Please connect our data

You are probably, like most manufacturing companies, looking to improve your manufacturing productivity by improving the efficiency of your various machines and other manufacturing facilities - by, in turn, improving your data driven management … monitoring the performance of those facilities in real-time. 

Connecting and analysing all that data is a big challenge.  

What you need are standards and protocols which allow you to share and connect your data which can then be imported into analytical systems to provide useful insights.

Of course, you could build custom code to do the job but the IoT scene is changing quickly and maintaining customer code over  time is going to  be difficult.

You need integrated platforms based around established protocols for inter-connectedness - platforms that can evolve over time to keep pace with technological change.

Manufacturing equipment makers, enterprise software developers - please help! 

Is pan-famine next?

Agricultural productivity is one of the globe’s (and the twentieth century’s) great success stories. Over that century from 1900 to 1999 the number of people employed in agriculture dropped dramatically, yet yields rose just as dramatically.

This was just as well since the global population also rose significantly and all those extra mouths to feed required a lot more food to be grown and produced.

The trend seemed unstoppable. Of course, productivity growth had to slow since the number of people could not continue to drop massively since there were so few people employed in the sector but advances in pesticides, seed formulation, weather forecasting - and agricultural technology - were sure to keep productivity rising, weren’t they?

Well, no actually.  Those optimists that forecast continued productivity growth forgot to factor in the effects of global warming and climate change. The sector has been struggling to stand still.

The effects have also been disproportionately felt in poorer, developing countries - where population growth is highest.  If you are involved in agriculture, you have to work harder, and share your knowledge more effectively if the worlld is to avoid pan-famine following pandemic.  

Home Creatrivity

 There is quite a bit of debate about whether working from home is good or bad for productivity.

Are working-from-home employees as efficient as those in the office?  

The jury is still out.... but perhaps we are asking the wrong question.

You need your employees to be innovative and creative as well as, or even rather than, efficient.

Since many phases of the innovation process require the sharing of innovative and collaborative thinking, innovation is only likely to happen if close relationships and effective communication processes are maintained for those workers not in the office.

There can be advantages for home working - like less distraction and reduced energy lost to commuting.  But the main loss is that of the casual conversation, the experimental thinking and informal co-operation that close contact brings.

Technology can replicate some of this - but not all of it and not for all people.  It is too early to say but creativity may take a hit.  Certainly your firm needs to be on the ball, monitoring the situation and checking that innovation levels are being maintained. 

If not, you had better open the office to all.

Do You have Invisible Employees?

Many employees seem to want to ‘hide in the shadows’ - to get on with their work without disturbing their supervisor/manager.  Many supervisors/managers seem equally happy with this approach, feeling that employees who ‘raise their heads above the parapet’ are likely to do so for negative reasons - because they have made a mistake or forgotten to do something. 

Of course this often means that employees are also not visible because of exceptionally good performance.

You and your managers should try to make all employees visible - by checking regularly on them, not in a punitive way, but simply to check that they fully know their role and responsibilities, have the knowledge, skills, tools and equipment  required to carry out that role effectively, and are fully engaged and motivated.

Your supervisors should look at performance data - throughput levels, quality levels, etc - but should also talk to employees while observing them in the workplace at the source of good or bad performance.

Employees who are invisible may be dragging down your productivity. If employees are visible, you can make a judgement about their performance and manage it accordingly.

Stop being hyperactive

 Anyone with a hyperactive child knows how wearing it can be to have to cope with the demands such a child can make on a regular and continuing basis.

Well, email and continual zoom meetings have been like that for many remote workers.  Everyone gets copied into emails or invited to zoom meetings which are of only peripheral interest or relevance.

If they decide not to engage with an email thread or a meeting, they get FOMO (Fear of missing out) and anxious.  Their stress levels rise. Their productivity drops.  

If they do engage, they waste time on irrelevant correspondence and inappropriate meetings. Their productivity drops.

Yet, many firms have let this happen for over 12 months.  

Few firms have issued guidelines about copying people into emails or inviting people to online meetings - even when they have seen email threads and zoom meetings which clearly have too many people in them. 

If not careful, this will continue as people return to the workplace. Productivity will be sucked out of the organisation into these communication tasks.

You should treat the return to the workplace as an opportunity to issue (or re-issue) guidance and tame the beast.

Control people’s FOMO and you control their anxiety. You make them more productive. And it costs you nothing. 

Start now!

Getting Engaged

 Before the pandemic, evidence suggested that many employees were not really engaged with their work/workplace/employing organisation.  The results of a lack of engagement are absenteeism, poor quality of work and a lack of concern for customer service.

So, what has happened during the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, engagement has not increased. It is difficult to maintain  engagement over distance …. but too manny firms have ignored this problem and made no real attempts to engage their employees with positive action .

As employees drift back to their places of work, some of this lack of engagement may automatically disappear … but it is a dangerous strategy to simply make this assumption. 

You should stafrt to re-establish positive engagement should start with your communications about returning to the workplace.  These, themselves, should be positive, thanking employees for their contribution if they have been working from home, or for their patience if they have been furloughed.  Previous relationships should  be re-established so employees feel comfortable and careful re-training provided in ceased employees have lost skills or confidence.

This also applies to supervisors and managers (and owners).  You must show that you are aware of the importance of a ’smooth’ return to work and to established working practices.

Join the Dots

Most small businesses fail before they grow into big businesses. One of the commonest reasons is that they run out of working capital. In turn this is because the business leaders often do not understand the relationships between different aspects of their business. They fail to fully connect sales, production and finance.  

At times they concentrate on sales, without bothering to ensure they have the capacity to meet enhanced sales contracts.  Or they concentrate on production without having those enhanced sales contracts - and end up with lots of unsold stock.

Even when they consider sales and production together, they might fail to fully understand the implications for financing - in both the short and long term.

Yet these leaders of small businesses are ‘smart’ businessmen - they have fought tenaciously to establish and grow their business.  They have probably hired someone with financial acumen and installed one of the standard accounting packages.  They have created the conditions for financial control - just forgotten to exercise it.

Their performance management is probably similar.  They might measure performance  - output, quality, etc but fail to make all the necessary linkages or take the hard decisions that sometime need to be taken. If, for example, they tolerate poor performance (or even fail to recognise it), their workers will recognise this and may act accordingly - becoming de-motivated or exploiting what they perceive as management weakness.

In both areas, managers need to ‘join the’ dots- to make the various links between measurement and control; to establish measures which uncover poor performance and highlight problems’; to establish  communication processes which ensure everyone knows what their role is and how their performance is perceived; to establish rewards for good performance and sanctions for poor performance.

Then you might actually create the environment in which you can prevent small problems becoming big problems and enhance the possibility that your small business might grow into a large business.