Creating a productive business culture
27th of June 2024
In a recent post, we highlighted that the average worker only spends 27% of their time on work relating to their skills – that doesn’t sound great. Even worse the average worker is only productive for 2.8 hours a day. 60% of their diary is made up of busy work, chasing things they need, in order to do their work. Combine that with the toggle, ignorance and focus tax we discussed in last week’s newsletter – we don’t actually spend that much time working. Instead, a lot of work is holding the structure of our organisations in place.
However, it doesn’t have to be this way.
In this week’s article, we discuss how you can go about creating a long-lasting productive culture in your business.
Love him or hate him, it’s well documented that billionaire and occasional world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has a policy of walking out of pointless meetings. This ideology is then passed on to members of staff. A different culture to what many of us work in, but it is undeniably a profitable one. To be successful businesses need to make the very best use of their time possible, even if that means going against what appears to be the status quo.
Clawing back what could be profitable time is highly important. Whether that’s through cutting meeting times with new enterprise management tools, ditching the spreadsheets, or automating routine emails. Like Elon Musk walking out of meetings, you may have to go against the grain, or against your working experience to create a truly productive business.
When turning to boost team productivity, you could look to consultant-led productivity classes, fund subscription-based organisational tools for your staff or enforce deadlines more firmly. At Shoothill we believe that for businesses to create a longstanding culture of productivity it starts in one place – the software you work with every minute of the day. This is because when your processes can run unhindered – it doesn’t really matter who’s driving them.
So how do I know my software is reducing my team’s productivity?
1. Do you spend time manually compiling data-based reports ahead of meetings with clients, stakeholders or colleagues?
2. Has your business ever over-bought, in-correctly sold, or lost money due to a spreadsheet typo?
3. Does invoicing take days of valuable business time a month?
4. Does your team take far too long to move between tasks?
5. Do team members incorrectly book meetings?
It’s very simple really, if your answer is yes to any of these questions – your business can improve its workflows and processes to boost productivity. It would be understandable for a business to think these are just aspects of the working world – but in 2024, it doesn’t have to be.
How does a business solve these productivity problems?
As the creators of quality custom software, of course, we’d say that custom software is the answer to a lot of these problems – if not all of them.
However, by its very nature, it is. Custom software is tailored to solve organisational problems. But unlike that consultant who provides training sessions and that’s it, or subscription-based organisational tools that expire, custom software stays in your business. You experience improved workflows, instant access to data and eliminate mistakes – leaving permanent productivity improvements and most importantly the groundwork for institutional cultural change.
This in essence is digital transformation. At the heart of the matter is the advanced technology used to enable more productive work. Digital transformation is about changing philosophies around the reality of work.
You might not know what needs to be solved right now, or you may have a clear idea of the systems your business needs. Either way, the systems that you work from have a direct bearing on the productivity of your team, the quality of work they produce and the trajectory of your business.