08BUSINESS SITUATION

Productivity is not where it should be

The team gives everything, the results do not follow.

What the problem looks like

The team puts in a great deal of effort, but the results fall short of expectations. Time goes into operations, not into value.

What is often behind it

Inefficient processes, too many meetings, a lack of priorities and performance measurement, and weak focus.

How Boutique Advisory can help

We optimise processes → set priorities → introduce measurement frameworks → strengthen accountability and the team's focus.

People are working.Calendars are full.There is no shortage of meetings.People often stay late. New people get hired because the existing ones can no longer keep up.And still there is a feeling that with the same people, the same equipment and the same hours it should be possible to do more.That is usually the first signal.Not that people work too little.But that the company is not turning their work into results well enough.

Productivity is not a question of how much is worked.

Two people can work equally long hours.One process can produce 100 units in eight hours. Another 140.One salesperson can handle 50 customers. Another 80.One back office processes an order in two minutes. Another in ten.

The difference is not necessarily about who tries harder. It is often about the process, the technology, how the work is organised, knowledge and specialisation.

How much value do we create from the resources we already use?

Productivity has to be compared.

Knowing that productivity rose 3% this year is not enough. What if a competitor's rose 8%? The company is objectively better than last year. But relatively weaker than the competitor.

So productivity should be tracked over time. But also against the industry and against competitors.

Where is it usually lost?

Very often on small things that have become normal over time.The same data is retyped from one system into another.Someone builds a report by hand that could be produced automatically.A salesperson spends hours on administration instead of on customers.A team leader solves operational problems the system should handle without them.An experienced employee explains how something is done to a new colleague every few months because onboarding is not structured.Five people are involved in work that two could realistically do.A meeting runs for an hour to reach a decision that could have been made in ten minutes.

None of that will destroy a company on its own. But hundreds of such activities every day can absorb an enormous share of the organisation's capacity.

Digitalisation and automation can help. But only if they solve the right problem.

That is room to raise productivity. But buying new software is not digitalisation in itself. If a bad process is simply moved into a new system, what you have is a digitalised bad process. First understand what is slowing the work down. Only then decide whether the process should be simplified, automated, digitalised or removed altogether.

The same applies to people.

Productivity is not raised only by reducing headcount.Sometimes what is missing is specialisation.Someone doing five completely different jobs will struggle to do any of them optimally.Sometimes the problem is onboarding.A new employee spends six months learning by trial and error what could have been learned in six weeks.Sometimes accountability is unclear.Sometimes the bottleneck is the equipment.Sometimes the system.And sometimes the company has simply never measured how long a given process really takes and what it really costs.

So productivity first has to be made visible. There is no single universal measure. Depending on the business, you can track:

revenue or added value per employee
output per working hour
labour cost per unit of product or service
the time the key processes take
transactions per employee
utilisation of equipment and capacity
your own productivity relative to competitors and the industry

Only once there is a starting point can improvement be discussed seriously. Because what is not measured is very easy to explain away. And much harder to fix.

Where to start?

Find where the company spends resources today without creating a proportional amount of value:

which processes take the most time
where there is the most manual and repetitive work
what can be automated or digitalised
where specialisation is missing
how quickly new people reach full productivity
where technology or equipment limits output
how your own productivity compares with the competition

Productivity is not about making people work more. It is about creating more value with the same time, people and capital.

Does this sound familiar?

If people are working hard and the result does not show it, the company may not need new people straight away.

It may be worth first establishing where their time goes today and what stops them doing more.

Recognise the situation? — Let us talk