By Chris Swistro
At a time when budgets are tight and tightly managed, there is a good chance you are incurring significant costs that don't appear anywhere on your balance sheet.
What is this invisible expense? Lost productivity that is costing companies billions - with a "b." The good news?
If you pay attention to alignment - matching how you do your work with how you generate revenue - these costs will plummet. And it doesn't have to cost a lot to save a lot.
Astute organizations are examining productvity - where it is lost, how much those losses cost, and where it can be recovered.
Consider these statistics:
- The UK website "Management Issues" suggests companies lose the equivalent of 36 days per worker per year due to poor planning, poor communication and poor supervision.
- The online magazine "Manage Smarter" cites the inability of employees to find information, and outdated or innacurate business information, as drivers of diminishing productivity.
- Business Wire cites survey data from multiple sectors revealing ineffective business communications have led to lost business, performance errors, and (expensive!) employee turnover.
Where might you be spending money and not know it?Do you have business goals set for the next quarter or year? Do your employees understand the goals and their role in attaining them? If not, it's likely that worker productivity is suffering - because your team is focusing their effort on the wrong things, or because morale is low as employees question how they fit into the big picture.
Are your daily practices, workflows or procedures aligned to help you attain your quarterly or annual performance goals? If not, outdated procedures, inefficient practices or stale information could be leading to errors, oversights, missed opportunities or costly re-work.
Take action now, and realize immediate savings.
The work to refresh plans, management practices and communications need not be lengthy and expensive in order to reap rewards. This three-step approach can work for you:
- Step 1: Take Inventory - With your performance goals in mind, take stock of what's working for you and what's working against you in attaing those goals, examining job functions, procedures, available talent, and communications.
- Step 2: Make a Plan to Close the Gaps - Pinpoint the problem areas, where your people or processes are out of alignment with your business goals, and design the necessary changes.
- Step 3: Make Alignment Your Consistent Focus - Monitor and mentor the changes you implement so that you, and everyone on your team, remains clear about how and why what they are doing matters in attaining your goals.
The boat moves faster, even in choppy waters, with everyone rowing in the same direction. Research suggests motivated employees are 80% productive with their time, but distressed employees are only 20%-30% productive with their time. For a $50,000 employee, this difference can represent $25,000 in lost wages. Those costs add up fast!
So make an investment now in creating and maintaining alignment. You'll build a resilient, high-performing organization, and your bottom line just might grow in unexpected ways!
