Become 40% More Productive Top performing organisations get more done by 10am on a Thursday than most companies achieve in a full week. Bain & Co partner, Michael Mankins reveals their secret to success.

• Player: Michael Mankins
• Company: Bain & Company
• Visit: www.bain.com/offices/johannesburg/

When Bain & Company partner, Michael Mankins evaluates businesses, he clearly distinguishes between efficiency and productivity. Efficiency is producing the same amount with less — in other words, finding and eliminating wastages. Productivity, on the other hand, is producing more with the same, which requires an increased output per unit of input and removing obstacles to productivity.

Interestingly, when businesses face challenges or tough operating conditions, the first response is always to become more efficient, instead of more productive. Restructuring and "rightsizing' are the result. The problem, says Michael, is that when companies take people out, they don't take the work out, and so the people end up coming back, along with the costs.

A better response, he says, is to identify the work that could be removed to free up time, which could then be invested in producing higher levels of output. While businesses have become very good at tracking the productivity levels of blue-collar and manufacturing workers, tracking the productivity of knowledge workers is entirely different.

"There's no data around white-collar productivity," says Michael. "The problem is that the world is shifting towards knowledge work, and so, if we can't measure productivity, output and obstacles in that space, businesses will never get the great levels of performance they're looking for."

Because of a complete lack of statistics in this area, when Michael and his colleague, Eric Garton, were approached by Harvard Business Review Press to write a book dealing with this issue, they had to devise a way of looking at the relative productivity of organisations comprised of white-collar workers.

The results were unexpected. "We were asked to research the difference between top performing organisations (the top quartile) compared to average organisations. I honestly thought the answers would be obvious, even if we didn't yet have the tools to track them. I thought the best companies would have the best people. That's 90% of the answer. Simple as that." As it turned out, it wasn't that simple at all.

Of the 308 organisations in the study, drawn from a global pool, the average star performer or A-player was one in seven employees. This statistic held true whether the company was in the top 25% of performers or an average performer. The difference was that the top performing businesses were 40% more productive than their counterparts — and yet their mix of talent, on average, was the same.

"There were some exceptions, but on the whole, the best in our research accomplishes as much by 10am on a Thursday as the rest do the whole week. And they continue to innovate, serve customers and execute on great ideas — all with the same percentage of A-players as other, more mediocre businesses." So, what were the differentiating factors?

WHAT'S DRAGGING YOUR ORGANISATION DOWN?

First, we need to understand how Michael and Eric approached their research before we can understand — and implement — their conclusions. "We began with the notion that every company starts with the ability to produce 100 if they have a workforce that's comprised of average talent, that's reasonably satisfied with their job and can dedicate 100% of their time to productivity — bearing in mind that no-one can dedicate 100% of their time to productive tasks.

"The question we were focusing on was around bureaucratic procedures, complex processes and anything else that wastes time and gets in the way of people getting things done, but doesn't lead to higher quality output or better service to customers. That's what we call organisational drag. You start at 100 and then the organisation drags you down.

The good news is that you can make up for organisational drag in three ways: First, you can make better use of everyone's time. Second, you can manage your talent better by deploying it in smarter ways, which includes placing it in the right roles, teaming it more effectively and leading it more effectively. Third, you can unleash the discretionary energy of your workforce by engaging them more effectively."

This trifecta — time, talent and energy — became the basis for Michael and Eric's book, Time, Talent, Energy: Overcome Organizational Drag & Unleash Your Team's Productive Power. "The way you manage the scarce resource of talent can make up for some, potentially even all, of what you lose to organisational drag," says Michael.

WHAT THE RESEARCH REVEALED: TIME

"Wasted time is not an individual problem," says Michael. "It's an organisational problem. The symptoms include excess emails and meetings and far more reports being generated than the business needs to operate." These are all manifestations of an underlying pathology of organisational complexity, which is managed by senior leadership.

"The best companies lose about 13% of their productive activity to organisational drag. The rest lose 25%. The most important thing is to reduce the number of unnecessary interactions that workers are having. That means meetings and ecommunications need to be relooked."

The easiest manifestation for Michael and Eric to observe were hours committed to meetings and how much time workers spend dealing with ecommunications. What's left-over is the time people can actually get some work done.

What they found is that the average mid-level manager works 46 hours a week. 23 hours are dedicated to meetings and another ten hours to ecommunication. That leaves 13 hours to get some work done — except that it doesn't.

"It's difficult to do deep work in periods of time less than 20 minutes. When we subtracted all the other distractions that happen daily, we were left with just six and a half hours each week to do work." What's even scarier about this statistic is the fact that meeting work and ecommunication time is increasing by 7% to 8% each year and doubles every nine years.

If left unchecked, no-one will have the time to get any work done. "This is why everyone plays catch-up after hours and on weekends," says Michael.

"One of my clients told me that his most productive meeting is at 6.30am on a Saturday, because it doesn't involve one minute that isn't required or one individual that doesn't absolutely need to be there.

If the same meeting was held at 2pm on a Tuesday, there'd be twice as many people, it would be twice as long and there'd probably be biscuits." The point is clear: We don't treat time as the precious resource that it is, and if we did, we would radically shift our behaviour.

Start by asking what work needs to be done and then figure out the best structure to do that work. "Don't confuse having a lean structure that does the wrong work with being effective," says Michael. "One of the biggest problems we see is that companies are not particularly good at stopping things.

Things get added incrementally, but nothing ever gets taken away. For example, we found that 62% of the reports generated by one of our clients had a producer — but no consumer. Time, attention and energy was invested in reports that no one needed and no one read.

"Ask yourself: How many initiatives have you shut down? If you made the decision that you could only do ten initiatives effectively, and each time you added an initiative, one had to be eliminated, what would your organisation look like? "Unless you routinely clean your house, it gets cluttered. The same is true of companies. Initiatives spawn meetings, ecommunications and reports, which all lead to organisational drag."

WHAT THE RESEARCH REVEALED: TALENT

According to Michael, the biggest element in their research that explained the 40% differential in productivity is the way that top performing organisations manage talent. "We conducted research in 2017 that revealed the productivity difference between the best workers and average employees.

Everyone knows that A-level talent can make a big difference to an organisation's performance, but not everyone knows just how big that difference is." To put it in context, the top developer at Apple writes nine times more usable code than the average software developer in Silicon Valley.

The best blackjack dealer at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas keeps his table playing at least five times as long as the average dealer on the Strip. The best sales associate at Nordstrom sells at least eight times as much as the average sales associate walking the floor at other department stores.

The best transplant surgeon at Cleveland Clinic has a patient survival rate at least six times longer than that of the average transplant surgeon. And the best fish butcher at Le Bernadin restaurant in New York can portion as much fish in an hour as the average prep cook can manage in three hours.

It doesn't matter what industry you investigate, A-level talent is exponentially more productive than everyone else. This is why Michael thought that the obvious answer to why some organisations perform better than others is the mix of talented employees they've attracted.

"When we asked senior leaders to estimate the percentage of their workforce that they would classify as top performers or A-level talent, the average response was slightly less than 15%. And that's despite the fact that most companies have spent vast sums of money in the so-called war for talent."

The big difference, as Michael and Eric discovered, is how that talent is deployed. "It's what they do with that one in seven employees that makes the biggest difference," says Michael. "Most companies use a model called unintentional egalitarianism, which basically means that they spread star talent across all roles.

The best on the other hand, are more likely to deploy intentional non-egalitarianism. They ensure that business-critical roles are held by A-level talent." The challenge is that approximately 5% of the roles in most companies explain 95% of a company's ability to execute its strategy, and very few organisations articulate which roles those are — but the ones that do tend to be top performers.

"There's an excellent historical example of this at work," says Michael. "Between 1988 and 1994, Gap was a high-flyer in the retail sector. They performed globally on all levels — they grew faster than anyone else, were more profitable, had higher shareholder returns, and were the most admired company.

"During that time period, the organisation was led by Mickey Drexler, and his strategy was to focus on what he believed was Gap's critical role, which was merchandising. He wanted every merchandiser to be a star. "No one will tell us what the colour is this year — we're going to tell the world. We're going to determine which styles are in and what everyone will be wearing.'

"And they did. If you want proof that Gap's merchandisers were in fact stars during that period, you can look at today's CEOs and COOs of the world's largest retailers. Most of them were merchandisers at Gap during those years."The challenge of course is that everyone is always trying to hire stars, and yet only 15% of employees can be described as A-level talent. What can organisations do to utilise their stars wisely?

"First, move a star into a different position if they're not in a business-critical role. To achieve this, how you define a star might have to change. Some companies hire for positions, and others hire for skills across positions. Stars, in my view, are more the latter. They can learn different skills and fill different roles.

"Second, start defining your business-critical roles. If you ask executives what percentage of their roles are business critical, most say 54%. They're not discerning.

It's unintentional, because they don't want to signal to their workers who aren't in a business-critical role that they're not as valuable to the organisation, but the reality is that people figure it out anyway, and you just end up with business-critical roles that aren't filled by the right people, and stars in positions that anyone else could fill."

TEAMS PERFORM BETTER THAN INDIVIDUALS

To understand how important teams are when deploying talent, Michael uses an example from the world of racing — Nascar in the US to be precise. "Between 2008 and 2011, there was one pit crew that outperformed everyone else on the track," he says. "A standard pit stop is 77 manoeuvres, and this crew could complete them in 12,12 seconds, which was faster than any other team.

However, if you took one team member out and substituted them with an average team member, that time jumped to 23 seconds. Substitute a second team member, and it was now 45 seconds. The lesson is simple: As the percentage of star players on a team goes up, the productivity of that team goes up — and it's not linear."

Michael and Eric also discovered that the role leadership plays on team productivity is both measurable and exponential. "In 2011, the National Bureau of Economic Research wanted to quantify the impact of a great boss on team productivity. They found that a great boss can increase the productivity of an average team by 11%, which is the same as adding another member to a nine-member team.

"If you take that same boss and put them in charge of an all-star team, productivity is increased by 18%, and this is with a team whose productivity was exponentially higher to begin with. Great bosses act as a force multiplier on the force multiplier of all-star teams."

According to Michael and Eric's research however, what most organisations tend to do is place a great boss with an under-performing team in the hopes of improving them, when what they should be doing is pairing great bosses with great teams.

"We did a survey that asked a simple question: When your company has a mission-critical initiative, how do you assemble the team? A: Based on whomever is available. B: Based on perceived subject matter expertise. C: We attempt to create balanced teams of A, B and C players to foster the development of the team. D: We create all-star teams and we put our best leaders in charge of them.

"We thought everyone would answer D. We were wrong. 30% of our bottom three quartiles answered B, closely followed by C, and then A. Only 8% of them answered D. "The results were very different in our top-performing quartile though.

There, 81% of respondents answered D. In other words, the 25% most productive companies in our study set were ten times more likely to assemble all-star teams with their best players than the remaining 75% of the organisations in our research."

How talent is deployed makes a difference. "I recently had this highlighted for me through another sporting analogy. The world record for the 400-metre relay is faster than the 100-metre dash multiplied four times. How is that possible?

When your role is clear and your position is clear, the handoff is seamless. Under these conditions, the best teams outperform a collection of the best individuals."

Michael does offer a word of advice though. "Don't fall into the trap of believing that if you do have the best talent, you don't need to worry about anything else. I don't believe that's true. There are always higher levels of performance that can be achieved because there are always areas you can improve on."

WHAT THE RESEARCH REVEALS: ENERGY

According to Michael, employee engagement and inspiration is a hierarchy. "There are a set of qualifiers that have to be met just to feel satisfied in your job: You need to feel safe, have the resources you need, feel that you're relatively unencumbered in getting your job done every day and that you're rewarded fairly.

"To be engaged, these all need to meet, and more. Now you also need to feel part of a team, that you're learning on the job, that you're having an impact and that you have a level of autonomy." Inspiration takes this a step further.

"Inspired employees either have a personal mission that is so aligned with the company's mission that they're inspired to come to work every day, or the leadership of their immediate supervisors is incredibly inspiring, or both." Why does this matter? Because how satisfied, engaged or inspired your employees are has a real, tangible impact on productivity.

"Engaged employees are 45% more productive than satisfied employees. An inspired employee is 55% more productive than an engaged employee and 125% more productive than a satisfied employee."

The really scary statistic is that 66% of all employees are only satisfied or even dissatisfied with their jobs, 21% are engaged, and only 13% are inspired. "These statistics are pretty constant, although top organisations can improve their engaged and inspired ratios," says Michael.

"What we found amongst those companies that did have more engaged and inspired workers was that they all tended to believe that inspiration can be taught. It's not innate. You can become an inspirational leader with the right attitude and training.

"For example, one organisation surveys its employees every six months and specifically asks workers to rate how inspirational their leaders are. If you're rated uninspiring by your team for the first time, you're given training. If, six months later, you're still rated uninspiring, you're given access to a coach to evaluate why the tools aren't working for you.

"By the third, two questions are asked: Should you be a leader, and should you be at the company? Many productive employees can be effective individual contributors but aren't necessarily leaders, or aren't happy as leaders, and would best serve the organisation in a different role. The second question is tougher, but even more important.

If an inspired employee is 55% more productive than an engaged employee and 125% more than a satisfied employee, an uninspiring leader is a tax on the performance of the company, and there has to be a consequence to that. We have to constantly enrich our workforce and leaders need to be included in that."

The problem is that very few organisations are asking how inspiring their leaders are. "If you don't know if your employees are engaged or if your leadership is inspiring, you can't address it," he says. "You can take a satisfied employee and make them engaged, but you can't inspire someone if they aren't first engaged — that's the hierarchy.

Employee engagement is largely achieved through the way you manage teams. You have to give people the sense that they are having an impact, working within a team and learning. Get that right, and you'll unlock a powerful level of discretionary energy that will drive productivity in your organisation."