How to have a more productive 2016 – understanding the workforce part I

If you have a stake in any business, your focus is always on how to grow the business. You spend time and money examining and re-examining your business model, trying to maximize on its strengths while mitigating its weaknesses at all times.

So you recruit a team to work with you in building the business because – its success means that everyone is gaining. Because you have hired skilled personnel, you imagine that it will be easy to work out the profit dynamics vs. timelines and beat the money making obstacles. You therefore hold meetings with your staff, discuss these details and come up with strategies that everyone feels that they can commit to working towards.

At the end of the month, the hours worked don’t correspond with the expected outputs and the to-do’s appear to be piling up with a client in vs. client not out ratio that is alarming. This in turn affects cash flow and everyone is unhappy especially the business owners.

This is every small business owner’s dilemma:

  1. High staff turnover – because the work is ‘too much’ , ‘too hard’, or the team is unable to self-motivate and requires a lot of supervision and micro management
  2. Unmet deadlines – poor planning and prioritizing of tasks,
  3. No team spirit – The individual staff have a ME FIRST approach to work thus there is no synergy within team to maximize efficiency and productivity by complementing one another’s efforts.
  4. Social media addiction – perpetual socializing on all social media platforms at the expense of productivity at work
  5. Lack of discipline – the list of incomplete tasks is perpetually growing

We spent time trying to understand why the items in the list were so consistent for many businesses and discovered why. You see, today’s workforce falls into four distinct categories:

  1. The Baby boomers
  2. Generation X
  3. Generation Y/ The Millennials
  4. Generation Z