Productivity Vs Flexibility – A villainous thought

In my current organization, we are thinking big to grow by year 2016 and as part of the goal set, align ourselves to excel in all the fields that we are involved in through an Operational Excellence exercise. One thing which struck me is the common factor – Productivity Improvement - where we all can contribute, to make the world we are in better and competitive. Also, it is this time of the year in our organization, when the appraisals come into reality monetarily. Hence, it is even more important to realize the significance of productivity.

One question always comes to my mind post the appraisal process – how productive are we while we call ourselves excellent and outstanding. I‘m sure most of us would have rated ourselves no less than being outstanding. If you have not, I appreciate the honesty.

Productivity is the measure of how specified resources are managed to accomplish timely objectives as stated in terms of quantity and quality. Productivity is a measure of the efficiency of all activities that aim directly or indirectly to satisfy customer. Productivity is a ratio of production output to what is required to produce it (inputs). The measure of productivity is defined as a total output (goods and services) per one unit of a total input (labor, infrastructure etc). Improving the quality-price-ratio is an essential way to enhance the productivity.

I understand that the above definitions are too general and insufficient to make the phenomenon productivity understandable. Productivity cannot be examined as a phenomenon independently but it is necessary to identify the entity it belongs to. In the IT industry, which is a service based industry, productivity is directly linked to labor productivity which in turn is connected with the availability of human hours, a primary and essential raw material.

It is impossible to find a solution to a problem when you are unaware of its exact existence. As managers it is easy to say, “we need to increase employee productivity.” However, we will not be able to implement a strategy for increasing work force productivity until we are aware of the specific productivity snags our employees face.

A basic study revealed the following reasons which reduced our work force availability during working hours for the organisation:

- Reaching late to office and leaving office early citing public transport, company bus timings and traffic jams as the reason

- Having breakfast after coming to office

- Not limiting the lunch hours to the permissible limits

- Multiple Tea or Coffee breaks, before and after lunch

- Smoker’s breaks

- Sick leaves misuse

- Desk and cellular phones for personal use

The reasons might sound silly but note that the organizational productivity loss stands 2% to 6% of the productivity for the above said reasons. While the organization allows flexibility in our working hours by letting us take breaks and rejuvenate, which helps to concentrate and be more focused, we all take it to our advantage.

Now, you can ask me whether being available alone improves productivity. No! it does not. Along with availability other equally important aspects of Productivity are quality, agility, periodicity and reusability, investments, technology, work methods including systems, processes and procedures. But one must understand that availability is the primary ingredient for being productive in a service based industry. Also, do not confuse productivity with efficiency. Efficiency is a narrower concept that pertains to getting the most out of a given set of resources; while productivity is a broader concept that pertains to use of overall resources.

The only reason I can think of why any effort to improve productivity fails is very simple – our mindset. While we want flexibility to maintain our work - life balance, we don’t want to be flexible on the organizational matters and thereby not wanting to get more done. Therefore, let us ensure that we stay committed and focused that we won’t bring the leisurely comfort in the name of flexibility and make ourselves more available for our organizations and improve its productivity.

The benefits of higher productivity are manifold. Productivity growth is important to any organization because more real income means that the organization can meet its (perhaps growing) obligations to customers, suppliers, workers, shareholders, and governments, and still remain competitive or even improve its competitiveness in the market place.

Corporate Challenge : Scapegoating in IT

Scapegoating seems to be a common human behavior and is usually linked with tribalism–the irrational identification of a particular group as superior to all others and yet threatened by all others so that it needs aggressive protection from others. This blame game is one of mankind's oldest rituals next only to prostitution. It’s an almost unconscious behavior that gets employed when unit of people lacks cohesion, and a common identity and purpose. Find a scapegoat- and everyone can come together around this reason for the problems they are experiencing and the ills that they are unable to constructively address together. It helps a group to reframe themselves as “us” against “her” “him” or “them.”

If I can quote the Bible, Scapegoat is a live goat over whose head Aaron confessed all the sins of the children of Israel on the Day of Atonement. The goat, symbolically bearing their sins, was then sent into the wilderness.

In most of mankind's history, one of our more destructive tendencies has been the need to find easy scapegoats whenever our lives become difficult. This is a process that the more radical leaders in each era have found very useful. It enables the few in power to distract the majority's attention away from the true causes of their distress, which is almost always the leaders themselves, and onto whatever minority these leaders believe are currently distrusted or disliked or that they can convince the many to distrust or dislike. The usual victims the leaders choose are the weak or defenseless or simply the minorities

Ancient societies often kept official scapegoats, animals or humans who would be sacrificed after disaster in the hope of purifying the community and avoiding further punishment from the gods. The human scapegoats might be convicted criminals or suffer from a physical deformity that set them apart. They would be marched through the city in fine robes, as the people's sins were cast upon them, before being taken outside the walls and stoned to death.

Today, we might have moved on from such barbarism, but we still express the same urges in different ways. We've seen this happen increasingly during the current economic crisis. We still yell for blood after disaster and we invariably look for someone whom we can hold responsible for something usually far beyond the power of a single being. It’s a common human penchant for people to convince themselves that they are the cause of the good things but try to assign blame to others when things go wrong. Somebody said it well in Hindi…’Tum karo toh Raas leela, hum kare toh character dheela!’. Basically it’s an ego defense mechanism. Such negative coworkers sap your time and attention with their negative comments about the people, the workplace, the company, and their work. When these coworkers exude negativity, one is forced into coping with their negativity daily and the only way out is to have a thick skin that keeps negativity from affecting you.

When we discover that it is no longer socially acceptable to scapegoat one group, we turn our scapegoating behavior towards a group it is acceptable to hate, demean, ridicule, marginalize and harm. It seems necessary for us to have such “others” and to act towards some of them so. It makes us feel better. We feel like we are solving problems we don’t know how to solve. But, of course, scapegoating doesn’t really solve anything.

Though I’m very unsure, my suspicions on the root cause of this problem in our world of IT could be - corporate greed or the lack of time to look for answers or that the actual problem could be too tough to find a solution for or lack of spine to be accountable for the debacle. Whatever be the reason, the time is long past to grow up and stop the never ending search for someone to blame for our troubles and to finally become involved with searching, instead, for the truth. We must learn to look past the noticeable differences in physical appearance, and to value who someone is as a person, rather than judge them because they belong to a certain sociological group.

Addressing such situations isn’t easy because you’re presumed at fault of whatever problem you’ve been accused of creating. But what I can recommend is to stick to the facts and not start making excuses. Be straight forward and say that this person is blaming me and it wasn’t my fault because of whatever reasons. It wasn’t in my area of responsibility, or it was out of my control. The best defense, though, is to avoid being made a scapegoat in the first place. If you know of a situation that could lead to scapegoating, make sure everyone around you knows your responsibilities and the limits of your span of control. To conclude, you also need to be on the lookout for people that throw stones. It’s a challenge to handle these back stabbers but certainly not impossible as I always think that there are some people with some sensible thinking out there.

Is Quality real or is it just a perception

I'm sure that my readers would have thought that I have stopped writing blogs as this blog has certainly taken a lot of time to come out. It is the sheer complexity of the subject that I chose to write – Quality - which has taken time. The complexity lies in the way we all perceive things; especially how it relates to the service we provide to the customers and that regardless of how good you believe your offerings or projected solutions are, your clients and customer will be responding to their perception than fact.

But this ‘quality in perception’ can be very difficult to identify and address. A good service for one customer is not always good service to another. We have many different kinds of customers, often the ones forgotten are the internal customers, with different opinions and expectations. In the last few decades, Quality has become a key notion for trade of any good or service. All profit focused organizations want to increase their sales but most of them refuse to invest on the quality factors which are the customer determinants for the company's survivability in the market it is functioning in.

Quality can be based on customer satisfaction, requirement, product or value. Developing a list of quality dimensions for a specific service industry requires determining what is important to customers. Methodologies which are appropriate for this would include Standards, Processes, focus groups and surveys and are grouped into Quality Control and Quality Assurance

Quality control (QC) has a narrower focus than quality assurance. Quality control focuses on the process of producing the product or service with the intent of eliminating problems that might result in defects.

Quality assurance (QA) is a broad concept that focuses on the entire quality system including suppliers and ultimate consumers of the product or service. It includes all activities designed to produce products and services of appropriate quality.

We can have supervisors that are constantly monitoring the quality of the product and service, as well as a quality assurance group that does nothing but reviews to make sure the quality standards are maintained with an in-depth matrix of criteria. All of this should be reported back to the management teams so that good work can be rewarded and improvement plans can be created for deficiencies. This should be one of the key performance indicators that we look at daily, weekly and monthly and constantly work to improve.

Defining the term Quality itself is more complicated than understanding the concept. Every other individual defines quality in more than one way. For eg: It is typical that a developer will only look at the end product and its functionality and call it a high quality delivery when there is no bugs raised. But the fact is, there are other parameters in determining the quality levels of the developer and his delivery which includes and not limited to following coding standards, maintaining code reusability, minimum maintenance requirement for the code and ease of deployment. The most common definition I could derive for Quality is that Quality is an attribute which helps gauge customer satisfaction against the value for money and time spent for meeting their expectations.

I’m sure in this new year, we all will constantly work to maintain and improve quality. We will constantly look at our customer service offerings to see what we can do better. We will look at our competitors to make sure we are in-line or better, and we look at what we believe are the customer expectations to make sure we are in-line or better. At same time, I also recommend focusing on the following to improve the product / service quality:

• Business decisions must not be made purely on the basis of cost


• Regular inspection of quality controlling purposes


• Educate or train the team at work with the necessary tools to trade improving team morales


• Bring in continuous improvements

Wish you all a very happy, healthy, prosperous and QUALITY new year.