Ever since business became an academic study, and MBAs a thing, talk about efficiency has been on the up and up. Yet for all the talk, I never cease to find it surprising how something can be constantly on people's lips yet rarely discussed. The challenge for organisations is recognising when people are merely mentioning efficiency and when they are actually achieving it.
Achieving meaningful change in the efficiency space is going to be very hard for most organisations. This is because a little under half of CEO direct reports do not have responsibility for P&L. Perhaps even more alarmingly, in the efficiency space, middle managers and key employees who are the engine room of an organisation can be separated from the CEO by up to 12 layers of management. Meaning that unless a CEO 'walks the floor' and finds ways to connect with front line workers, they will end up an archetypal boss in an ivory tower, perplexed as to why the senior leadership is unable to achieve meaningful efficiencies despite a sound organisational strategy.
But the depressing news does not stop there. COVID, while ushering in a new age of working from home, has also caused bloat in organisations with tremendous growth experienced in Teams/Slack messages, emails, unending Zoom meetings, and utterly futile interactions. The result is that organisations, particularly in the technology sector, who have swelled their ranks over the last few years, are punching below their weight due to the inefficiencies introduced by the new ways of working. A situation that is compounded by the concurrent unlocking of latent GenMe attitudes in a wider section of the workforce than was originally believed in the popular approach of 'blame it on the Millennials'.
Efficiency At All Levels
The trap for managers in getting the most out of the efficiency lifecycle is that over the years, efficiency has gotten a bad rap—particularly among front line workers. This is because when the average employee hears 'we're focussing on efficiency', it usually translates to more work with fewer resources. Picking up the responsibilities that were previously done by a colleague who was just let go or finding that the supplies in the kitchenette have vanished and been replaced with the opportunity to 'bring things from home'. And we wonder why our teams are cynical when we start talking efficiency.
