What is the secret of being a highly productive company? Most of the people would say it's the result that counts. We are normally told that productivity is the ratio of output to inputs used in the production process, i.e. output per unit of input. However, in the real-life scenario, our work is not considered to be productive, unless we have achieved our goals. For example, we are targeting to serve X amount of clients per month (or close Z amount of deals). If we have achieved that without going over the budget, we would consider our work was productive. In the fast-changing business environment, these rules do not necessarily work. We are facing so many factors impacting our productivity.
The reality is multidimensional these days and cannot be expressed as a simple flat equation. We can no longer measure the productivity as Real income (abs.) = Real output - Real input. A simple example of that would be a company doing some sort of service, with the goal of servicing 100 clients per month. Assume they have met this goal, but the quality of their service has dropped, and they lost 35% of their clients, so they will not place any orders for the following month. The productivity equation would show they were productive, but in reality, they are on a sloppy ground now, and unless they fix it, they will be going out of business soon.
We cannot consider ourselves productive unless we look at productivity as a combination of not only how much of money we make and how much we spend but include many other factors. Let's imagine we are continually improving our quality, reducing time to perform work, minimizing costs, managing risks, providing a full transparency for business apps and everyone's work, giving a fast response to all market and business changes, picking up on new business opportunities, creating a healthy and fun environment in our team? Would that allow us to be more productive?
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