Managing Productivity

The impact of your organization's culture

The importance of productivity is clear to all organizations. Service organizations, manufacturing, high tech, even non-profit charities share the need to do more with less. Those who have ignored it are no longer competitive or possibly no longer in existence. Utilizing an employee survey can help you maximize productivity in your organization.

No single "magic bullet" maximizes productivity.

As Deming pointed out, most of your organization's productivity is influenced by the actual production process itself. The equipment you use, the way you process your materials, the number of errors produced by the system, the pattern of workflow - provide the overall constraints of the relative efficiency or inefficiency of the system.

Of the factors inside your organization, which ones affect productivity?

Case Study

Our client had invested in new equipment and better procedures to improve the production process and had seen gains in productivity. However, since employees also affect productivity, the goal of this study was to identify the factors that influence productivity that are beyond the production process. If this employee survey research could identify the organizational factors affecting productivity, the company could maximize the contribution of its employees - thus, getting a better return on its investment.

About 700 managers and employees participated in the employee survey, which represented over 93% of the workforce. The company has a good balance of both white-collar and blue-collar employees. Thus, the survey results are not unique to white-collar or blue-collar employees.

This analysis was part of a larger study whose goal is to support an overall process of continuous improvement. The company is following our general CIP® process (Continuous Improvement Process) enabling workteams across the organization to create and implement improvements based on data gathered from the employee survey. This is a "grass roots" process that manages problems while they are small. Its goal is to put information into the hands of people who can use it to make changes that simultaneously strengthen the organization and improve employees' lives at work.