Better Productivity Improves Your Strategic Competitive Advantage

05th Aug , 2019

Superb productivity is a strategic competitive advantage against your competitors. The opposite is true of poor productivity, which can be caused by a lack of individual performance, wasting time, lack of engagement, and poor management and leadership. All of these factors can increasingly impact business morale negatively in the workplace. If left unchecked, this trend will lead to productivity spiralling further downward, eroding your business performance and weakening your competitive advantage.

How a Business Mentor or Business Coach Can Help with Productivity

Not only can a well-matched business coach or mentor from International Business Mentors help you to review productivity and business culture, but they can also assist you in many strategic areas of the business, including business growth strategies. They can help identify what issues are critical and assist you to work through possible scenarios or solutions to make improvements based on their own business experience.

So how do you reverse the trend of lower productivity and re-engage your people to use their time more effectively, and develop a more harmonious and productive workplace?

In most cases, this downward productivity is a chink in the strategic armour, and if left unaddressed, it can ruin any business. To improve your business’s productivity, compete in the market against productive competitors and better prosper, you need to support your employees. This can be done by improving performance culture, with strong productivity and tighter engagement by everyone.

Improving productivity is the right thing to do by your people and will help drive the business’s financial performance with better output, higher service levels, better morale and lower people costs of doing business.

Business coaching can help business owners and senior management to identify and deal with poor productivity. Being independent and experienced in this space with broad business experience, our business mentors and coaches cast fresh eyes over the situation and can discuss with you and share their skills and experiences as to how you might successfully fix the problem and improve productivity.

With the help of your business mentor or business coach, you can get your organisation to teach your employees to use their time more effectively and set performance targets that will result in a win-win situation. Further, as a business owner or as senior management, you will see the knock-on effects of higher productivity. As productivity improves, your people will have higher job satisfaction, which will result in better staff retention. Managing your people will become easier as they become better self-motivated, and you’ll see better business performance as a result.

Common Areas for Improving Productivity

To improve productivity, some of the more common areas to look at are:

• Support your people with training in leadership, management skills, selling skills, time management, and up-skilling technical skills. Also look at organisational structure and clear job descriptions, with staff understanding their major focal areas to help the business succeed (and themselves long term).
• Ensure that you have the right people in the right jobs to support the business. Should you employ staff, train and promote them in your business’ specific approaches, or recruit them already trained from outside.
• Does internal policy support the need for productivity such as: Electronic device usage in working hours:
  • Phones – Whilst it is critical for some people to use their phones to communicate with customers, suppliers and the like, they can also be an enormous distraction.
  • Likewise, email can be absolutely necessary or not useful at all.
  • Reducing the lack of focus and time that is frittered away on devices can boost productivity.
• Re-define what is required for each job and define reasonable policies to support what you expect in behaviours.
• Are your reward systems coordinated to produce the right results, including productivity? For example, do you reward good behaviour and a job well done and let your people know that they are valued? They in turn will reward you with greater effort.
• Prioritising – What is critical and what is not.
• Focus on attention. This is more valuable than focusing on time. Work done in a few hours with peak concentration, clear thinking and no distractions defines our productivity.
• Take a break. A typical attention span is 45 minutes depending on the individual and the time of day. So take a short break, grab a drink, and focus your eyes on something else. A break away from a screen will prevent your attention from waning and keep your mind alert.
• Move regularly, as being physically active can enhance mental performance. Stand up and walk to a colleague rather than emailing them.
• Moving increases blood flow to the brain, keeping it active and alert which helps people to better do their jobs, generate ideas and solve problems.
• Eating well and staying healthy are very important. Having a healthy diet, medical check-ups and exercise are not only good for the body, but good for brain health, helping to boost cerebral activity.
• Drinking enough water is an added advantage of having drinking water available in the workplace.

Where Can A Business Mentor or Business Coach Help You?

A well-matched business mentor or business coach from International Business Mentors can help you review productivity and business culture and also assist you in many wider strategic areas. Furthermore, they can help you to work through possible scenarios or solutions based on their own business experience.

The issues and challenges that you face in your business are wide and are likely to vary over time with your business’s objectives, industry, size, types of customer, products and services that you provide, nature of the competition, location, strength in people, supply and finance, and also the culture of the business. Having identified what your issues are and what your business growth strategies should be, your business coach or mentor can guide you as to how to address and put into place strategies for improvement.

Contact International Business Mentors today to start experiencing the benefits of business coaching and mentoring.