In my mind, there are two key reasons productivity suffers: a lack of good leadership skill and lack of maintenance (people, process, technology, physical assets). Both of those, in deficit, will result in unplanned effort and spend. Both of those will prevent you from delivering what you wanted to deliver, or stop you getting all the benefits you expected.
As the old adage goes, ‘Practice makes Perfect’. But in this instance, what does practice look like?
- Be clear on the principles you will add to your assets and how you operate on and share those with your teams. That can be how you make decisions on technology or recruit staff.
- Think about who has decision rights in your organisation. Do the people you expect to make decisions have the right and authority to do so? Will you overrule them if someone else shouts loudly enough or you would prefer they achieved the objective in a different way?
- Trust your staff and build that trust. If you don’t trust them, you need to understand why. Be clear what the issue is and deal with it. Anything else is putting cost into your organisation, either by working round the issue or people not able to do their jobs.