Increasing Productivity: Three Steps to Achieve Effective Practices and Advance in the New World of Work
How productive are you? Do you get everything done that you plan to do each week? Has your workflow been disrupted by changing demands and expectations? In a digitally-accelerated world, work is evolving, becoming less linear or predictable. It’s time to be proactive with personal and team strategies and tactics to streamline your work, accomplish your tasks, and be more effective in a more challenging, competitive work environment.
Work Disrupted
Work looks and feel different. We used to be able to develop long-term strategies, schedule numerous specific steps over multiple years and execute upon them. We didn’t have to think too hard about how we got our work done. We were told what to do. There was a defined process in place that we learned, followed, and repeated. For some tasks, we were on auto pilot.
Things have changed. Technology developments have given us unprecedented interconnectivity, mobility, with real-time data generation and sharing. Digitized customer feedback loops and global competitor developments have shortened and accelerated update cycles. Between 1970 and 2009, highly cognitive non-routine work grew by 60 percent, while repetitive work declined by 12 percent. Many basic, routine tasks are being automated. We need to iterate and make more frequent adjustments to make progress, which significantly impacts our daily work experiences.
New Paradigm
Does it sometimes feel like you are scrambling to fulfill your weekly tasks? With a shorter time horizon, are you challenged to coordinate effectively with your team and co-workers? Are you now often considering many potential pathways and track several significant variables’ developments as things move forward? This is a common occurrence now. Work is evolving — what we are doing, when, and how.
The ‘why’ of our work — its mission or purpose — is the constant, able to ground and guide us, helping us focus and prioritize on distant goals so we can move forward. But the changing nature of what, when, and how we work is disrupting the legacy systems, processes, and rhythms that we inherited and are struggling with as they are now too linear, rigid, and disconnected.
We need to organize, schedule, manage, and accomplish our work in the midst of uncertainty with an ever-changing environment. For ourselves, our teams and departments, we are now faced with proactively creating new effective frameworks, processes, and routines to be able to work effectively in these new conditions. But how?
First: Recognize Your Context
Taking purposeful action to devise productive new ways of working requires first recognizing the current conditions. What is the impact on your business, role, team, workflow, and tasks of the more fluid environment with more available options to consider? Carefully assess wherever you are now experiencing friction — such as misalignment with your manager about changing specs; tension with teammates about delayed deadlines; or uncoordinated tasks with other departments. Identify which processes need adapting or rethinking entirely for the future.
Another important step is to discover your optimal working profile — how, when, and where you work best. Are you a night owl or an early bird? Do you find your ‘flow’ better in a team situation or working alone? Are multiple small milestones the best way for you to stay on track? Do colleagues around you play a key role in motivating you? Recognize your preferences so you can figure out what adjustments will enable you to performance at your best as well as allowing you to compromise appropriately in team combinations.
Second: Adapt Your Process
Acknowledging current conditions, their effect on your work, and how you perform best, you can work with your manager and team to develop a new framework that is appropriate for the new business climate, especially accommodating the increased amount of non-routine work. Creating a relevant framework and processes can be a significant undertaking, benefiting from contributions from multiple perspectives with detailed, strategic attention so it fits your company, business, and team.
You may have made informal adjustments, but design-thinking can be a helpful approach to step back from tweaked routine practices and consider a new way forward that will be optimized for the environment. An updated framework needs to be less structured and more flexible than previous operating practices with more emphasis on project work elements. It is important to recognize and be able to incorporate all the new parameters of work such as: simultaneously working on multiple projects in different team combinations within your department; integrated cross-department collaboration; and the ability to update interdependent tasks rapidly when specifications change.
Third: Support New Routines
Market developments are moving us forward in expected and unexpected directions. Whatever your new process looks like: test it, tweak it, test it again. Iteration is the name of the game in the Future of Work. Once confirmed, it is essential for everyone to be coached about the new framework and associated operating practices, explaining and promoting relevant new habits to establish and sustain adoption.
Sophisticated digitized platforms and tools are both essential and invaluable for enabling new work processes with more complicated, interconnected projects and team configurations. These are going to be most effective when supported by synergistic compensation and recognition. For example, ensure departmental budgeting and resource allocation reward — not hinder — meaningful cross-department project collaboration to achieve important company goals.
Have you taken these three steps yet to reduce strain in your workflow and improve your productivity? We are all faced with a much more challenging work environment. The faster we adjust and implement more adaptable frameworks and project-based practices, the more future-prepared and future-proofed your company will be.