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Performance coach Vanessa Bennett suggests less is more when devoting energy to your work.
Two of the biggest issues for mortgage brokers and other small business owners always seem to be:
1. Time – we all want more of it
2. Staff – how to keep great staff
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Well, both of these can be dealt with by working on your productivity.
Think about Olympic swimmers: do they just jump in the pool and start flapping their arms and legs and hope for a gold medal? No. In fact, they look effortless.
Most of them look like they are hardly even kicking! How? They work on their technique so that every part of their stroke is aimed to minimise their use of energy so that every stroke feels easier.
So what can small business owners take from the Olympic swimmers?
In order to improve our productivity on a sustained basis, we need to decrease our perceived effort. That is, we can only improve our productivity if it feels easier.
Simple in concept – how do we actually achieve it? There are so many ways to improve productivity.
Personal pace
One way of achieving this is to focus on personal pace – for you and your staff.
So what do we mean by fast and slow pace? Say you give two people the same three tasks and the same time to complete them.
The faster-paced person would prefer to spend a small amount of time on each and chop and change tasks.
For example, it might be 20 minutes on task A then over to task C for 30 minutes and then task B for 25 minutes and so on, until all the tasks are completed by the end of the day.
The slower-paced person would prefer to start with task A and complete it in its entirety without any interruptions and then move to task B and so on until all the tasks are completed by the end of the day.
Which is more productive? Both are equally productive! Assuming both are working to their natural pace, they are both completing their tasks in the same time. It’s just different execution. So how do we use these differences in pace to create time and keep staff?
Freedom of choice
Now the trick to keeping your staff is to let them work more closely to their natural pace even if – shock horror – it’s different to yours.
If they are slower paced than you, then your constant interruptions will stress them out and they will leave the office feeling mentally exhausted.
The more mentally exhausted your staff feel at the end of each day, the less likely they are to stay with you long term.
So let them work more closely to their natural pace so that they improve productivity for you and leave the office feeling energised.
It is good news for them and you won’t have to effectively pay twice their salary to replace them – it’s a win/win.
Vanessa Bennett is the CEO of Inside 80 Performance in Australia – working with leaders and their teams to ensure high performance is improved and sustainable.
