Organizational Paralysis

Within 6 months of life some organizations suffer a paralysis:

1. Point zero minus six months: growing anticipation of the new organization is rife; most senior managers are preoccupied with networking amongst the organization’s rising stars in order to be well positioned for advancement.
2. Point zero minus three months: the new organization is due shortly, so no one will do anything in case it is seen to be wrong in light of the new structure.
3. Point zero minus one month: all senior managers desperately plead for a new job so the sin of the last year’s time wasting can be hoofed off onto another poor unsuspecting victim.
4. Point zero: the planned reorganization is put back two months to accommodate the wishes of an intransigent director who keeps digging in his heels and refuses to listen.
5. Point zero plus six months: senior mangers look forward to extremely generous takeover conditions and contemplating retirement

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Pride through Responsibility

If a person is to feel a sense of power in his job, he must feel a sense of pride—pride in the company, pride in the department or group, and perhaps most important, pride in himself.

Pride creates the desire to succeed; the desire to succeed causes people to dig down deep within themselves and draw upon untapped inner resources. Pride is perhaps the greatest catalyst for getting people to discover and use their own personal power.

One of the best ways to instill pride in people is by giving  them a sense of responsibility; by helping them know that they have an important job to do.

A sense of ownership is what we are trying to create. This sense of ownership must be present if you wish to create an entrepreneurial spirit.

If a person believes the job is lowly and insignificant, if he believes that others look upon the job as relatively unimportant, his performance will usually reflect this belief. On the other hand, if you repeatedly remind him of the importance of his job, he will usually perform the job with a sense of pride and purpose.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Measuring Productivity

You are likely to be judged – at least to some extent – by your financial performance. But financial measures such as profitability and return on investment are really indirect measures of the operations, good financial performance comes from good operations. You can measure the operations more directly using measures such as productivity, utilization and efficiency.

Productivity is the most common measure of operations. It shows the amount of output that you create for each unit of resource used. You might, for example, measure the number of units made per employee, sales per square meter, or deliveries per vehicle.

Your competitors are always trying to gain an advantage, and an effective way of doing this is by increasing their productivity. You then have to match their improvement simply to stay in business. So the benefits of higher productivity include:

• Long-term survival;
• Lower costs;
• Less waste of resources;
• Higher profits, wages, real income, etc;
• Targets for continually improving operations;
• Comparisons between operations;
• Measures of management competence.

These are good reasons for improving productivity. But how can you do it? At the very worst, you simply make people work harder – problem solved. In reality there are four ways of increasing productivity:

1. Improve effectiveness – with better decisions;
2. Improve efficiency – with a process that gives more output for the same inputs;
3. Improve the process – getting higher quality, fewer accidents, or less disruption;
4. Improve motivation – getting better results from the workforce.

One of the problems with improving productivity is that employees see it as an excuse for sacking them. Productivity is really a measure of improvement performance, and it has very little to do with the old-fashioned idea of getting people to work harder. An enthusiastic person digging a hole with a spade can work very hard, and still be far less productive than a  lazy person with a bulldozer. Typically, 85 percent of productivity is set by the process which is designed by managers and only 15 percent is due to the individual workers.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Intranets

Not all Websites are available to anyone cruising the Net. Some are reserved for the private use of a single company’s employees and stakeholders. An intranet uses the same technologies as the Internet and the World Wide Web, but the information provided and the access allowed are restricted to the boundaries of a company-wide LAN or WAN. In some cases, suppliers, distribution partners, and key customers may also have access, but intranets are protected from unauthorized access through the Internet by a firewall, a special type of gateway that controls access to the local network. People on an intranet can get out to the Internet, but unauthorized people on the Internet cannot get in.

Possibly the biggest advantage of an intranet is that it eliminates the problem of employees’ using different types of computers within a company. On an Intranet, all information is available in a format compatible with Macintosh, PC, UNIX-based computers. The need to publish internal documents on paper is virtually eliminated because everyone can access the information electronically.

Besides saving paper, an intranet can save a company money in the form of employee hours. Employees can find information much faster and more easily by using a well-designed database on an intranet than by digging through a filing cabinet or card catalog. Some of the communication uses companies have for intranets include updating policy manuals, posting job openings and submitting job applications, accessing martketing and sales presentations from anywhere in the world, updating and managing employee benefits, accessing company records and databases, collaborating from anywhere in the  world to develop new products, scheduling meetings, setting up company phone directories, and publishing company newsletters. In fact, just about any information that can help employees communicate is a good candidate for an intranet. As video and audio technologies progress, you can expect to see more multimedia applications on intranets as well.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Lectures, Line of Sight