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(Published in b-innovative, the member magazine of the Auckland Chamber of Commerce, 2010.)
Once, productivity was about how many widgets came off the production line. Today, productivity is different for every business.
It might mean the speed at which you deal with incoming emails, or how many sales calls you can make in a given time, or how connected you are with your customers.
Change has been so extraordinarily rapid it is difficult for even the tech-savvy to keep up. Remember how letters were replaced by email? That’s been superseded by instant messaging. Remember how meetings took up valuable work time, especially when travel was involved? Now, meetings are held online.
We do a lot of things differently today, thanks to new technologies like virtualisation, cloud computing, electronic processing and online networking. These techniques will help New Zealand businesses lift their productivity levels because statistics show we lag well behind Australia.
In fact, we’re worse off now than during the Muldoon years. Then, productivity grew 1.4% each year. It continued to do so intermittently until 2000, but since then it’s been all downhill. The most recent figures (2006–2009) show a slide of -0.3%.
Compare this with our trans-Tasman neighbours, where the increase in disposable income per person is twice ours. If we are to have any hope of catching up, we need to lift our productivity. And smartly.
b-innovative asked three business leaders for their ideas.