Productivity Comes Second

There is a lot of talk today about worker productivity. But that talk only seems to be coming from business leaders and not the workers themselves, at least not in that terminology.

When was the last time you heard a coworker say, "I wish I could increase my productivity"? Not very often, at least not in that way. It probably sounded more like, "My day is really dragging," or "I wish it was Friday," or worse, "I'm thinking of finding a job somewhere else."

At their core, all of these statements mean the same thing:

I want to feel passionate about my job.

Traditional thinking has been that business leaders should focus first on boosting productivity, and any activities that make an employee happy are secondary to that goal.

Employees see things from a different perspective. They want to be happy. They want to feel engaged and passionate about what they're doing. They want to know that their hard work matters and will be appreciated.

To them, productivity comes second.

There is a book by Marsha Sinetar called "Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow." A variance of that is the quote by Marc Anthony, "If you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." Both Sinetar and Anthony understand the relationship between employee engagement and passion and the productivity that results from it.

Statistics back this up.

Happy employees can be up to 200% more productive than their disengaged counterparts.

Conversely, unhappy employees can cost the company up to 3x their annual salary.

According to one study, "Employers lose an estimated $550 billion in lost productivity each year because of a lack of engagement with the job."¹

Productivity can be achieved on its own, but the biggest gains are brought about when employee happiness and engagement come first. To put it another way, research clearly shows that maximum productivity cannot be achieved when workers are not engaged.

How do you get happy—and therefore productive—employees?

It all starts by putting the right people into the right seats.

The next step is to measure and boost productivity with the Performance Fuel application at eRep. The Performance Formula focuses on providing employees with what they need to feel passionate about their jobs: clarity, purpose, and feedback. If you have the right people in the right seats based on their CVI profile, the performance formula can take your team's productivity into overdrive.

It all begins with the right hire. Get an account on eRep and create a Top Performer Profile™, then match candidates with the right Core Values Index score. Once you have the right people in the right seats, measure their engagement through the Happiness Index. Then, achieve peak productivity by engaging eRep's Performance Fuel application.

Building a team of rockstar employees can be achieved with the eRep formula built upon the foundation of the Core Values Index.

NOTES:

[1] https://www.surepayroll.com/resources/blog/productivity-prohibitors-how-to-stop-them-in-their-tracks