Employees have complex responsibilities as leaders, but ensuring their organisations remain competitive and relevant is critical.
Staying with present trends is the simplest way employees can accomplish this. But with incredibly busy schedules and long to-do lists, how can employees successfully keep up with trends and stay ahead of the curve? In a world that changes at a fast pace, transformation to stay relevant and meaningful is a given – if not you become obsolete as an employee and your business becomes non-viable.
Change is dynamic, so agility and continuous adaptation is essential. Feedback is important to informing what steps leaders should take. Throughout your career, plan to innovate, experiment and learn fast.
The operating environment has changed in Sri Lanka. Tomorrow’s environment is just beginning to shape up.
Employees need to stay tuned and aligned to be relevant. Greater competitiveness through a synergistic approach is a must with no room for waste. Companies are organised based on functional silos and traditionally defined processes. They are loaded down with non value-added waste. Waste exists at all levels of an organisation.
It doesn’t matter what level or function of the business you look into; waste has invaded all areas with or without your knowledge. All employees must be trained and encouraged to recognise waste if productivity and efficiency is your goal.
Recognising waste and eliminating them should be a part of your daily routine. If you don’t do this as a part of your daily routine you will have to engage expensive consultants to embrace and apply theories like lean management to stay afloat in business in the most competitive environment you are in today.
Who will know what adds value and what doesn’t to your business, better than you and your own employees. What is required is to understand this and inculcate the right waste management culture in your organisation and make it a part of how you do business.
For most of us, perhaps, a quick look in the ‘garage’ reveals a number of things that are probably no longer useful but that we just haven’t taken the time to get rid of. Whenever we go through this process at home don’t we realise how much unwanted stuff we have been storing that are no longer necessary.
Acquiring new and piling up on what we have already got is an inherent habit we hardly question for a meaningful change. We would argue it’s the same for any business organisation. Work practices, tools, policies and even processes that you developed to serve a specific purpose at a given point in time can become less relevant and effective as your business environment changes.
Given enough change, they can actually stop adding value at all, while continuing to drain resources as people continue to “go through the motions” because “we have just always done it.” Can you afford such activities today?
Deciding on what to “stop doing”
Yet, although we readily accept the need to “start doing new things” to stay viable in a rapidly-changing business climate, we are far less likely to take the time to ask “what should we stop doing to rid ourselves of non-value adding business clutter?”
If you’re sceptical about the point I’m trying to drive, look at the list of all the activities you do day in-day out. Think of the numerous reports generated; an indispensable data-reporting tool when you introduced it some years ago, but no one uses it for decision making anymore. Does it sound familiar to you and your organisation?
If I have succeeded in convincing you of the value of “cleaning the garage or so-called corporate attic” you will be the beneficiary.
Eliminate waste
When we think of “being better” and “doing more,” naturally our thoughts go first to needing and getting more resources, more capacity — a bigger budget, better and more staff.
But from my experience, there’s almost always the opportunity, first, to better optimise existing resources by routinely ridding your company’s “garage” or “attic” of what mattered yesterday, so you can refocus those resources onto what matters today.
Think of it as doing more with what you’ve already got — to the great benefit of your company’s bottom line. The most important thing to understand about value is that it’s determined from the customer’s perspective. It’s the voice of the customer you’re looking for here.
Customers are looking for the right product, at the right price, at the right time. There may be a lot of things you do that customers are not willing to pay for. If there is no value in activities you do in the customer’s eye tangible or otherwise, it takes your competitive advantages away.
Waste in business comes in two ways; business related activities and employee related. Time waste by employees is undoubtedly one of the biggest wastes and costs the business a lot of money.
One thing that every employee feels challenged by each work day is how easy it is to waste time. From our computers to our co-workers to the recesses of the internet, family chores, politics, telephone calls, friends calling over at the office; there are plenty of opportunities to get distracted and wheedle away hours of our workday.
To really benefit from “cleaning the house” business activity wise, the employees should be well disciplined to optimise their time in executing more value adding activities.
Any failure to use the time and talents of employees is a waste of intellect. Lack of employee involvement includes people who aren’t interested and aren’t helping solve problems.
This is a lot of intellect not being tapped. Years of accumulated knowledge held by the employees are being wasted. Causes for waste of intellect include: not creating the conditions for involvement, structural barriers, not promoting cross functional collaboration and lack of accountability are all causes of the waste of intellect. This is the most difficult waste to tap into but can be most rewarding.
