I have been reading several articles on IT industry suggesting increase in productivity will help the industry out of its current woes - unfavourable exchange rates, high attrition, wage inflation, shortage of talent, but none of these explain how the industry can attain this rather difficult goal. Of course everyone would like the productivity to go up - managers, employees and investors. Is the answer in increasing the number of work hours per week? Would employees produce more by staying late in office? No one can answer with surety. Can better teamwork help? Successful managers know that people perform and produce great results if they work like a team. Companies must invest in training & coaching to promote & enhance team work. Team players should be encouraged and rewarded. Mentoring too can come handy. A large proportion of employees are fresh from college and need help with their first brush with corporate life. They need to be moulded, guided & coached in order to bring the best out of them. A structured and well established corporate mentoring program can to wonders to employee morale and output. The young & energetic IT employees often make wrong career choices by changing jobs for immediate gains such as higher salaries & fancier designations. However if mentored appropriately these youngesters prove to be great performers.
How I wish there was a silver bullet for raising productivity!!
6 comments:
you write very well. you should quickly start posting on infosysblogs!
There are several studies which have shown that in the last couple of decades blue collar productivity has gone up. Till the sub-prime crisis hit the world, it was even thought that the world has escaped Business cycles and technology enabled productivity was cited as one of the contributors.
Some of the tools that have surely improved our productivity (which is not readily apparent are...)
- Email
- Voicemail
- Mobile communication (Phone and Blackberry)
- Collaboration tools (in future blogs and shared workspaces like sharepoint)
- Web search
- Workflow enabled shared calendars (outlook calendar)
There is one way to feel the productivity improvement in the last 20 years. Look around our office space. The number of Personal assitants, Clerical staff, Data entry operators have come down. The whole profession called Travel agent might shortly follow stenography and xerox operators
Innovation continues in this space and given the same amount of work, it will continue to be done by lesser people. Alternately the same amount of people will produce far more output.
Are you sure it’s the tools that have improved productivity? To me, it’s better understanding and application of eternal concepts such as a low information diet, information filters, action oriented comms that do the trick. After all, as hp put it a few years back - a fool with a tool is still a fool
It might be better to define what producitivity is. The definition i am using is given the same level of input and output, how many people does it take to convert the input to output.
My point is simply, man and machine together will continue to improve productivity.
If the tool does not exist there is no question of knowing how to use it. If you dont know how to use it then the tool is useless.
Again i can state enough instances / studies to show that productivty tools are invented first and people use these tools in innovative ways, which in turn feeds-back into the tool improvement and so on.
Lets take 2 examples
a) Email:
It is difficult to say that better information diet will give same productivity improvement with or without a tool called Email. Going a step further, if MS-Outlook does not have a filtering mechanism, then any information filtering rules cannot be as effectively implemented. At the same time, productivity concepts feed into MS-Outlook to create even more sophisticated filter features
b) Social networking
We are currently in the middle of this virtuous cycle in social networking. Initially, people went ballistic on social networking. Subsequently usage of social networking sites have dropped considerably. Further course correction is being made as we speak.
Enough and more people (incl. productivity consultants) are grappling with how to use social networking tools in business.
Anyways... Do we now have an answer how productivity will improve ?
Hi Murali,
You are spot on. Tools and behavior together would lead to higher productivity. I happen to touch upon the behavior aspect and you have highlighted the importance to using technology.
I would like to call it the "cobblers shoe" problem. IT companies are busy selling and implementing productivity enhancing tools and strategy however are poor users of these tools themselves. I would like to see them using content and collaboration tools more agressively. I dont know of any IT company using a good enterprise asset management tool though these companies would have deployed several instances for other non-IT companies.
There is no silver bullet. We need to use every available method to raise productivity
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