Michael Millward joined Elly Fiorentini on the BBC Radio York Drive Show this evening to discuss what it means to work harder.
The discussion was prompted by comments made by Foreign Secretary William Hague M.P. in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, in which he told British business people to stop complaining and start working harder.
Mr Hague’s comments were themselves made in response to criticism from the business community of new government strategies announced last week in the Queen’s Speech.
In a carefully chosen statement which has been compared to Lord Tebbit’s call during the 1980s for the unemployed to get on their bike and look for work Mr Hague said that the Government had done all that it could do to help and that it was now time for businesses to get out there, start exporting and creating orders and jobs.
Mr Millward who spent last week in Brussels, Belgium launching an exclusive European partnership between Abeceder and US media giant Bloomberg LP which makes the Abeceder learning resources website Work Place Learning Centre the exclusive marketing partner of Bloomberg Businessweek EDGE said that Mr Hague’s comments were too simplistic.
It is too easy to say that businesses need to work harder. There is little point in working harder, if that way of working is inefficient, or ineffective. The real business success stories have come from businesses that have learnt how to work smarter.
The problem is that many managers and business owners find harder working much easier to manage than smarter working.
In terms of carrot and stick getting people to work harder involves using the stick, but getting them to work smarter requires using the carrot and that is something that many managers find extremely difficult because it requires two way communication with their employees.
It has to start with making sure that your employees understand what the objectives of the business are, and how their jobs and daily activities contribute to the achievement of those objectives.
There is said Mr Millward significant evidence that employees who understand how their job fits into an organisation and how their activities contribute to the success of that organisation have a positive impact across many areas of that organisation:
- Employees are likely to be 20% more efficient, and 87% less likely to leave, (Corporate Leadership Council)
- Gallup research has also found that organisations that involve their employees in this way enjoy better relationships with their customers, have 18% higher productivity and 12% higher profitability.
- ISR research suggests that companies where employees view their employers positively are likely to enjoy 2.1% higher sales than their competitors.
- Shareholders are also happy, positive employee involvement can create 2.2% extra shareholder value according to Watson Wyatt.
So once an organisation has communicated its objectives to their employees each employee then needs to have their own set of objectives that are linked to the overall objectives.
The best way to structure an objective is to use the S.M.A.R.T. approach
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Timed
Objectives work best when the job role involves reaching a target or achieving a change.
For many jobs this is not appropriate so managers should clearly document and communicate the performance standards that the employee must achieve and maintain in order for both the organisation and them as individuals to be successful.
Just understanding why you are doing something can have an extremely positive impact on someone’s attitude to doing an activity and deliver clear productivity improvements. It also said Mr Millward makes it easier for people to identify not just the tasks that they should be doing but also those that they should not be doing. If an employee cannot see how completing a specific task is going to help them achieve their objectives or their performance standards then they need to ask whether they should be doing that task in the first place, does it need to be done or should it be done by someone else?
Setting objectives or performance standards helps to give people ownership of the activities they do during their working day and results in them being able to work both smarter and harder.