Lift Productivity In Your Business With This Knowledge

Business owners are always conscious of the money going out in the business. They want to get good value from every dollar spent. When it comes to productivity though, it can be hard to see if the money the business is giving a good return on the expense. They would do well to pay attention to also what the hidden cost of not spending some money might have in terms of productivity gains being stifled.

"On average, Australian workers spend 16% of their day 

on activities that waste their time and effort."

How do you measure productivity within your team?

Some statistics I came by recently are from an ongoing series of surveys with responses gathered from 2100 individuals across seven Australian industries. The findings were quite interesting and held what I think will surprise a lot of business owners.

Top Time Wasters In Business
The top three areas where time is lost in business is in these areas:

1. People can't get on with their work due to delays waiting for someone with more authority to review their work, or waiting for additional input from other parties. (16%)
2. Time-wasting emails (15%)
3. Technology waiting time. (13%)

Not All Employees Are Equally Productive

There is a tendency for some business owners to equate time spent on the job with productivity. In fact the survey results show this is quite wrong. 

There is no correlation between time at work and productivity. Indeed, the least productive employees often spend the most time at work! 

The most productive employees are particularly likely to be wasting time waiting on technology.

The least productive group are wasting their time in unproductive meetings. 

Qualities of productive employees and unproductive employees were striking to say the least. As shown in the survey, despite the gender pay gap and the difficulty older people have in getting employment, the most productive workers were more likely to be female and older workers. 

Characteristics of Most Productive Employees

Characteristics of Least Productive Employees

Yet typically the recruiting processes commonly followed are likely to screen out those very people who are potentially MOST productive employees!

Productivity By Industry
These industries represent those surveyed and this is their productivity ranking.

Declining productivity

Where productivity has declined over time, the reasons employees cite for this are issues controlled by management. While of these four reason given, one is defined as poor management communication, the other three can also relate to a communication issue.

Workers attributed productivity declines to:

• Poor management
• Lack of motivation and incentives
• Staff being treated poorly
• Poor management communication

The Role of Managers In Productivity

While it may be the individual workers' combined efforts that lead to higher productivity, getting the best from the team is a job for and a reflection of the owner and manager.

Killers of high productivity

• Needless complexity
• No environment that values and provides training 
• Tasks given to employees, but not the authority required to go with the responsibility
• No performance management strategy
• No vision for the employees to buy into
• Time wastage due to inadequate technology

Productivity Improvement: The Upside

As you can see from these sets of data, the gains in productivity can be huge by just improving some areas of business.

That means taking stock of what's happening in the business, and taking steps to improve the efficacy of the business, and the competence of the management, and the flexibility to adapt to a changing marketplace.

That's good news for those businesses willing to improve their productivity and face their own internal devils.

Related:
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Paid + Organic Search The Big Winner For Business

Many companies have moved to using the web successfully, but are paying high prices for paid advertisements on Google.  Yet the same companies are nowhere when it comes to earned placement on Google in organic search.

If you are paying for ad campaigns on Google, improving your organic reach too, can multiply the effectiveness of your Pay Per Click ads. So - if you have a budget for paid search, it makes a lot of sense to take the extra step of making the most of the potential for organic search too.

There is ongoing debate on whether paid links get more clicks than organic links on search, the smart business owner will hedge their bets - and make sure if they are already committed to paying for results, that they also have the free clicks covered too. And if you have paid advertisements on Google AND your business comes up in the organic search - that's peace of mind for the customer and means they have more ways to check out your business and feel confident that your business is trustworthy and reliable.

Paying for ads while basic SEO is not done

When I am reviewing websites for clients, it often happens that the website they have been using for some years is missing vital basic code and features that would make the site perform much better. These basic simple changes don't cost or even require a whole remodel of a site, just the insertion of the right information in the right place.  These changes are in the page code and are for Google,  not visible on the page by a user.

Other incremental changes to the layout or content of the website on the page for viewers can also dramatically improve the performance of the website. Together, these small changes can give the business a lot more bang for their advertising buck.

To look at it another way, not fixing these basic issues on the website would be like turning on heaters in all the rooms in the house and then leaving all the doors and windows wide open.  It can warm the house somewhat, but wastes a lot of money for a poorer result than might be achieved with just closing some of the areas that are letting the heat out.


So your website performance can help your business get found by those searching for what you do. That's pulling people in.  Social media on the other hand can push people who were not already looking to see what you have on offer. That Pull + Push element can multiply your traffic to your site again.

Not only does social put your business in front of social contacts you know - it also puts your business in front of people who they know!

Not just what you say but also how you say it

In improving your organic search you will be adding content (which Google loves). You need to have information on the website that informs those searching for what you sell. It should be written in a way that is a match for what customers would search for, makes sense to them, and provides them with useful information to satisfy their query. Your website also needs to have fresh information added regularly so that Google will keep coming back to index the website.  A simple way to keep your website both fresh and relevant is to add a blog.  Authentic reviews or testimonials reinforce your social standing, and this is becoming the new currency of value. You want to be seen as The Authority on what you do. The go-to guy or gal.

Now it is easy to fall for the spiel of the consultants selling advertising online. Your role as the business owner is to ensure that you get the advice that is good for you - not just the advice that is good for the advertising consultant.  With your PPC you want to be paying for the words that you want - and not paying for the words that are not useful to you, as many are. That's a whole other issue though, one for another time.

The internet is such a fantastic tool for business. Use it well, and be successful as you can be!



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Claim your free business listing on Google ... before someone else does! 
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Local business: Tips to online marketing 
Getting started with your business blog
Social media help for your business

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Technology, Internet And Social Media - Productivity Tools

Disturbing it is that business people who are smart and clever in their business yet are still not quite getting the point about the new technologies and marketing potential of the online environment. 

Q: Why might a company switch to cloud computing for their accounting? 

A: To be in possession of real time data on their numbers in the business and streamline processes to manage that information so that you as manager can run your business more effectively.

Q:Why should a company use social media? 

A: I don't really know... Oh to look trendy... 

No. 

That's not why you would use the online world for your business. You use the online environment and tools to be more productive and sell more.

You use these tools all to become more productive - and do more with less.

That's the long and the short of it.

Your Website, Social Media And Making It Work For You

How do I tell if someone has a cohesive strategy for making technology, the internet and social media a centre for productivity in their business? I listen to see if they are talking about the website as something separate and apart from their online presence. I listen to see if they believe they can learn all they need to know in a week or two and think that's all they need to know to master this part of their business.

Since I have spent so many years studying this stuff and monitoring the changes that have happened over that time, I know how naive and unrealistic that is.

If you are going to "do something with social media after... you do X with your website" then you have not understood that the website and the social media marketing elements need to work together.

You might even not understand that the person doing your website changes may know nothing about how to make you website productive. That's typically, in their mind,  not what they are there to do.  That's not my opinion, that's verbatim what I have been told by people who work in this industry.

Now this is an important thing to understand.

If your web person is design focused then by and large, they are there to make it look good on the screen.

Not for Google.

If they are coders then they want the code to be clean, or maybe they will settle for the template working without obvious glitches.

Not for Google.

If your website has not been updated in the past 3 years you can be certain that it is not doing all it could be.  No question about it.

Which does not mean that is is doing all it could be if it is newly revised - many new websites don't work at all in the ways that let them add to productivity.

Oh and you should know - paying a lot of money for your website work is no indicator of capacity to work. Let me say that again. Paying a lot of money does not mean it will work better or even at all.

Now this is a complex and changing environment and some things that make the website work have nothing to do with the web person. Some things are a factor of the information that must come from the owner of the business.

These are issues not of a technical nature but of a company narrative and focus. Of vision and ability to communicate the story of the business, and the understanding the business has of it's worth and what their customers value. Many businesses don't even know what that is, so will struggle to communicate that in their marketing.

So too, when it comes to your company being visible online on both the website and social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, or your blog, or Linkedin or all of these, and more besides.

We are stuck with this not uncommon problem that is always there to catch us out. That is - Not knowing what we don't know.  Not knowing what a problem is - is not the same as there being no problem, though to that business it can LOOK THE SAME.

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Learning what you need to know to be able to identify problems that are not readily apparent is part of our job as managers of our business.

The other invisible aspect of this, is the cost you are paying for not knowing.  The cost you are incurring in sales not made, inefficiency, wasted man-hours and lack of good system and data by which to streamline and make the business more efficient and staff more effective.




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