The problem of productivity for Operations Directors and COO’s is central to success or failure in organisations.  The quality and quantity of work produced influence the outcome for many other key performance indicators such as customer retention rates, customer satisfaction rates and ultimately revenue and profit. However, productivity has become increasingly challenging to address.

It probably won’t come as a surprise that the problem of worker productivity is not getting much better. The environment at work today and our relatively new addiction to ever changing technology has put us in a different environment than any generation before us. Many try to address the problem, but often find the results disappointing. Presenteeism has become a key factor in tackling productivity and the costs to businesses are estimated to be over four times that of absenteeism.

Where does the Problem of Presenteeism Come From?

Many techniques and methods to improve presenteeism have been put in place to support workers develop and motivate them, however despite this, the problem of presenteeism and productivity can linger. What else then, can be done? Have we missed any other opportunity to identify performance hinderances in our working environment today? Or perhaps we have identified them but the measures to counter these issues may not be as effective as we need.

One key issue that is known to affect performance at work is work related stress, however often the methods used today for resolving this are ineffective in making much difference. This leaves organisations to struggle with high turnover, absence rates and cope with crippling levels of presenteeism. But why are popular methods inefficient in dealing with this?

A Reflection of Our Past

We can easily and simply pinpoint a key issue contributing towards this by looking at the past.

200 years ago industries faced a problem. That problem was that their workers were getting sick, getting into serious accidents and the rate of injury skyrocketed. This was during the industrial revolution, a change in the way we work was so significant that the world was never the same again. But what was the root cause of this explosion in incidents?

For many centuries prior to the industrial revolution before work was mechanised, workers had a way of working that kept them relatively safe. It was all anyone knew as no other method had been developed. That way of keeping safe was personal resilience. It was up to the worker to keep themselves safe, and to avoid debilitating injury. Blacksmiths working by themselves would spend years training apprentices to do just that. It was up to the worker to make sure they were fit enough to work and work in a way that did not cause them injury leaving them with no income. It was by no means a perfect or ideal solution but it was effective enough to keep work going.

Once the industrial revolution occurred it became clear that the old way of keeping safe at work, that of personal resilience, was no longer enough. The workplace environment had changed so radically that even a perfect worker in safe practices could be hurt or even killed due to the actions of another or of a machine that had simply not given them time to get out of the way before injury occurred.  Machine and process safety was born, engineers put guards on machines, ergonomics and the world of physical safety at work developed into the strong systems we see today.

What Can We Learn From This?

Society has gone through at least five successive digital and communication revolutions since then, not including enormous change in our family and home lives. Our world has changed so significantly it would be foolish to ignore how these changes impact our workers, and indeed our workplace output. The connection and information overload that we have today absolutely overwhelms that of those of us who were children in the 1970s and 1980s. New generations today are already affected at a young age by the mental pressure of the online 24/7 lifestyle. This has of course affected us at work and the way we work today is significantly different to the way we did only a few decades ago. Even the pace of information exchange is now hundreds of times faster than it used to be and workers are now used to seeing many thousands of emails in their inboxes. How many of these workers decades earlier would have a physical mail bag of 126 letters to read through and respond to before doing any work each day? And the problem is just getting worse.

In addition to this, the family structure has changed, the information process requirements of roles have changed and the demands of a society constantly updating new digital shortcuts leaves its mark. Industries are changing rapidly, and keeping a business relevant and alive is a significant challenge. The rate of change within organisations to keep them alive and competitive takes its toll on worker productivity.

The pressure to work at a pace along with significant and constant change to technology and legislation has led many to burnout. This can be particularly the case in legal, banking and professional services fields. We are simply not equipped to deal effectively with this significantly new and different workplace environment compared to past generations.  

Presenteeism is a normal human response to high levels of pressure. When pressure becomes so significant, we can no longer effectively work because we become overwhelmed by the obstacles in front of us. Presenteeism is the death of productivity and is estimated to cost businesses many times that of absenteeism and even turnover costs which are also the output of high pressure in organisations.

What Can We Do About This?

Again, by looking back at the past we can learn from what actions were effective, and what actions were not.

As mentioned above, when the industrial revolution hit, it changed the world so radically that it would be almost impossible to return to a pre-industrialised world today. Whole populations of workers moved and changed lives radically, from being unskilled farm labourers to working in factories in rapidly expanding cities. The first lesson to learn from this past was that they did not take the option to try to reverse the industrial revolution. Workers rebelled and even tried to stop industry progress from forcing them to change their lives and livelihoods. But, pandoras box had been opened, there was no going back.

What did they do to address the issues with safety?

They changed the way they viewed safety at work. They realised that personal resilience was no longer enough. New safety disciplines emerged and included engineering controls, the hierarchy of control and ergonomics. People-interaction with the working environment became a science and improvements were driven that brings us to the world of safety we see today.

Steps to Take Today

If we take these learnings and apply them to our environment today and to our problem of burnout, presenteeism and productivity challenges we reach an inevitable conclusion. We have in fact followed the same pattern as the past.

So far, many efforts to address issues such as workplace stress are based in decades-old methods of managing mental safety. These methods are all built around personal resilience. They are based in treating the symptoms of stress. These methods include providing employee assistance phonelines and resilience training, even mental health first aid. They are targeted at improving the personal resilience of an individual to enable them to more effectively deal with workplace stress. But like personal resilience for physical safety was no longer enough when the industrial revolution occurred, we should ask ourselves the question; What if we have reached a critical pressure point where just relying on personal resilience for mental safety is now no longer enough? We see evidence of this through research published that effectively points out the ineffectiveness of individual-led mental health interventions for organisations.

Establish a New Approach

Consider the machine that is causing injury. In the physical safety field this would be clear such as a meat grinder or a laser cutter. These are guarded to remove possibility of injury. Where we cause increased likelihoods of mental pressure and stress we can review the ‘machine’ that is causing them and effectively guard it. This is most effectively done through business process and systems re-engineering and requires a knowledge of what stress factors those existing systems are exacerbating. When done effectively business process re-engineering brings together the world of risk assessment with stress factors to remove, substitute or guard these systems to result in less workplace stress and therefore, greater productivity.  Read more about how Caldeira Consulting can help you and your team.