Summary:
Companies invest a lot of time and money on every new product improvement program that comes along. But there are fundamental steps that any company can use to improve productivity without having to jump from one paradigm promise to another. These steps are as relevant to large corporations as they are to small startup companies.

Details or Sample:
If you were to loiter in the business section of any 2nd hand bookstore you would find an overabundance of last year’s bestsellers on how to improve productivity in the workforce. Printed on each book jacket are audacious claims like, “A business paradigm shift equivalent to an 8.0 magnitude earthquake”. Each year businesses sink unhealthy doses of their previous year’s earnings investing in the latest bestseller and subsequent bestseller seminars. But how effective or innovative are these productivity improvement programs? If you were to extract the “spin” from each of them, would they all end up looking, feeling, and smelling the same?

I have been working in the business community for over 25 years. In that time, I have been on the receiving end of dozens of these improvement programs. After the first few, I became cynical. After the second few, I became numb. Based on my experience, there are only a few key steps to improving productivity. These fundamental steps are the same whether you work for a Fortune 500 company or out of someone’s garage. They are the same steps regardless of the product or service you provide.

But before we go any further, you will need to determine whether you want to improve productivity or increase productivity. Improving productivity means there is improvement margin within your maximum capability. In other words, based on your facility, equipment, and staffing constraints, your maximum capability may be 100 units per month. If you’re only putting out 90 a month, you need to improve productivity. If you want to up your yield to 120 per month, then you want to increase productivity. This article addresses improving productivity. Increasing productivity usually requires a detailed business case, as it generally requires some level of capital investment.

So here are the four steps for improving productivity. As you will see, there is a natural progression from one step to the next.

Step One – Training.

The first step of an effective training program is to document the processes required to build a product or deliver a service. This is similar to a recipe. It documents the start-to-finish steps required to build a product, while driving consistency into the process as well. If you do not document your processes, don’t bother going any further.

The second step of an effective training program is to make sure the right tools are in place to support each process. Taking the recipe analogy one step further, if you need to add two cups of flour, you need to make sure there is a measuring cup available. If not, each person will have to guess as to how much flour to add. If you don’t provide the necessary tools, people will improvise (a recipe for disaster).

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