The operationally efficient companies are the ones that drive more profit and they’re the ones that actually have an understanding on the strategic view of their business and what they should be doing going forwards.”
This is part one of my three-part talk to Richard Turner about driving a more efficient business, people’s resistance to change, and personal productivity techniques. Richard is the CEO of Innovantage.
Steve: Recruiters – they want to be more productive or do they prefer to do things the way they’ve always been done?
Richard: They like to stay in their comfort zone.
Steve: Well, that’s a pretty default human trait.
Richard: It is, but it’s also a management issue because in many organizations they’ll give the recruiter multiple tools to try and service their business requirements – and you end up with multiple views of the truth.
The management can’t fully see the productivity of an individual because one person uses social media, another the CRM, somebody else will use word of mouth and their contacts.
The reality is you’re not taking a consolidated view of the business and you’re not forcing the recruiter to use the business tools that actually make them more operationally efficient. Nobody wants to change the tools that they use today, do they? Everybody wants to stay in their comfort zone of doing what they do and doing what they like.
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Steve: As much as we [software providers] all love to push technology as a solution especially with regards to Management Intelligence, there are the top billers who are still writing things down on scraps of paper… and the fact is, they’re the top billers. So they tend to call the shots and management are a little bit afraid of them because you don’t want to piss off your top billers!
Richard: You can’t disrupt your income stream, I absolutely get that. And there are usually a couple of exceptions to a rule but from the technology perspective, you have got to find a way of supporting those top sellers with the same platform. And you’ve got to create, I call it, “One view of the truth.”
Otherwise, an organization makes decisions on partial data or limited information and that’s business critical type decision making, isn’t it? The operationally efficient companies are the ones that drive more profit and they’re the ones that actually have an understanding on the strategic view of their business and what they should be doing going forwards.
Steve: So for any business reading this – what would your top two rules be, to implement tomorrow, in order to increase their productivity effectiveness through measurement?
Richard: Really good question. There are two very simple answers.
Number one, you standardise on a technology platform. You have to have a common platform and you have to have it optimized to the way you want to work. That’s not difficult but people overextend those complexities and the time skills for doing it.
The second thing is, you do it and you do it very quickly. The Draconian view of that move would be that you disable all the surrounding solutions and you have a cut off date where things will be disabled or retired and you force people onto a platform. And you do that very, very aggressively.
And it’s painful, it’s open heart surgery while the patient’s alive. It hurts, but the reality is it harmonizes everything and it forces everybody into the same place very, very quickly. And then you spend your time fixing the real problems as opposed to never getting to what that problem might be when faced with multiple views.
Richard Turner is the CEO of Innovantage.
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