Organizational Productivity Improvement Tips
Posted in Organizing on February 19th, 2011 by Jim – Comments OffOrganizational productivity improvement techniques are often overlooked in preference for individual employee productivity techniques. In this article I look at six of the key ways an organization can look into improving and increasing their output.
The starting point for many companies is to look at some of the short-term gains they can make. One of the most common productivity improvement ideas is to rethink how your operational procedures and methods are being used. These can often have gaps in the production chain which cause workers to be under-allocated/overworked.
A secondary element to this is looking at how your project management and planning staff is done. By planning out what activities employees are working on you can make them more productive and increase the output of the company as a whole.
The most common approach however will always be looking into the effectiveness of your workforce. This principally means identifying where the weaknesses in staff are and choosing training in technical/soft skills to improve their abilities. You should also consider mentoring by some of the stronger members of the workforce in specific skill sets.
In the medium term all companies should be considering how to cull parts of their product line and feature sets to simplify their output. Simplification will not necessarily result in lower sales if you drop non-profitable lines and features which do not provide a real value proposition to the customer.
In the long-term, most productivity improvement techniques involve purchasing more equipment, new machinery or expanding into a new plant. This is all worthwhile but does take a large financial outlay and you need to be sure that your future plans have a ready and willing customer base.
An alternative approach to consider is to look at how research and development can improve the basic processes in the firm. Is there ways of making more effective for simple products or different engineering tooling that can be designed in order to increase the output of the company?