are fixed and oriented toward customer satisfaction, the final focus has to be on managing and perfecting the process which leads to the goal.
In western cultures, such as Finland and the Netherlands, an increasing number of organisations are applying new ways of working (NewWoW) changes by implementing activity-based offices, acquiring portable ICT tools for all employees and improving organisation policies to support the NewWoW. The concept of NewWoW was created in the field of facility management as the opposite of traditional work practices. Since then, it has evolved to consist of work in information technology, work in management and personal work practices as well. The idea behind NewWoW is to increase productivity without decreasing job satisfaction. This can be achieved by increasing the autonomy and flexibility of workers so that they are able to find the best ways of working for themselves.
Recent research (Palvalin, M.(2018)- What matters for knowledge work productivity? Employee Relations.) concluded that big productivity improvements can be achieved without big investments, focusing on good management and workers’ self-management skills. This is because the relationship between individual work practices and productivity is positive and better than that, well-being at work and productivity has the highest significant positive relationship. In practice, the numbers are telling that improvement productivity brings additional health benefit. Once worker is more productive, organised and focused in his goals, he can decrease his stress perceiving a better life’s quality.
In summary, technological changes are bringing breakthrough innovations in a shorter period of time and pressuring workers to learn faster, manage huge quantity of information and be more productive. A worker can improve his productivity performance working on four basic constraints: keep your focus, create a generic key set of performance indicators, control the quality of your work associating it to a generic process and look for an improved communication. There is no one simple answer to achieve productivity improvement but NewWow is trying to bring some contribution. A big contribution occurs when a research points out that self-management skills can bring big productivity improvements relaying that human beings by yourself can make a big difference. Furthermore, productivity improvement can bring better life's quality to a worker.
The last but not the least, knowledge is what is delivered for most workers nowadays. Knowledge worker skills and his productivity are very important because even small economies that are relatively disadvantaged in lacking natural resources but skilled in the production and exploitation of knowledge can outperform larger rivals that have abundant natural resources but who are lacking in such skills. As knowledge still remains the great value of exchange in the world, it is an excellent opportunity to manage carefully, this so important resource.
