Send them home

Do your employees turn up at 9am and leave at 5pm, having completed their day's work.  Was it satisfying for you to watch them beavering away?  Were they productive?  How much more productive might they have ben working from home or from their local coffee shop?

Employees often find certain tasks difficult to complete in the office - report writing, coding and anything else that demands a high level of concentration and a low level of distraction.

Yet, few employees take the logical step of closing or shrinking their office space and allowing employees to work where they feel most comfortable.  Few even experiment - and measure performance/productivity differences.

Why don't you give it a try - perhaps on a small scale at first.

Key to induction

When you hire new people how do you induct them into the organisation?  Too often this consists of introductions, 'policy sessions', issuing of email ids and passwords .... and little else.  Your new people are informed - but bored.

Yet, in many organisations there is one activity in which you could engage new staff that would tell them more about the business - and its success factors - than all your hectoring and rehetoric.  This might be customer service, handing customer complaints, picking and packing orders  ... or something else.  You want your new staff to understand what it is that your customers value above all - and how that can be delivered.  So find the activity - or set of activities - that does this  and make all your new employees work on this activity, reflect on it and synthesise for themselves a list of customer success factors. 

Can you find the middle ground?

Great for the companies -and their shareholders: not so good for those now unemployed workers whose jobs have gone to the robots.

Of course in some industries and sectors , using robots is not quite so easy - automation requires highly repetitive, highly standardised, highly consistent work.  Robots are fast, regular and relentless - but nowhere near as flexible and adaptable as humans.

However, we are now seeing the rise of a new generation of 'co-bots', machines that work with humans to take out some of the effort and drudgery of tasks while allowing humans to exercise their flexibility and control.

And one section of the workforce is gaining more than the rest - women.  Where work requires precision and strength, women can provide the precision while the cobot provides the strength.  Productivity rises, work improves.

Can your company find ways to use 'assistive technology' - to improve work and productivity?

Using incentives

Japan is offering employment subsidies to organisations that improve their productivity.  So 'winning' companies get a double boost.

Is this a sensible role for government - to reward the successful?

One reason for their action is to prevent companies from using job cuts to fuel growth.

What does matter is that the aims of any government intervention are clear - and seen to be fair.
And, as a general rule, government should not 'shore up' the unsuccessful and uncompetitive.

so, perhaps this is a valuable experiment.  Certainly I will be interested to see the results.

Japan currently ranks 22nd out of 34 OECD countries for its productivity.  Perhaps this initiative can move it up the list.

Back at company level, what incentives can you offer to boost your winners and get that 'double whammy'?