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Organisational Mechanics

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Stating the Blindingly Obvious

7 August, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

High Performing Teams If there’s a subject that will get the good people in H.R. excited it is high performing teams.  They are the holy grail of human resource management.  Everybody wants a high performing team. Conventional wisdom tells you to get the “best-of-breed”. Find the most capable sales men, ops guys, marketeers and technical wizards and […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: communication, culture, listening, office productivity, organisation, performance management, research, SMART goals, systems thinking, teamwork

Efficiency or Productivity

24 November, 2018 by James Lawther 6 Comments

Efficiency versus Productivity

Which is better? Should you be more efficient or more productive? On the face of it they sound like very similar things, so does it matter which you strive to be? Efficiency is the amount of input you use to produce a standard level of output.  If you become more efficient you do the same […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: cost saving, human nature, office productivity, waste

Pointless Conversations

30 August, 2018 by James Lawther 1 Comment

Management meetings Do you ever lose the will to live in management meetings?  Sometimes they are so bad I want to scoop out my eyeballs with a tea-spoon.  I’d do anything to get out of the conversation. I hate futile meetings that are a waste of everybody’s time — usually highly paid people’s time. Here […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: bureaucracy, command and control, cost saving, diversity, effective meetings, employee performance measures, forced fun, key performance indicators, management style, motivation, objective setting, office productivity, performance management, targets, waste, wasted intellect

Scapegoating and the Black Magic of Work Creation

5 March, 2018 by James Lawther 4 Comments

Scapegoat

An imaginary tale… Picture a high pressure environment.  Resources are stretched and the work keeps on coming. Jobs are routinely prioritised so that staff can focus on what is important. That isn’t an uncommon scenario, maybe it is ringing bells, so let me make it a little more dramatic by upping the stakes. Imagine it was […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: blame, bureaucracy, fear and anxiety, mitigating demand, office productivity, over-processing

Outputs and Outcomes

31 January, 2017 by James Lawther 1 Comment

Stockpile

Similar but not the same It may be semantics, but I think we confuse outcomes and outputs: Customers desire outcomes, organisations deliver outputs.  They are not always the same. Where do you place your attention? Outputs are easy to measure and manage.  Output data rolls off systems and out of processes.  Outputs are easy to quantify, target […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: incentives, measurement, office productivity

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