Stop low value work to be efficient

All organisations do some unnecessary work. This work wastes resources that could be used effectively to add more value.

High value-added work is often rewarding and is profitable to the organisation. Work practices, tools, policies and even processes that you developed to serve a specific purpose at a given point in time can become less relevant and effective as your operating environment changes.

Given enough change, they can actually stop adding value at all, while continuing to drain resources as people continue to 'go through the motions' because 'we have always done it'.

The time you release, by eliminating low value activities, is available to improve the way you do things. Else, day-to-day pressures will prevent you using time to think and plan for progress. This happens almost everywhere. Organisations too get into habits like individuals. People defend habits as though it made sense. The habits probably did make sense once but things have moved on.

They result in vast amounts of wasted effort. "I know it doesn't make sense but we have always done it this way." If you ask people to suggest to their manager their ideas to do things better, they nearly always resist.

Listen to staff

The organisation has another habit, which is to discourage staff from expressing their ideas by not being prepared to listen to them. You can deal with this by listening intently to staff and acknowledging their ideas and creativity.

You can avoid too much dependence on higher-ups by encouraging staff to implement their own ideas. Most people like to feel that their work is useful. You may find that some work you do is unnecessary. If you get information or work from someone else that you do not need, you could tell them so, gently.

It's probably understandable that when we think of 'being better' and 'doing more', our thoughts go first to needing and getting more resources, more capacity - a bigger budget and more staff. But from experience, there's almost always the opportunity, first, to better optimise resources by routinely ridding your company's 'garage' of what mattered yesterday, so you can re-focus those resources on to what matters today. Think of it as doing more with what you've already got - to the great benefit of your company's bottom line.

Assumptions

If people don't know what happens to their work, then it is hard to make precise judgements about what to do. If you know that the work you do will determine if a product gets to a customer today, tomorrow or not at all, then this is motivating; you see the fruits of your work. When you know the context of your work, you can decide what to do and what to drop. You could encourage people to trace their work across the organisation.

The assumptions that people make, strongly influence the work they do. Most managers in an organisation may have a common assumption. For example, they may have the assumption that you cannot influence a tedious and bureaucratic system that is imposed on the organisation from outside. The work reduction caused by a small change might be very large.

If you simply accept the assumption without rigorously testing it, then the unnecessary work will continue indefinitely.

People make assumptions too. Someone might assume that he or she has to go on doing the work in a particular way. "We have always done it like this. My manager wouldn't agree to any shortcuts so there is no point in asking him."

Assumptions are a cultural issue. Individual managers can encourage their staff to question assumptions by asking for and listening to their radical ideas. "If this was your section or department or organisation, what would you have us do differently?" You will hope to make improvements in the way you and your team work routinely. This is part of the job of all managers.

Lean organisations

When people find the culture of their organisation too critical, they work defensively to avoid people criticising them or catching them out. They may even make work to appear busy or useful. If organisations are too 'lean' there is no time to review the effectiveness of systems and improve or eliminate them. Paradoxically, the leanness of resources causes wasted effort.

Effective organisations need some slack to allow time to improve. Managers, who are under stress and time pressure, find it very difficult to listen to ideas on how the organisation could do things better.

They may find it hard to hear anything from their staff. This will block the flow of creative ideas from their staff. Then improvements to the way you do things get lost.

The old patterns remain and you do unnecessary work. In the ideal organisation, people would feel safe to talk openly about their mistakes without fear of reprisals. Managers and others would work together to learn from the mistake so it is less likely to recur in the future.

Those who make no mistakes might, depending on their jobs, may not be taking enough risks.