Leaderless lost souls damage productivity
THERE IS a shortage of good supervisors and team leaders in New Zealand business and the country’s productivity is suffering as a result, a productivity specialist says.
Accounting firm Ernst & Young has released its second Productivity Pulse Survey, a poll of Kiwi workers asking them how productive they are.
The latest results show time wasting costs New Zealand organisations $17 billion a year, compared with $19b at the last survey six months ago.
On average, one hour and nine minutes is wasted each day – because of factors such as work produced but not used, waiting for other people, travelling between sites, sending and replying to emails, technology problems, and futile meetings.
Ernst & Young performance improvement leader Braden Dickson said employers had to be clear with individual workers what their daily output requirements were, and they needed to be well managed and supervised. ‘‘Often we find people are very busy, they’re flat out. [But] things are not being organised properly.
‘‘In my experience, what we’d call that first-line level of supervision, the team supervisor . . . these people can have a material impact on productivity in the workplace.’’
They were super-organised and good at keeping staff busy, he said. ‘‘I refer to them as the people at work who have the ants in their pants.’’
There was a shortage of these kinds of people, and it wasn’t recognised as a skill in itself, Dickson said.
The latest Productivity Pulse surveyed 750 New Zealand workers across a range of industries. It categorised them under four profiles – Super Achievers, Solid Contributors, Patchy Participants and Lost Souls.
Super Achievers are highly productive people who make up 26 per cent of the New Zealand workforce. They say only 10 per cent of their day is wasted, and are the most likely to be satisfied with their jobs and have flexible working conditions.
Solid Contributors make up the bulk of the workforce at 53 per cent. This group wastes more time than average on waiting for other people, IT issues and emailing. Around 13 per cent of their day is wasted.
Patchy Participants account for 17 per cent of workers. They are responsible for most of New Zealand’s workplace wastage. They are the least satisfied, least motivated and least likely to be planning on leaving. Around 18 per cent of their day is wasted.
This group tended to be skewed towards younger workers and were the ones who could create structural problems for employers, Dicksons said.
Lost Souls make up 5 per cent of the Kiwi workforce. They waste 21 per cent of their day, are the least likely to have flexible working conditions, and a third are looking to leave.
Lost Souls existed regardless of industry or skill level, Dickson said. ‘‘We can pretty confidently say 5 per cent of the New Zealand workforce in general falls into that category.’’
John Phipps is deputy head of equities at AMP Capital and takes a keen interest in productivity issues.
A lot of New Zealand companies were not skilled in performance management, he said. Staff wanted to know what they could do to add value.
‘‘A lot of solutions to these things are in the people in the business already, they just don’t get managed and played out into the business.’’
Global data showed that the first 50 per cent of improvements in a business came for free, he said. ‘‘[But] New Zealanders say ‘to make it better let’s buy a bigger thing that goes thump, thump, thump’.’’
Rick Boven, the former director of think tank the New Zealand Institute and now an economic development consultant, said in comparison with their colleagues in similar nations, Kiwi line managers had fewer academic qualifications and received less training. They were more likely to have been promoted through the course of their work.
‘‘In New Zealand we perhaps don’t invest as much in our people as we might,’’ he said.