Simple Choices

Sometimes choices become very simple.

A recession is defined as negative growth.  The cure for a recession is positive growth.

Positive growth can only happen in two ways:

1.      More people are working;

or

2.      People become more productive.

My state, Minnesota, will have a shrinking workforce in the years ahead.  If we are to grow as an economy with minimal immigration, our only option is to improve the productivity of the workforce.

What do you think is the most effective way to improve productivity?

If I say that it is by improving attitude, will you protest and urge more education, improved training, support payments and government contracts instead?

Well, as it happens, you would be wrong.  And we have some data to support our claim.

In an earlier e-newsletter, Mysteries of the Universe1, I described how we were able to define productivity as a two-step process in which we first apply five principles to free resources, and then apply one principle to re-deploy them.  This has reliably produced 100:1 returns to the bottom line, no layoffs, and productivity improvement of mind-boggling size.

When I wrote that essay, I did not know about a very important finding from our subsequent research:  If the attitude of the workforce was not right, nothing would come of a productivity improvement effort.

It is a powerful fact, but its discovery was entirely accidental.  Over the years, we had collected data from hundreds of projects — information on hundreds of different aspects of work from stress, satisfaction, time-of-day, and productivity to tasks, activities, and many more variables.  We then performed a factor analysis on all the data.  Factor analysis is one way of looking for interrelationships among the data to see how everything hangs together.  It also functions as a means to identify data we may not need and that can be eliminated.

The largest factor$ in the analysis we called “the productivity factor,” because it contained all the variables that define productivity (screening, delegating, planning, efficiency and occupancy).  All of these variables appeared in sequence, and at the “bottom” of the factor.

On the top of that factor was one dominant variable:  Attitude.  It “explained” more than half of the variation in the productivity factor.  We were stunned.  I didn’t know what we had expected, but we would not have been surprised if, instead, the dominant variable had been experience, or educational level, or level of training.  But the elephant in that room was “attitude.”  All the other unsurprising variables were present as well, but their combined influence was much less than that of attitude.

We then looked at what influenced attitude.  Much to our surprise, attitude was mostly influenced by only three things:

1.      Leadership;

2.      Job satisfaction; and

3.      Job stress.

It is fairly rare in social science that the predictive power of such “hard-to-define” concepts is so high.

Attitudes form immediately in response to good (or poor) leadership, high satisfaction (or high dissatisfaction) on the job, and highly positive (or highly negative) stress in the organization.   Were you to compare a place that makes widgets and has good leadership, high job satisfaction and high positive stress, with another widget maker with poor leadership, high job dissatisfaction and high negative stress, what would you think the differences in productivity likely to be?

The first widget maker could be as much as twenty times more productive than the second.

So now we begin to see the workplace through different lenses. 

Should you be unfortunate enough to contract a deadly cancer in this country, the chance of you receiving care in a high mortality-high cost treatment center is about the same as that of your being treated in a low mortality-low cost facility.  Productivity and, in all likelihood, attitude, are matters of your life or death in such a situation. 

We saw this up close and personal in military projects.  One of them, at Fort Rucker, resulted in the elimination of fatal accidents on the job almost overnight utilizing the principles I have described.  I doubt whether you need to be in a work place — any workplace — for more than five minutes before you make a judgment about the attitude of the people working there.  That quickly, you probably decide whether you are likely to make a purchase, recommend the place to a friend, or continue to do business there.  Such decisions, when made by many, may well determine the survival, or death, of any organization.

And all those tiny, individual decisions are the source of growth — and failure — of this nation’s colleges, businesses, hospitals and cities. 

I wonder … is it really that simple to make this a much better, much more productive, much more livable, world?

Tor Dahl & Associates Productivity Improvement Seminar