Productivity at Workplace

The theory without practical is lame and practical without theory is blind.

Employee productivity is a serious workplace problem and an expensive occurrence for both employers and employees, as well as unpredictable in nature. The productivity of the employees is critical to raise employees’ performance which contributes to the success of organizations, and it is influenced by many factors.

The working environment plays a key role in the employee’s productivity. The working environment is argued to impact immensely on employee’s productivity either towards negative or the positive outcomes. Various thoughts indicate that the factors such as dissatisfaction, cluttered workplaces and the physical environment are playing a major role in the loss of employee’s productivity, which depends on the willingness and the openness of the employees themselves on doing their job. Furthermore, a reward system based on the productivity of the employees motivates them to perform more of their tasks.

There are several factors such as physical work environment, equipment, meaningful work, productivity expectation, and feedback on productivity, reward for good or ineffective system, standard operating procedures, knowledge, skills, and attitudes contribute to employees’ productivity.

The job satisfaction-productivity linkage has been primarily discussed by theorists from these perspectives - 

• Organizational productivity depends on congruence between the technical and social structures of the organization
• The human relations perspective posits that satisfied workers are productive workers

Organizational productivity and efficiency are achieved through employee satisfaction and attention to employees’ physical as well as socio-emotional needs, best achieved by providing autonomy, participation, and mutual trust.

The success of an organization is a function of the productivity of the employees and is a driving force which will push these critical elements of the organization to improve and deliver better performance to push the improvements in the job performance. This research has explored the meaning of. Each factor, namely, work environment, organization culture, and leadership style have a different impact on the productivity of the employees. Furthermore, there are specific dimensions related to culture that impact productivity like creativity level. As for the work environment, all the factors that go under it have an influence on employees’ productivity.

Jack or Master: the dilemma between multitasker and domain expert

Every entrepreneur understands that growth is what creates value. The question is, how do you create the growth that creates value? Marketing, the world over has moved from the 4Ps and is primarily defined by the variables of 3Ps – Product, Process and People. They function as the cornerstone for everything your business does.

The best teams are those that have a mix of skills, expertise, and experience where the exact mix is defined based on the problem you wish to solve. To build the best team, start thinking about what it is that will have the greatest impact on your growth like prioritization, hiring or internal movement of the right resources, to fit it into your growth process, and most importantly stop expecting immediate results or dividends – don’t expect quick wins – sustainable growth evolves and then explodes and is not an overnight success.

It is a well-established fact that hiring or selecting the right team is usually not a cakewalk. It is time-consuming, cost-extensive, and can be a tricky business. Having the right team also helps the likelihood of raising investments. From an investor’s perspective, the firm or fund house looks at the four Ts – team, technology, total addressable market, and traction.

The hiring pattern is determined by a multitude of factors like sector, stage, and business model of the startup. While multitaskers are great for a startup that aspires to have a lean team, domain knowledge is an important indicator of potential job performance. Owing to the challenging environment in a startup, founders often need to hire employees who can work across departments and play a variety of roles at the same time. However, once a startup achieves the product-market fit and scales beyond 100 employees, specialists should perform functions to allow the company to solve problems efficiently while focusing on scaling. As a business grows and moves from agility to stability, companies should start moving from hiring multitaskers to seeking domain experts.

To sum up, domain experts and multitaskers are both valuable and critical for a startup. Hiring a candidate for a particular role involves considering factors like knowledge about the sector, pain points, and the solution.

Mentorship

Till very lately, my perception about having a guide or mentor (professionally and/or personally), was to have that one person whom you look up to as an ideal who guides you throughout your whole career and/or life. This holds some grounds with the fact that our psychology and belief were built on the basis of the numerous questions in our early and mid-childhood, about a childhood hero, role model or ideal, who you look up to and want to become like when you grow up. My understanding and expectations from a mentor revolved around the fact that you learn their way of life, skills, take their advice and (hopefully) shortcut the process that helped them succeed. What took them decades, can take you just half - with their advice.

The truth is, this unicorn of a mentor is a myth. There is no shortcut and no one “perfect” mentor who can help you conquer all your career goals.

Why?

Perhaps, you don’t want the exact skills or behaviours they have for yourself. Maybe you just want 1 or 2 skills they have. They could have incredible technical skills but have terrible communication. Maybe you want to forge your own path - one that no one has ever treaded on before.

I quickly found out that I needed to reframe how I thought about working with mentors. I asked myself, ‘how can I engage a mentor to get what I want out of them?’. Now, I have dozens of mentors that I talk to when I have specific problems or questions. This gives me a diverse set of experiences and data points to craft my own unique pathways.

Storyteller

Sometimes, we just want to hear stories and recounts that could inspire us and could help us pull insights for ourselves. We know people who are successful, but they can’t really explain how they became successful, like if you ask an ace archer how they consistently hit the bullseye or the 10-pointers, they may just say something so simple which might not make any skill-based sense.

The Level 35 Player

This is a person who is an expert in their craft. The question arises here, why Level 35 because it is next to impossible to get audience with even a so-called Level 60-70, let alone a Level 90-100 player because they are inaccessible, have paucity of time and may not be in a position to respond most of the times. Instead, we focus on people who are very skilled at their craft but have the time and are excited to share their skills.

Co-Pilot

These mentors are most helpful because they ride the journey with you and have a higher propensity to offer honest feedback with their skin in the game. The discussions, queries and conclusions should be able to make each other comfortable, honest, and without getting too defensive about either's work.

Evangelist

These are the mentors that have a network and can help you find the right opportunities. Attracting these mentors is hard, but well worth the effort.

The EdTech Moment

With the kids of today, the concern lies with the quality of content rather than the quantity of time spent on devices and digital media. With the younger lot, you often find them staring at a happy-go-lucky cartoon figure jumping around the screen or other interesting captivating videos. I would not completely side with it being healthy or unhealthy, as I said it about the quality. The addiction can either be counterproductive or  beneficial, based on what they are addicted to. Hence, the prerogative lies with the sensible adults or grown-ups around to monitor, guide and streamline the direction in to productive content.

So what is with this screen addiction, so often and lot spoken about for Gen Z. The most alarming and atrocious effect is the non-realisation on the part of the sufferer (like the case for all addictions) that they find very little or no meaning in interactions in the physical world.

Visions from Silicon Valley, the leaders of arguably the world’s foremost innovation hub and the largest exporter of tech ideas, often travel around the world and take on various shapes and forms stitching together the global tech and startup fabric. Even the tech giants here want to cut down the screen time for kids and young adults. The fact of the matter is that screen exposure has today become a necessity and not a privilege like yesteryears. "Food, Clothing, Shelter.... Screen" is the new basic needs of humanity.

A half-a-decade old study titled, “A Large-Scale Test of the Goldilocks Hypothesis: Quantifying the Relations Between Digital-Screen Use and the Mental Well Being of Adolescents” collected information on over 120K young smart devices users to determine if mental wellbeing went down with screen use. The survey showed that while some screen time is great for mental wellbeing, as the amount of time increases, the mental wellbeing falls down. So clearly there’s a sweet spot that the parents have to target.

Children need the right balance of real-world experiences and digital learning and this habit needs to be inculcated among kids in their free time. When Gen X, GenY, to some extent the Millennials were growing up, after homework and other curriculum-related tasks, they would go outside and play and discover new things outdoors and explore the world around them. Now all the information comes to kids through some digital medium. With everything going digital, no one is surprised that children don’t get the same real-world experiences as students used to do in the past. Even schools are being run on tablets with teachers often staring at screens themselves.

Having said this, the exposure to new concepts and ideas through digital learning has broadened the scope of conversations even among kids. Going beyond textbooks means creating a new generation of students that know about the things that are happening outside the classroom and also developing interpersonal skills in a better manner. Though, parents do rue the fact that teacher-student interaction has changed dramatically over the years.

When it comes to technology, education systems need an operating manual and beyond data, perhaps the parents, school and the government need to look at screen time checks within regulations so that kids also get the chance to look at the world outside the tiny rectangle in their palms, or in front of them on the wall.

First Mover Advantage : The Gospel Truth?

A first mover is a service or product that gains a competitive advantage by being the first to market with a product or service. Being first typically enables a company to establish strong brand recognition and customer loyalty before competitors enter the arena.

Some management concepts have such intuitive appeal that their validity is almost taken for granted. First Mover Advantage is one such concept. While FMA is one of the most appealing and diffused concepts in strategy, there is still no conclusive evidence either in favour or against it. A lot depends upon the positive relationship between the age of the firm and the sub-markets it operates in, as much as also the negative correlation between such statistics and the probability of exit. I consider factors favouring the emergence and protection of the advantage lie with the leadership, preemption of assets and switching costs for consumers, thus collectively constituting the entry barrier.

There are examples of where the first-mover advantage paid off. Amazon’s head start in e-commerce turned into hundreds of millions of customers, with a substantial number of them paying an annual subscription just to get free shipping. More often than not, however, the company that beats everyone to the punch doesn’t end up the long-term champion. While being a trailblazer might turn you into an icon, most early entrants end up being also-rans when the dust settles.

There are some benefits to being the first to move:

• Capture customers that can’t fathom the switching costs once competition arrives
• Patents, if any, can protect you and your incumbent technology, methods, and ideas from getting  copied or duplicated by the competitors 
• Branding is easier when you don’t have to differentiate yourself from a similar offering
• Wherever applicable, in case of limited amount or source of resources, a first mover can snatch them up before others come to the party

Meanwhile, being the first business in an industry may not always guarantee an advantage- 

• Later entrants would benefit from the informed buyers and would not need to spend as much on educating consumers
• Later entrants can avoid mistakes made by the first mover
• If the first mover is unable to capture consumers with their products, later entrants can take advantage of this
• Later entrants can reverse-engineer new products and make them better or cheaper
• Later entrants can identify areas of improvement left by the first mover and take advantage of them

New products and categories are constantly emerging around us. In most cases, companies and teams struggle not with whether to enter with a new product category or line of solution altogether but with whether to enter now or later. Practically, first-mover advantage occurs not when you enter a market, but when you start making real dividends out of it, like you say in chess it is not about whether you are blacking white or black, it is about when you start making inroads and "move into an advantageous position".

To make real money in an evolving market, we need to continue to innovate, evolve and analyze the kind of environment that surrounds the new category; to assess the character and depth of our resources, technological as well as economical; and then decide on the type of mover we want to be, whether to play white, play black or go-with the flow and play along when others jump into the pool. Remember, once you have taken the jump or plunge into the water, whether or not you drown or survive, you have one chance and option, to at least swim with or against the waves.

Impact of Geopolitical Crisis

War has immediate consequences for global trade, capital flows, financial markets and access to technology. International sanctions usually have long-term consequences and new elements introduced into new(er) normal.

The ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine may impact certain high-frequency indicators like financial markets, exchange rate and crude prices in the short-term for India. However, it noted that this moment will not have any lasting impact on  the Indian economy. While with the ongoing geopolitical crisis in the northern regions of the globe, the banking sector of the country being resilient and trades insignificantly alarming, the GDP is also expected to have a negligible impact due the conflict, but India is indeed torn in between for the defence imports from Russia and the US. Meanwhile, further sanctions by the West on Russia for payments, can force India to revert to erstwhile INR/RUB exchange for whatever minimal trade.

Looking farther ahead, the decisions of oligopolies like Visa, MasterCard, Google, Apple, PayPal etc to suspend their services as part of sanctions issued in particular geographies, draws attention to the preparedness of the individual economies and financial systems of the countries or regions to deal with such denial of services. India is no stranger to sanctions or denial of services, but still in spite of the major efforts made to shield the economy from the whims and fancies of the stronger economies, we are still not completely insulated or independent as our immediate northern neighbours. In the payment world, India has built substantial capability since the launch of the RuPay and UPI infrastructures under NPCI, which at present process far more transactions in India than the multinational payments technology companies. The only speed-breaker in the overall autonomy is the segment of international transactions for credit cards, which is governed and ruled by the Visa-MasterCard duopoly.

The icing on the cake is the spurt of new age first generation entrepreneurs and disruptive startups in the fintech space which provides the impetus and cushion for financial independence and stability of the financial system.