Productivity will continue to dominate the management agenda

Managers are, more than ever before, faced with the challenge of raising the productivity of employees. According to Peter Drucker, in an article entitled “The New Productivity Challenge” in the Harvard Business Review, “this challenge will dominate the management agenda for the next several decades”.

There is a need to measure productivity, to benchmark it and to continuously improve it. We once used to say “creating wealth with people” and now many businesses are “creating wealth without people”. This is a new reality of the work-place. How many jobs have become automated and how many have been rendered redundant by technology?

ATMs have replaced bank cashiers and operate 24/7. In the manufacturing sector, so many jobs have been replaced by automated machines. Low-skilled jobs are being eliminated. Technology is also replacing the very complicated jobs which many employees would run away from.

The greatest determinant of business success nowadays is “costs of production/operation”. Managers have this immense responsibility of keeping cost of production or of operation, at its lowest possible level. This partly explains why lay-offs are the first solution in times of crisis.

Historically, employees have always demanded salary increases. They are always looking for better payments. The danger lies in the fact that this will force managers to have recourse to technology and automation whenever and wherever possible. Not many will be happy with such a statement. Yet, this is what we see happening in the world of work.

The challenge for managers is to ensure that employees are given opportunities to explore and generate ideas and concepts that will strengthen the position of the business in its market. “Achieve more with fewer resources” is the new winning formula that all are testing.

Whatever else is said, productivity will always determine the competitiveness of all businesses and will determine, as was rightly stated by Peter Drucker “the very fabric of society and the quality of life in every industrialized nation”.

The famous quote that says “we should produce the cake to be able to share it” is a good way of demonstrating the importance of productivity for if there is no cake, there is nothing to share. Some few people have been trying to criticize the concept of productivity. It is high time all of us realize its true importance.

Many have now aknowledged that it is productivity which determines the wealth of a country. It allows a country to have a high level of GDP per capita and a high standard of living. The quality of life is highly dependent on the level of productivity. Everyone would like to have a high standard of living. This is possible only when we use all the productive resources of an economy; especially human resources in an effective and efficient way.

We all have to promote a culture of productivity. Each one of us must contribute in our own ways to explain its importance. Once the idea is generally accepted by one and all, the pursuit of higher productivity will become a national issue. We need to use all the opportunities at hand to educate, inform, enlighten and inculcate the notions of productivity.

Higher productivity would lead to lower average costs, improved competitiveness, improved business performance, higher profits, higher wages and, most importantly, economic growth. All these lead to improved confidence in the economy, therefore more investments and more jobs created. This is why “Productivity will continue to dominate the management agenda”.