As regular followers will testify,  I’m on a crusade to highlight how engaging your staff is key to unlocking greater productivity and profitability in your business.

In my previous series of posts shining a light on the Great British Productivity Swindle, I showed how identifying your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and setting up a Management Control System (MCS) is the crucial foundation to turn up the dial on your business productivity. The next key step is to ensure you are training your managers to give your employees clearer expectations and stronger, more meaningful performance appraisals. This will enable everyone to work more effectively together in a way that is truly aligned with your overall business goals.

As a business consultant and Engagement Multiplier Partner, I am privileged to see behind-the-scenes in a range of different businesses. I’ve seen first-hand how engaged organisations are much easier (and more pleasant) to run.  Value wise, engaged organisations show improved employee retention, lower absenteeism, better quality of work and productivity.  Together with findings from other Engagement Multiplier users, we see how a greater sense of ownership results in

– fewer sick days

– a 21% increased efficiency 

– increased retention of staff with an average of 87% less turnover

The best performing companies are proven to have highly engaged employees.  According to research by The Temkin Group 82% of companies with strong financial results are “highly” or “moderately” engaged, and are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work .

And happier, more loyal and satisfied staff has a ripple effect, making it easier to attract talented new candidates to expand your team, and happier customers too.  All of this results in a better bottom line – with engaged businesses becoming on average 22% more profitable.

ADD £££’s to your bottom line boosting staff engagement!

Even with a team of just 10 people, you could be throwing up to £140,000 of your current wages bill down the drain (based on each person being on the UK average salary of £36,000 including employers costs). Imagine if you could flip that profit drain around by maximising the output you get from each person and generate a better return from every member of your team. Where do you start?

4 Big Issues Business Leaders Face Right Now

Before we get going with the solutions, it is useful to really understand the reasons why staff may be unengaged and unproductive. Many business owners have few, if any, productivity measures on their dashboards, and are oblivious how unproductive their staff actually are.  Some of the surveys I’ve referred to in the past show 89% of employees admit to wasting time at work, with most of those suggesting they actually only use 60% or less of their available paid time on effective work.  This means that 2 of their 5 paid days are effectively unproductive. 

According to a Scoro survey during 2019, office workers said their number one time waster is too many meetings – and that’s before the pandemic forced many employees to work from home; their only contact with other team members and managers is now via Zoom or Teams etc.  

There are a number of small quick wins that could be achieved, such as addressing the effectiveness and number of necessary participants in meetings. This would free up time for your teams to do more of the revenue generating work.  This, however, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to improving productivity. There are four more fundamental changes that a business could yield significant productivity gains from which I will outline here, with a particular focus on how the latest national lockdown could be impacting your business.

“We can’t control our circumstances, but we can control how we respond”

People are the foundation of a productive business, and the current pandemic lockdowns are bringing additional problems to the surface.  Mental health and wellbeing in staff working from home is being impacted, and as we’ve seen above, if it isn’t already this could directly hit your bottom line.

ISSUE 1 : Concern about remote team performance?

The Symptoms

– nagging concerns about remote worker productivity

– a decline in communication & connection between people and

– the erosion of your normal culture

In my last blog, looking at the Covid Productivity Tax, I talked about some of the challenges businesses have been facing over the last few months with teams being forced to work remotely.  Employees are feeling the effect of this isolation.  It’s impacting motivation, communication and collaboration.  Staff are feeling lonely and finding it hard to define and divide the work vs home boundaries.

Even managers are beginning to have trust issues.  Recent Harvard Business School research shows that managers who cannot ‘see’ their direct reports struggle to trust that their employees are indeed working, which adds to the employee engagement issues.

People, Structure & Process

From a process perspective we’re in a  world where communication needs to be much more efficient, and more multi-channel.  There is a notable lack of connectivity and lack of structure in the way people are collaborating and being managed, which needs to be rethought in the light of remote working. 

Similarly, structurally the shift to remote working is amplifying many challenges around decision making, bringing people together and upheavals around workflow.  Business leaders have to look at their governance, and simplify it drastically to operate in a new remote-working or hybrid working model.

Taking data from countries around the world who have been working remotely for a while longer than the UK, and adding to the initial reactions emerging in this second lockdown – the principal message is that motivation is taking a nose dive.  The “home vs work life balance” challenge is becoming more prevalent, with the burnout mentioned earlier becoming a reality, and anxiety related to the pandemic is deepening.  

The Solution: Alluxi ‘Working from Home & Winning’ Analysis

We know this is an extremely trying time for business owners, especially those making the rapid adjustment to remote teams, even as they respond to difficult conditions. The recently introduced “Working From Home and Winning” survey helps you quickly understand how your team is adapting to working from home, and what adjustments need to be made to help employees stay connected and productive.  By using the survey you can quickly assess your staffs current mindset and take progressive action to strengthen your team now, and for the future, in the three key foundation themes of connection, productivity and performance.

ISSUE 2 : Evolving Leadership Styles

The Symptoms: 

– concerns that your managers may not be equipped to lead through today’s uncertainty and rate of change

– the company needs to upskill its leadership group

– some leaders are struggling

Old leadership styles in this new world just don’t cut it. Leaders are having to change their approach with employees who are no longer a captured audience in the confines of their workplace. The trust issues mentioned earlier exist because mechanisms are not yet in place in most businesses to measure and manage remotely.

Whereas previously a manager could rely on their gut feel, perception, hearsay and office banter for knowing how business was going, no longer works with teams working from home.  They are now blind to the day to day minutiae they have relied on to keep their finger on the pulse.  This new situation requires a more personal approach, supported with relevant facts and figures.  

McKinsey’s recent report “Fostering Employee productivity and morale through COVID-19” (June 2020),  identifies three areas of leadership that need to be ramped up, if employee engagement is to be improved and be sustainable.  Leaders are going to have to refresh their styles and traits away from a command and control emphasis, and become more attuned to their team’s wavelengths and hone their listening skills.  Partner, Tom Welchman, highlights the workforce challenges business owners need to embrace to drive productivity, in their role of leader.

Empathy

Empathy may not be the first word which comes to mind when describing strong leaders, but in the current climate creating and sustaining a caring culture is perhaps more important than ever. Employees need leaders to lead from the front line rather than micromanage from afar.

Creating a Team of Teams

Leaders need to think about how they can change structures to work more effectively, and more quickly in response to some challenges that we’re facing.  The classic agile approach of the two-pizza rule, between 7 and 9 people in small teams is a proven method which will still work through the new communication methods on video conferencing.

Effective Communications

Increased productivity requires effective communications – a two way dialogue, not a monologue.  Business leaders may be used to pushing out information in a one way process, but now need to engage in a more personalised, two way channel of talking AND listening.  Keeping things short, simple, focusing on the facts, encouraging dialogue and making sure employees hear the truth first hand, is possibly needed now more than ever.  

“91% of employees said they’d feel more comfortable working

from home if their leader set clear expectations for

responsiveness and communication”

(Hired Inc. 2020)

Welchman summarises with a far reaching vision that “future generations are putting more and more importance on purpose and how organizations are responding. And if there’s anything we’re learning about this crisis, it’s that the legacy of actions taken today will really be in people’s minds for years to come”

The Solution: Alluxi ‘Leadership Perception Gap’ Evaluation

The power of strong, effective leadership is an undeniable contributor to an organisation’s success. Employee confidence in their leaders is a crucial factor in determining whether or not leadership is effective. All too often, company executives and employees have differing perceptions of the leadership team’s effectiveness. We call this The Leadership Perception Gap and bridging it is one of the surest ways a leadership team can improve the overall performance of the business. The following questions will enable you to determine whether or not Leadership Perception Gaps exist within your company, and the associated Leadership Perception Gap Success Guide will help you take immediate action to close the gaps you find.

ISSUE 3 : Empowering Teams to Handle the current Rate Of Change

The Symptoms:

– Difficulty making change stick

– Problems with alignment due to rapid shifts in the business

– Lack of visibility into new practices, processes and procedures the team has developed

This year has brought about massive transformation for many businesses. Covid may have helped accelerate some changes that were already being planned or talked about. Some changes may therefore be welcome – as the pandemic has forced many of us to look at new ways of working and get smarter at what we do.  However other changes may have been forced and feel more like temporary solutions while awaiting a return to greater freedom and changes in the market.

The move from work place to home, has also exacerbated and complicated matters when having to introduce changes in practices and processes.  Achieving a behaviour change working face to face with people, with the luxury of being able to interact with them is difficult enough, but to ask people to understand and implement changes remotely adds to the stress and anxiety for employees.  The sharing and collaboration when change happens in the work place is suppressed when working home alone.  It requires you to re-empower your staff – give them new permissions in ways of handling the changes they’re having to adapt to.  This adds to the pressure on the leaders and managers too.

The Solution:  Alluxi ‘Emerging Stronger’ Analysis

Examine how your team has been impacted by change and what innovations it has inspired using our EM Emerging Stronger tool.  Delve into what your organisation has learned since the onset of the pandemic, and identify: 

– New opportunities the employees see from their vantage point 

– New innovations and processes the team has developed

– Opportunities to make the organisation more efficient 

ISSUE 4 : Employee Fatigue and Slowing Innovation

The Symptoms: 

– Engagement Scores declining

– Employees not coming forward with ideas as they have previously

– Progress stalling across the organisation

– Teams losing energy

Frustrating Technology

A poll carried out by Censuswide in May 2020 showed that “Only 6% of IT Leaders believe their organisation is set up to enable maximum productivity from employees at the moment – down from the 11% who took this view pre-lockdown”.  The survey was carried out with 1000 employees as well as 750 IT & HR leaders from across large organisations.

Two thirds (66%) of the IT decision makers believe staff efficiency is currently restricted by the limitations of their IT systems.  Over half (56%) of the employees surveyed agree that serious change still needs to happen with their tech tools, for them to be more productive.  

What might surprise you is in February 36% of staff claimed that greater financial rewards were key to making them more efficient in their role, yet post lockdown this dropped to just 25%, with employees more likely to cite technology as the significant catalyst for greater productivity.    Clearly the shift to motivating and engaging staff is not money but a need for better tools to do their job.

Predictably staff frustration with workplace technology has also increased during lockdown.  Pre lockdown, one fifth (22%) of staff blamed current workplace technology for inhibiting productivity.  This figure increased to 28% by May 2020, flagging that their tech tools aren’t user friendly or simple to use.

Beyond the frustrations with the lack of technology, research has uncovered leadership concerns that enabling staff to work flexibly – whether in the office, working remotely, or even on the move – can have a negative impact.

Both HR & IT leaders believe flexible work is increasing the risk of an “always-on” culture.  Staff feel obliged to be available beyond their normal working hours, which will lead to burn out.  Those same leaders agree that improving employee engagement is key to boosting employee productivity. 

The Solution: Alluxi ‘Kickstarting Innovation’ Analysis

The whole point of having an engaged organisation is what you can do with it! The Alluxi Kickstarting Innovation Analysis will engage your employees in a new and positive way. Your leaders will be able to quickly assess and improve their innovation process with the Engagement Multiplier tool, creating structure and framework for advancing the ideas that power future growth. The message to employees is powerful – their ideas matter, and leadership wants to hear them.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE ALLUXI SOLUTIONS TO ENERGISE EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT & PRODUCTIVITY

Improve your team’s productivity with the Alluxi Business Improvement Toolkit

“What gets measured improves ….

What gets measured and reported improves exponentially”

Alluxi offers a 60 minute Productivity to Profit Breakthrough session to understand your unique business frustrations and uncover where your hidden potential lies to boost productivity in your business. You’ll leave the call with clear guidance on how to address your key issues  If you would then like to delve deeper and explore the issues outlined above in greater detail:

– managing remote team

– evolving leadership styles

– supporting your team to emerge stronger and manage the rate of change

– kickstart innovation

We can design a Launchpad Workshop giving you a bespoke framework to optimise productivity and maximise the profitability of your business.  This half-day session, structured around your key challenges, will introduce you to the Alluxi concepts, and how to apply them to your own needs, tailored to your business. It also includes a benchmark engagement survey to assess the current health of your teams engagement levels, and incorporate the findings into future plans.

As the name suggests, this workshop provides a taster of what you can expect from the full suite of Alluxi Business Programmes, accelerate your Escape Velocity and enable you to reach a higher orbit in your business – lift you out of the day-to-day operations to the higher-level strategic control room of your business.

The post HOW MUCH IS LOW STAFF ENGAGEMENT COSTING YOU? appeared first on Alluxi Consulting.

A 5 week series for business leaders needing to transform their business towards the “new norm”

Challenge 5 – Maintaining Fun & Energy

How do we keep team energy high and support teamwork when working remotely, with all the negative press about the impact of COVID-19?

One of the questions in the Working From Home & Winning survey, asks employees to suggest “one way we can maintain fun and energy within our team while working from home?”

Chances are that this is more important to your employees than you think.  Work relationships are important, and those with close ties to each other may miss the routine of the office that brought them together. 

Some ideas to maintain the ‘fun’ elements of work when the team are working remotely could include: 

• Creating a slack channel, Whatsapp group or similar outlet dedicated to fun – sharing memes, stories etc.   As their leader, you have to give them permission to recreate the interactions that make their normal workplace fun.

• Start and end every meeting with everyone contributing something they’re feeling positive about (see the EPIC^TM meetings solution in the previous blog)

• Schedule in time for virtual happy hours, maybe over lunch time, or at the end of the day for trivia games, baking lessons, family hours, coffee breaks, which will create a welcome bright spot your team can enjoy.

• Pro tip – if you’re subscribed to the Engagement Multiplier, use your on-demand survey tool in your dashboard to gather ideas – you can create your own survey on any topic.

Try the Weekly Energy Sheet^TM

One clear solution to maintaining Energy in the team, is a Weekly Energy Sheet^TM to give the team a time out moment, to reflect on their week.  By creating a mechanism, for the team to regularly check in with what have been

• the highlights of their week
• their working from home Win of the week
• Gratitude call out to one of their colleagues who helped or supported them recently, and 
• Next week’s focus areas, to keep the momentum on the teams positivity and productivity.

These four areas will bring a degree of mindfulness to each of the team, to look back and identify the positive, motivating moments rather than dwell on the negative background noise of the crisis they’re living through.

The sheet can be created electronically, and sent back to their line manager, at the end of every week.  Use the sheets to incorporate their feedback and mention the Gratitude call outs, as part of one of your EPIC^TM meetings

Working From Home & Winning Survey

Try the Working from Home & Winning Survey, to get better insight of how your team are really feeling.   The Free “Working from Home & Winning” survey gives you a quick and easy tool to get anonymous feedback from your employees working from home. It takes just 3 simple steps to set the survey up, share with your team, and receive  a summary report, in a very short space of time.   

To interpret the results of the survey, and for more detail on how to adapt the team to remote working, you can download the FREE Working From Home & Winning Success Guide How To Keep Remote Teams Connected, Proactive and Productive

Hopefully we’re all starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel & getting your business back on track.  If you need to boost your competitiveness in the market place, and would like to refresh the “way we do things”, watch out for the next series of blogs from Alluxi, bringing you the fundamentals of LEAN working. Over the coming weeks we’ll outline the 5 principles for creating superior value in your operations.  Each blog will provide practical tips, techniques and methods for you to immediately apply in your own business to boost profitability. 

Fundamental common sense ideas are often hidden amongst the trials and tribulations business owners are up against on a day to day basis.  This next LEAN series will guide you through how to re-boot your operations and cut out those loss making steps that don’t add value to your service or product, and may be eroding your profits.

The post TOP 5 LOCKDOWN CHALLENGES – Maintaining Fun & Energy appeared first on Alluxi Consulting.

A 5 week series for business leaders needing to transform their business towards the “new norm”

Challenge 4 – Effective Time Management

How do we help out team ensure they’re managing their time productively?  Establishing a clear understanding of roles and responsibilities is important to employees. My previous blog in this series, I highlighted how to use the 3x3x3 technique to keep each team member focused on their priorities on a daily basis.

Teams that work remotely, while also responding to a new business challenge, may struggle to maintain productivity.  This can prove especially frustrating for people in the roles that are interdependent on each other, and other areas of the business.

I believe the secret to productivity, regardless of the current pressures of the outside world, lies in giving employees structure, routine and focus.  They need a map to navigate the interdependencies that exist between individuals and team.  Their work routine needs to provide flexibility to make working from home really practical for both the business and its employees.  

There are many techniques that can be adopted, and continued for the future, not just during lockdown.  Here are three simple tips that are easy to implement in a short space of time.

Commit to your in-office schedule and routine

Keep regular meetings, that would normally happen in the office, on the schedule. However, don’t hesitate to bring people together for video conferences when needed, if needs must, outside of the normal meeting schedule.  Without the normal day to day interaction the team is used to when working in the same office, they may sometimes not be communicating as effectively when working remotely.  A videoconference may be needed occasionally to thrash out specific issues.

Helping employees create a workspace at home

Make sure your teams workspace in the home works for everyone they’re living with (spouse, kids etc).  Offer them ideas of how to succeed, such as:

• Working out their routine between the other people in the house, so they’re not all clashing on conference calls at the same time.
• Minimise disruptions using flexible work schedules if that’s possible.  Their work may not necessarily have to fit the 9-5 scenario.
• Agree timings and work schedules amongst everyone the employee has to share the space with.
• Introduce Do Not Disturb signs, to allow periods of concentration.

The 55-Minute Sprint Solution

One key solution which will enable the team member to break their day into small bite size, manageable tasks, is the 55 minute sprint solution.

A solid To Do list needs to be drafted at the beginning of the working day. It’s useful to put an estimated time required against each task, then block together tasks that will roughly take 55 minutes.

Set a timer, and get stuck into the work. When the alarm goes off, it’s time to take a 5-10 minute break and re-energise.  Grab a coffee, take a short walk round the garden, breath, stretch – whatever it takes, to stand up and get away from the screen, rest your eyes and switch off – just for a few minutes.  

When you get back to your desk, tick off the tasks you’ve achieved, feel good about it, then set the alarm and get stuck into the next task.  Repeat.

By the end of the day, you may be surprised at just how much you’ve managed to achieve.  As the days go by it’s worth comparing your results when you work in 55 minute sprints versus when you don’t, and see how much more productive you are.

Working From Home & Winning Survey

Try the Working from Home & Winning Survey, to get better insight of how your team are really feeling.   The Free “Working from Home & Winning” survey gives you a quick and easy tool to get anonymous feedback from your employees working from home. It takes just 3 simple steps to set the survey up, share with your team, and receive  a summary report, in a very short space of time. 

Next week’s blog will address the fifth, and final challenge of this series, and possibly the most important – Maintaining Fun & Energy.  You’ll find some great tips and guidance to keep team energy high, and support teamwork when working remotely (although it should apply equally when we’re not having to be socially distancing and back in the work place!). 

The post TOP 5 LOCKDOWN CHALLENGES – Effective Time Management appeared first on Alluxi Consulting.

A 5 week series for business leaders needing to transform their business towards your “new normal”

Challenge 2 – Fragmented Team Communication

Working from home can be lonely and lead to employees feeling isolated—even when a firm is well-practiced at operating with remote teams. The less connected employees feel to the business, its purpose and to each other, the worse the outcome. At a time when many companies are abruptly shifting to a work-from-home model, the pace of change—compounded by pandemic-related fear and uncertainty—is eroding intrinsic workplace connections, setting our employees adrift. 

If you’re a leader or owner of a business, you’re potentially feeling that same sense of disconnect with your employees— also bearing the weight of responsibility for the business, your customers and your family. To weather this perfect storm, it’s essential your team is acting as one, and that they’re united, connected and energised.   The key question is how do we keep everyone on the same page?

Here’s a one stop solution to help your teams recapture their spark while working in isolation from each other.

The solution – EPIC^TM Meetings 

The EPIC Meeting should inject Energy, Purpose, Insight & Connection into the team.  This approach will put an end to pointless meetings that waste time and slow momentum.  Adopt this simple framework and watch your team engagement and productivity soar.

If you’d like to learn more about protecting your company culture & staying connected, my blog on how to minimise meetings provides 7 key steps to ensure you keep the meetings on time and on topic.  When built into a robust management control system, your team reviews will be the driving force behind increased productivity in your business.

Working From Home & Winning Survey

Try the Working from Home & Winning Survey, to get better insight of how your team are really feeling.   The Free “Working from Home & Winning” survey gives you a quick and easy tool to get anonymous feedback from your employees working from home. It takes just 3 simple steps to set the survey up, share with your team, and receive  a summary report, in a very short space of time.   

To interpret the results of the survey, and for more detail on how to adapt the team to remote working, you can download the FREE Working From Home & Winning Success Guide

How To Keep Remote Teams Connected, Proactive and Productive FREE PDF

Next week’s blog will address the third challenge Ensuring the right things are being done in the right order.  We’ll be giving you practical solutions, and more free tools to get your team working on the right priorities and getting them done.

The post TOP 5 CHALLENGES – Fragmented Team Communication appeared first on Alluxi Consulting.

A 5 week series for business leaders needing to transform your business towards the “new norm”

As the world celebrated the 2020 new year, launching into a new decade, businesses globally have been sucked into a state of panic and chaos by the COVID-19 pandemic.  Non-essential industries have been forced into lockdown.  Staff are having to work from home or worse, have been furloughed, in an attempt to save money and the business.  The media and many world leaders are forecasting the next global recession. This may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for some businesses.

As the business owner you may feel you’re scrambling to put a make shift contingency plan in place to survive the lockdown period.  However, the more pro-active business leaders amongst you are are re-evaluating your whole business model.  You’ll be looking to emerge from lockdown with a clear vision of how you’re going to kick-start your operations into action.  

With this in mind, here at Alluxi, we’ve been keeping in touch with our clients. We are introducing ways to help SME’s stay connected with their teams.  In collaboration with our trusted partner, Engagement Multiplier, we offer straight forward, practical solutions to turn your challenges into opportunities.

The Engagement Multiplier team approached a large pool of business leaders and identified their TOP 5 LOCKDOWN CHALLENGES.  Over the next 5 weeks, this series of blogs will tackle one challenge at a time. Each week we’ll provide simple tools and techniques to implement with your teams.

The beauty of these tools, techniques and solutions are they can be applied to any business, regardless of whether your staff are having to work remotely or not.

1 Working Reactively versus Proactively

How do we adopt a progressive and productive mindset and culture in the new normal?

2 Fragmented Team Communication

How do we keep everyone on the same page?

3 Ensuring the right things are being done in the right order

How do we know everyone is working on the right priorities – and getting them done?

4 Effective Time Management

How do we help our team ensure they’re managing their time productively?

5 Maintaining Fun & Energy

How do we keep team energy high and support teamwork when working remotely, with all the negative press surrounding COVID-19?

The first blog in this series will address Challenge 1 –  How to work reactively versus proactively.  We’ll be offering a completely free survey for you to share with your teams.  Get their anonymous, honest and open feedback on their fears and concerns. You can take positive action to help them be connected, proactive and productive.  Coupled with the free Success Guide to interpret the results, we’ll provide you with robust tools to implement & achieve greater engagement from your employees. 

The post YOUR TOP 5 LOCKDOWN CHALLENGES & How to turn them into opportunities appeared first on Alluxi Consulting.

In November of 1992, I was assigned to a productivity improvement programme for a small shoe manufacturer in Hungary. It was during the freezing winter months with snow drifts up to 10ft, in the middle of nowhere.

We had a team of translators channeling communications with the clients’ project team. Only one telephone line connected us to the outside world. We had no photocopiers, or printers and just a couple of very heavy laptops between us. 

The internet was still a far distant unknown called the “world wide web”.  Mobile phones were expensive and cumbersome (and we couldn’t get signal where we were anyway). The first public email – Hotmail (HTML) wouldn’t be launched for another 4 years.

Life was less complex, simple.  We achieved our project objectives.

In our now hi-tech world the Covid-19 pandemic is creating an extremely complex situation. We can, and will find ways to keep our businesses afloat.  For small firms it’s a very precarious status, which needs to be carefully managed and different scenarios mitigated for. During these lockdown weeks moving employees to remote working from home, our SME’s are in for a very bumpy ride. 

Here are some guidelines to get the best from your team whilst they’re enduring very uncertain times.

1. Reassure the team or at least be honest

The current climate is understandably causing much stress and anxiety for people worrying about their finances. The government is, thankfully, stepping up to the plate. Financial support is beginning to filter down for sick pay, salary and wage payments. Rates and tax breaks are being made available for companies, and the self-employed, throughout the UK.

Business owners need to get your contingency plans and financial forecasts urgently reviewed to keep your heads above water.  Even if it’s bad news – it’s better to be upfront and honest now, so regular communication with employees is key. Keep your teams updated with the facts, or how you’re planning to cope (or not) for the foreseeable future. At least your team can then make their own plans for themselves and their families.   Humans have an innate survival instinct, and normally common sense prevails.

2. Get priorities in Order

You may now be operating with a reduced team, if you’ve had to lay off and furlough workers. You will therefore need to identify and prioritise the critical path marketing and revenue generating activities.

If it’s not going to sell product or service, and generate an invoice, then ditch it (for now).  Call the team together on a conference call (or 6ft apart round the table) to hear their thoughts and ideas. Carefully work through and agree with them what needs to be done, who’s responsible, and by when.

3. Find a common task management tool

If you’re not already using a task management tool, Slack, Trello & Asana all have free versions. You might be subscribing to Google, Microsoft365 etc. but not really had time to get it up and working effectively. Now is a great time to learn about it’s full functionality, and get more return on your investment.  Here’s a short read blog about some software tools available, both free and paid.

4. Establish a Daily Routine

To keep people motivated establish a daily routine. A morning conference call will rally the team at the start of the day.  Hold a round robin of successes from the day before, and what each persons’ daily goals are. Discuss and help them plan their daily routines for the next few weeks. Communicate your expectations so they know they’re appreciated. Make sure they recognise their work will make a positive contribution to getting through this period.  Give everyone a clear focus and a sense of purpose, even if there isn’t a full days work to do.  Click here to see recommended task management software

 5. Encourage regular breaks

In their normal office environment, your team may not be used to sitting at a computer screen for prolonged periods. Encourage them to rest for 5 minutes every hour; to stretch, rest their eyes, grab a glass of water etc. This would be probably happen subconsciously in the office, where there are other people to interact with. But not so for remote workers, especially if the team member is home alone. 

6. Parental Responsibility

Added pressure is on parents with school aged children. Schools are now closed, and children are also having to get online for lessons. This may be causing a clash on home desktops, laptops etc. Work with those staff who have parental responsibilities to ensure they have the equipment they need to do their job.  

The business owner should make concessions for those with school aged children in the house. Parents will be trying to work from home whilst juggling home schooling. This may cause additional stress or anxiety if they feel they’re pushing their workload onto colleagues who have no children. Discuss this with the team and make sure everyone is pulling together to support each other, without any animosity.

The post SIX LOCKDOWN SURVIVAL GUIDELINES FOR SME’s appeared first on Alluxi Consulting.

Training is perceived as an expensive luxury, and is often the first cost to be cut when cash flow gets tough

The familiar phrase Training is a Necessity Not a Luxury may strike home to many business owners who feel that, more often than not, staff return from the latest fad course pumped up from the great stuff they’ve learned, only to end up in the routine drudgery of their day job – finding nothing has changed in the business and the training manual lost for ever in the dust of the bottom shelf.

Many of you will relate to the inevitable promotion of most productive worker to Manager, only to see the team’s performance drop through the floor and the newly appointed Manager’s motivation swiftly follows.  Just because a worker has the best output of the group, doesn’t mean they’re a natural choice for Management. They may not have a clue how to manage or lead their teams, and here in the UK we are notoriously poor at training our future managers and executives. Management is a skill that can, and SHOULD, be trained.  Leadership CAN be developed and nurtured.

Management Mindset Re-Boot

The Alluxi Leadership & Management Development Programme does it differently.  We take participants through a step by step management thinking re-boot designed to deliver the skills and competencies required at ANY level of your organisation.  From your front line supervisor, middle and senior managers, and even the Business Owner, the programme evolves your mindset to lead and manage the people in your business, to optimize productivity, resource performance and team engagement.

We are extremely proud that the Alluxi Leadership & Management Development Programme, is recognised by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) as meeting National Occupational Standards.  Participants can benefit from

• 1 year Affiliate Membership of the CMI
• Participation in the CMI “Achieve” Mentoring Programme
• Enhanced Learning Experience with access to the CMI’s Management Direct online Library & Resource Centre
• Facility to record and monitor CPD
• Networking opportunities and benefits
• CMI Certificate of Attendance awarded on Completion

Putting Theory into Practice

Consisting of 6 sessions, ideally over three to six months, the course qualifies for 18 hours CPD, providing the tools and techniques to be immediately applied in your work routine prior to the next session.  If fully adhered to, the theory and interactive exercises delivered during the course will result in a measurable increase in performance, generating a culture of continuous improvement, objective, fair and factual management – translating to bottom line financial profit improvement.

Click here to read more and download the programme overview

YOUR NEXT STEPS TO GREATER PRODUCTIVITY

The post Alluxi’s Leadership & Management Programme Achieves CMI Recognition appeared first on Alluxi Consulting.

In the first Painful Truth of this series, we highlighted the need for business owners to implement robust Management Control Systems and Key Performance Indicators, critical to measuring and optimising productivity.

The Bank of England’s “Lessons on a Plate” gave us some insight as to why businesses are woefully unproductive, and the impact on profits. This article explores the second Painful Truth: The Manager.

The Government is pouring money into Leadership and Management development, possibly fuelled by scathing claims by Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, that,

“Bad managers stand accused of holding back economic growth in the UK by undermining productivity, and preventing pay and living standards from rising”. Mr. Haldane continued “Just as most people believe they are better than average drivers, so most firms believe they are highly productive…A lack of management quality is a plausible explanation for the UK’s long tail of [unproductive] companies” and “there is a statistically significant link between the quality of firms’ management processes and practices, and their productivity.”

Training is a necessity not a luxury

I’ve spent thousands of hours observing managers in the field, and there are two fundamental problems I’ve witnessed, which business owners need to address:

1. Managers are not trained in setting expectations or communicating standards of work required to meet business goals.
2. Managers lack the people skills to communicate, delegate and constructively challenge poor performance or, conversely, reward and perpetuate good performance.

Both these issues have a domino effect impact on the managers’ teams’ performance, as the staff will basically just get on with doing what they think is right, but potentially completely mis-aligned with the company’s objectives.

I’ve often heard managers suggest their teams know what they have to do and they just need to let them get on with it. This then begs the question as to why companies pay managers and supervisors at all. And little wonder we’re now witnessing the Great British Productivity Swindle, with the biggest downturn in UK productivity since 2008.

A case of ‘a bad workman blames the tools’?

In my experience of working with team leaders and management in industries around the globe, it’s unfair to blame the managers themselves. Managers can only be as good as we make them, and the onus should be on the business owner, or executive team, to ensure their managers are equipped with the tools and people skills to carry out their jobs effectively.

How often have you promoted a high performing team member to a supervisory or management role, only to find overall performance drops sharply? A good worker doesn’t necessarily make a great manager. They have the advantage of a strong technical knowledge of the work to be done, but may have no management or people skills whatsoever.

The good news is that leaders can be shaped, and managers can be made.

For your managers to have a positive impact on productivity, you may need to invest in training to ensure they have the right tools, techniques and skills to guide their teams towards becoming more productive and effective, and achieving those all-important KPIs.

I’ll end this article with more words from our Chief Economist, which sums up the solution perfectly.

“If we’re to turn the tide on this slippery slope towards diluted profits, business owners have to invest time and money into their Managers. This suggests potentially high returns to policies which improve the quality of management within companies.”

The post THE GREAT BRITISH PRODUCTIVITY SWINDLE – 3 Painful Truths No 2. The Manager appeared first on Alluxi Consulting.

Have you spent your long weekend, or weekday evenings attached to your iPad, tablet or mobile.  Do you know what’s important or how to prioritise? This is for all you business Owner Managers who spend their every waking hour staying on top of seemingly endless streams of To Do’s. 

Life cannot be all about work.  Over the last few decades social media, mobile telephony and the explosion of other pods, pads and tablets we are bombarded with have taken over our lives to the point of obsession.  I believe we have to sometimes STOP and TAKE STOCK of what our lives are all about – when do we stop planning and working towards a better future, and start living for the Here and Now?

The main reason we become so tied up with our working lives is our fear of losing control; letting go of what we perceive no one else can do for us – our reluctance to delegate – or not having the self-discipline and determination to really define our objectives on a day-to-day basis, and time manage against those.

If you prefer to work to live – freeing up your evenings to enjoy some family time, taking weekends off to have some of those adventures on your wish list, and really get your life back in control – you have to learn to delegate some of the “doing” stuff to the people in your business.  You can read more on that topic in my article Get Comfortable with Delegation.  Right now, we need to focus on understanding what is important and, hopefully, not urgent.

Proactive versus Reactive

If the business is only you, then the exercise becomes one of determining what your proactive and reactive tasks are, and eliminating those time consuming to do’s that won’t actually move your business forward, or make more money.

Lots of reactive, unimportant tasks accumulate into hours of unproductive time.  This results in the proactive, important tasks that you really should be focusing on, becoming urgent, and you find yourself in a downward spiral of living only to work.

Get your stylus or keypad out and jot down on one of your electronic screens all those to do’s that will actively move you towards your key business objectives. If you’re not sure what those are, then try to think about whether that activity or task will

1. increase sales
2. reduce costs
3. improve client service
4. improve product quality
5. give you more time

These are your Proactive tasks.  If the work doesn’t cover any of those then it’s Reactive and should go to the bottom of the pile.  Either find someone else to do it for you, or do it last and don’t procrastinate over it.  Get it done and off the list.

Important versus Urgent

A task can be reactive but urgent (like getting your finances over to the accountant at the end of the year), but it just then becomes a matter of how you prioritise that task, and how much time you spend on non-urgent jobs.  Anything you defined as Proactive above is an Important task, and should be scheduled accordingly.

If you are planning effectively your diary will fill up with the important, non-urgent jobs as you gradually put the fire’s out, and get back in control of what you SHOULD be doing to drive your business forward.  Then you’ll begin to find there are less reactive and urgent issues distracting you.

In summary, here’s a simple matrix to help you plan your Proactive from your Reactive, and Important from Urgent tasks, and how these can be prioritised and scheduled into your working week.  Don’t end up working yourself out of a life.

The post LIVE TO WORK OR WORK TO LIVE? That is the Question appeared first on Alluxi Consulting.

Productivity means higher output using your current resources, or achieving the same level of sales with less resource.

Meetings are the beating heart of a functional management control system –  but unless they’re managed properly, can be unproductive and a waste of time.  For those who still remember John Cleese, his video arts company created a memorable video “Meetings Bloody Meetings” which captured beautifully the essence of time wasting.  It portrayed the weekly Monday morning production meeting, attended by the same people, at the same time, for 2 hours, every week – rain or shine.

There was never an agenda, relevant people weren’t invited, nothing was minuted from the previous meeting so actions weren’t monitored, items were dealt with ad-hoc, resulting in conversations going round in circles, and sometimes there was very little to discuss but the chair failed to cancel the meeting. It was basically chaos and had no positive impact on the business other than wasting 12 hours (that’s 6 people for 2 hours) of valuable management time. Does this sound familiar?

Meetings must be minimal, in quantity, in time and in participants.  Here are a few basic rules:

1. Have a formal agenda, in a logical order, with time frames against each item, circulated at least 1 or 2 days in advance for people to prepare.
2. Appoint one person as the chair, and that chair is responsible for ensuring the meeting stays on topic, and items effectively dealt with.
3. Recurring meetings should still have an agenda to document any other business, and circulate the previous meetings action list as a reminder to get things done.
4. Only invite the relevant people. Don’t have two people from the same department in the meeting. Managers should do their research, and know what’s going on.
5. One meeting at a time. There is nothing more frustrating than having whispered sub-conversations going on around you, whilst you are trying to resolve a specific issue, and those hushed conversations means those people are not concentrating on the meeting.
6. Document action plans, making sure each task or action required has a named person responsible for it, and a due date by when it has to be completed.
7. The action log should be the first item on the agenda at each meeting – if people are not held accountable then the meetings are fruitless.

The best meetings are driven by specific reports and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) to proactively drive the business objectives forward.  The meetings should focus on facts and figures, reasons and causes of variances against the plan. Then work on identifying solutions in order to improve, even incrementally, the next time round. By continuously measuring, reviewing and removing barriers to performance, productivity can only increase.

The post 20 WAYS TO BE MORE PRODUCTIVE – Minimise Meetings appeared first on Alluxi Consulting.

Productivity means higher output using your current resources, or achieving the same level of sales with less resource.

Poor planning often results in high levels of overtime. The use of overtime, whilst occasionally inevitable, is normally indicative of a number of possible weaknesses in the business such as:

1. Procrastination on the part of the employee
2. Poor supervision
3. Poor planning
4. Unforeseen emergencies – caused by all 3 of the above

Overtime should be used only in extreme cases, as prolonged overtime working has an impact on longer-term productivity.  Studies show that the amount of additional work actually achieved after the standard 35-40 hour working week, does not increase linearly.  In fact, if a working week starts to edge into 60-80 hours (and this is not unheard of), no extra output is achieved over and above what would have been done in the standard week, due to tiredness, procrastination and lethargy on the job.

If you are seeing overtime starting to creep up then measures have to be taken to understand the causes.  Using overtime occasionally will be necessary, but if it is consistent to the point where employees are expecting it and rely on it to boost their salaries then inefficiency will start to lose any gains had from the extra output.

Overspend on Overtime – Case Study

I recently visited a production line whilst a line change was in progress with workers being rounded up by the supervisor and all dawdling over to the next line.  There was no sense of urgency to get production in full swing.  The supervisor spent about 20 minutes getting the team rounded up and mobilised from one station to the next.  The raw materials weren’t ready for start up, and the supervisor was running round like a headless chicken trying to get everything organized.

The eight people and half hour late start cost the business 240 minutes (4 man hours) to change lines.  The manager explained they prefer to do overtime during the week, than put on whole extra shifts on a weekend.  My suggestion would be to improve the supervision, and line change set ups, to reduce or eliminate the overtime all together, but if the manager isn’t around to see what is going on occasionally they’ll never see how to improve productivity.

The post 20 WAYS TO BE MORE PRODUCTIVE – Control Overtime appeared first on Alluxi Consulting.

Productivity means higher output using your current resources, or achieving the same level of sales with less resource.

Planning is one of the fundamental elements of a good management system in any business.  Planning has to be focused on the short-term objective (today, this week, this month) and time spent in preparing a meaningful plan.

In a manufacturing environment this is a much easier task to focus on, but in office based or service environments it’s harder for managers to understand what constitutes a good plan.

If the end objective is clear, then the plan will reflect exactly how the goals can be achieved in terms of time and resources. Resources are not just the financial budgets and labour requirements, but materials, machine capacity, storage facilities, computer time, meeting time, client availability (yes sometimes the client needs to be involved in getting the work done) – in fact anything which needs to be prepared and ready prior to starting the work so that it can’t hinder progress once the plan is in motion.

Once the plan is put to paper, the next step is to communicate to the staff and stakeholders and get commitment to that plan.  Getting team buy-in will ensure the plan is met as closely as possible if the employees are given the opportunity to tweak or adjust the plan based on their judgment as to what will or won’t work.  They should be encouraged to suggest changes, so long as the overall objective is reached.  If the staff understand and agree to the plan, and the plan is based on high standards of performance, higher levels of productivity will be achieved.

The post 20 WAYS TO BE MORE PRODUCTIVE – Improve Planning appeared first on Alluxi Consulting.