Tips on Productivity & Motivation

Increasing Productivity & Motivation is key to Growing Profit
Growing Profit is normally one of the principal goals of business and we have a mass of advice to assist with this goal.

Every Manager has a number of ‘Levers’ that they can ‘pull’ to Grow Profit. 

12Faces collects and distils out the best advice on how to use these LEVERS to advance the Goal of improving YOUR BUSINESS’ PROFITABILITY. 

The Levers include such things as Marketing, Sales, Human Resources, Accounting…. 

This advice is made available to you in a manner designed for busy Business Operators:

• Choose quickly.
• Implement the best and most applicable Profit Growth Levers.

Articles to get the most out of the people connected to your business:

• Secrets to Staff Bonus Plans:
  Read this if you want to know more about how bonuses should be constructed to drive the goals of the business. 
  Many bonus systems are not well thought out and don’t help to improve the things the owner/operator really wants while costing money and raising the expectation of the staff. 
  Learn about a whole range of techniques you can use to to construct a workable set of goals for your business that focus on achieving what you want.

• What Parkinson’s Law Tells Us About Wasted Work:
  Northcote Parkinson, writing in 1955, semi humorously proposed his ‘law’ that “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion”.
  This is very true. 
  Staff will often take as much time as is available to them to work on a project even though that might mean unnecessary embellishments.

• SM3.0 How to De-Stress Intro:
  There are straight forward ways of reducing the 4 main contributors to stress and they do not take very long to implement.
  This article is an introduction to the Skills Module which shows how to convert “distress” to “de-stress”.
  Included within the Skills Module is a video talking about how to reduce these four main sources of stress.

• Double Your Personal Productivity in Under Two Weeks:

  There just never seems to be enough time in the life of a manager to get all the things queued up in front of you done.
  Do you know that feeling?
  It doesn’t have to be like that though.
  Two simple skills can make you up to 16 times more productive!

• Your Life Plan:
  The old adage that ‘money isn’t everything’ is very true.
  Wealth, in its own right, is a pretty limited description of what goes together to make a life worth living.
  In 12Faces, we stress the need for a clear sense of direction for your business by way of having clear goals.
  This article covers similar ground for YOU.

• Labour Efficiency Ratio Metric:
  The cost of Labour is one of the largest overhead expenses in most businesses.
  Any inefficiency here is an expense that must be recovered from the potential Profit of the organisation.
  Labour tends to grow of its own accord, it is very difficult for the business operator to know just how Labour productivity is going as costs are rising.
  The Labour Efficiency Ratio, discussed in this article, is an early warning alert if wages are moving in the wrong direction.

• Kanban:
  Kanbans are a tool for structuring how work flows into the work-in-progress queues so that workers do not get overloaded and can use their time most effectively.
  Kanbans, and variations on them, are widely used in Software Projects (e.g. Scrum and Agile) and Manufacturing (e.g. Lean and Six Sigma).
  The fundamental principle of Kanban is to only produce something when it is required by a downstream step.

• Getting Stuff Done When There Is Lots:
  As a business manager, there is always more to be done than you possibly have time for.
  If you want to work reasonable hours and have a life outside the business, you will have to prioritise what you do.
  This Leaders Briefing describes several techniques that can help you reduce the overwhelming number of things you have to do to a more manageable approach.
  If you don’t learn to manage the workload, you will find yourself flitting from one task to another and not getting much of importance done.
  Follow the link above to register.

• Agile / Scrum / Kanban:
  Businesses have struggled with prioritising time, several techniques to overcome this, that are very similar, have evolved.
  The three best known of these are Agile, Scrum and the Japanese word Kanban.
  Various references cite improvements in team productivity ranging from 25% to 300% by using these methods.
  This article introduces these concepts and a way of using a free software app named Trello to manage the process.

We are here to help: 

Do not hesitate to Contact Us.

Utilise the public Q&A forum.

Leave your Comments at the bottom of each article.