Peak productivity is achieved when a team is fully occupied, with no waste or downtime; employees have the skills they need for the task in hand and are all working at a good pace. Let’s explore why being fully occupied, having the right skills, and pace matter, and why flexibility is the key to maximum productivity.
Highly Skilled vs. Generalist
Teams are fully occupied when customer demand perfectly matches the available employee resources. It sounds like a state that once mastered is easy to maintain. But in reality, it’s a tough ask as demand fluctuates by day of week and across a day. And sometimes changes—such as those we have experienced as COVID-19 has altered our daily rhythms and routines—throw a huge spanner in our tried-and-tested resource planning. Achieving peak productivity means hitting a constantly moving target and requires flexibility to meet the day-to-day fluctuations.
Skills matter because our economies have shifted from repetitive manufacturing work to being service based, so most businesses require a range of tasks to be completed. Consider the sandwich and coffee shop you go to for lunch. It makes sense for all the team members to be able to brew a good cup of coffee, so that when the business is ticking over, a colleague can look after a steady flow of customers by singlehandedly taking and making the order. Yet during the busy lunchtime peak, it’s more efficient to have one colleague, or a barista, focused on making the coffee while others serve customers and prepare food items. This is a skill mix dilemma faced daily by coffee shop owners: Do I employ a highly skilled barista? If so, how much of their time will be spent doing things other than their speciality? And what is the drink quality trade-off with more general colleagues who lack the depth of expertise of a barista?
The right answer will depend on both the brand values and customer promises, as well as the economics of the business. We know the right skills matter from time and motion studies in many different coffee shops that show peak coffee-making efficiency is achieved by a trained barista with more than a year’s experience—making a great coffee takes much more practice than most people realize. The skill mix deployed in a business creates a foundation for peak efficiency, and local teamwork and flexibility determine whether that productivity potential actually is achieved.
The Right Pace
Pace is measured by specially trained work study experts who assess speed and quality of work against a British Standard. The ideal 100 rating is achieved when employee movements are swift and business-like. Faster ratings of more than 100 cannot be maintained for a long period without the employee experiencing fatigue and usually lead to a drop in quality. Ratings below 100 mean the colleague is not working as swiftly as they can and often is seen when Parkinson’s Law prevails—that is, work expands to fill the available time for underoccupied employees. Only suitably skilled employees will be able to hit and sustain a pace rating of 100 for their entire shift and reinforces the importance of having the right skill mix available.
Day-to-day efficiency can be optimized by flexibly matching the right mix of skills to customer demand. There is a whole industry of workforce management solution providers that aim to help businesses achieve this difficult balance.
It’s hard to reach day-to-day peak efficiency. Yet the business maxim—“If you’re not changing and moving forward, you’re going backwards”—means new approaches are required if you’re going to stay at peak efficiency.
Automation and Role Changes
If you are doing a strategic review, battling in a fiercely competitive sector, or facing significant business change, it’s essential to consider new approaches. Increasingly, adding automation is part of the solution, which then results in a role change for employees who need training and embedding. For example, stores using self-checkout registers and self-scan technology need colleagues who provide customer service in a subtly different way than saying, “Hello,” and getting on with the task of scanning the items in your cart. And employees working in quick-service food outlets no longer manage orders from just onsite customers. They have orders flying in from customers pre-ordering via the app and third-party delivery partners such as Just Eat and Grubhub, too. Managing that complexity requires different skills than just looking at one screen and making whatever it tells you to.
Employees in convenience stores are some of the most flexible and multi-skilled you will come across as the sector has taken on additional services to support their communities and create more reasons to visit the store. In the UK, such employees do everything from providing delivery services when you want to send your package, to baking sausage rolls, looking after your dry cleaning, and managing the intricacies of newspaper deliveries. And that’s on top of all the normal things that happen to make a shop run. In these circumstances, the operation can only run smoothly if employees receive good initial training and some ongoing support. The whole operating model falls apart if the store lets a customer down when an employee can’t sell the airmail stamp they’ve made a special trip to buy. Or the wrong newspaper arrives in the morning or the customer calling in for his breakfast finds there are no hot baked pastries that day.
Commercial change is necessitating transformation of operating models for businesses to survive and thrive in these challenging times. A big factor in whether new business approaches work is whether the employees are engaged, trained, and supported to play their part in achieving peak efficiency.
Simon Hedaux is the founder and CEO of Rethink Productivity, a world-leading productivity partner that helps businesses to drive efficiency, boost productivity, and optimize budgets. For more information, visit: https://rethinkproductivity.co.uk/
