Eureka Moment: How to Accelerate Efficiency #87

After all, all art is experience. Hello and welcome to this Eureka episode of The Company Doctor, where Gary calls upon his years of experience to provide a surprising solution to a common conundrum. For this episode's flash of inspiration, we're talking about how to accelerate efficiency, and being the efficiency wizard that he is, Gary goes above and beyond, providing not one, but two Eureka moments.

Eureka! One day we'll get that perfect.

Well, perfect timing.

Today wasn't that day.

No, but it's still a eureka moment.

It is.

We're live together again. We're rolling new, new live stuff and we're talking about efficiency, how to accelerate efficiency. Great. How cool is that?

It's very cool.

And just to remind people of the format of these, these are, you know, we pick a topic. I don't know anything about it, which you're probably used to by now.

That's normal really.

Yeah. And then Gary reveals a sort of eureka moment often at the end, sometimes right at the beginning though.

It's often been, you've started with the Solutions.

Yeah, I won't today. Um, but today is going to be a classic Eureka moment, and we're talking about—

so, the IT efficiency.

Brilliant.

Hit me. Well, so here's the thing, right? Everyone's complaining. Let's use the NHS as an example, right? Everyone says the NHS isn't working. It isn't. So we need to add more people. That isn't the answer. If you add more people, it won't be more efficient, and you've got to change the way you work, right? And I think when I look at people in the workplace, we're all the same, where everyone's busy, you know, back to back, blah, blah, blah. Not even time to go to the toilet in between team calls. But are we moving forward in the way we want? Are we getting things done in the way we want? Are we being efficient in the way we want?

I think not.

Good answer, George. So I thought we'd do this episode with a bit of eureka about how do we accelerate efficiency. It's not the only way, but we've got some ideas about it.

And presumably with not having to use as many people, I guess. That's sort of where it's headed.

Yeah, exactly. And here's an example, right? I know we can improve efficiency and you'll relate to this, people listening. When you're about to go on holiday, you become super efficient because you write things down, you give things to people to do, you make sure that when you come back from your holiday, you are not overloaded. Although, and I appreciate that it's hard to do that, but that's when you become super efficient. My suggestion, and this is not the eureka moment, is that your mindset is you do that every day.

I mean, that in itself would be quite a good eureka moment. It would be sort of like set yourself out-of-office tasks on a daily basis.

Then I was going to have those eureka, but I've got an even better one. Wow. I know, you should get one at the beginning. It's like a eureka sandwich at the beginning.

A delicious eureka sandwich.

Yeah. All right. With extra chili sauce. You like it? Yeah, I do like it. But, you know, think about yourself, George, in your work environment, you know, Is everyone sort of busy, but are they doing, are they being efficient? Are they doing the things they need to do?

Well, that's sort of become a badge of honor, isn't it, to talk about how busy you are? And if you never have anyone sort of say, I'm actually not that busy, you know, I'm pretty relaxed and not much on at the moment, it's almost seen as a bad thing.

You know what, this is funny and not wanting to insult anyone, but have you ever come across a manager that says, I'm so busy, so busy? And just to let you know, if you are a manager and you say that, your staff are thinking, I don't care how busy you are. In fact, it means you're inefficient. So it's never good to just tell people you're busy. You should be like the duck in water, just calmly moving through and underneath your feet are flapping like crazy. That's the answer.

Yeah, I like that. That's not what you were thinking. No, no, no.

I like that a lot.

And yeah, I think it's good advice. I think people need to take it on board because it does get a bit boring. And, you know, that's become almost like the conversation starter in business. I found people will say, you know, how's it going? Are you busy at the moment? And everyone will say, yeah, yeah, really busy. And that's just become the way conversations are. It's almost like, how are you? The new how are you is, are you busy? And the response is, instead of yeah, I'm fine, it's yeah, really busy.

And also we've got a better answer for how are you as well, haven't we? When someone says, how are you? What do you say? Fantastic. I'm fantastic. And then people go, wow. Anyway, that's another podcast. So yeah, talking about this efficiency. So I genuinely believe that people fill their days. So I don't know if people realize listening, but the weekend came from Henry Ford, because he was trying to find ways that people could be more efficient on the production line. And he worked out there was a limit to people spending their time. So he decided to give people 2 days off, and therefore they would not— not because he was being kind, but they could be more efficient. And if you remember back, George, to our episode around the 4-day week, it was proven around the world, the same experiment, that the 4-day week didn't reduce revenue. Reduced sickness by 65%, improved engagement by 85%. People were getting more out of that 4-day week. So there must be something in it. Yeah, yeah. It's less time, more efficient.

What does that mean?

Yeah.

And that's happening all over the world now, isn't it? More and more people are not just trialing the 4-day week, but they're adopting it probably. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, you hear a lot of people who will do 5 days' work in 4 days and they just— because they just make themselves more efficient. You just sort of have to convince your manager that you're trustworthy enough to do that.

But it's not possible in all businesses. If you're in a professional services this business, you're in operations, you need to be around. But I'm just talking about it because the principle, there's something in it, right? So what are people doing in less time and being more efficient? It doesn't make sense, right?

Yeah. And this does tie into the, what you were saying about, you know, when you're preparing to go on holiday, there's that sort of rush almost, you know, you suddenly become hyper-efficient because, you know, there's almost like a deadline on it.

Exactly. So we, you know, we're getting to this eureka moment. I'm just holding it back a little bit more. Yeah. Yeah. So two things to consider. If you want to be more efficient, the most important thing you need to do is either get more help or change the way you work. Would you agree? Yes, I would agree. And so the changing the way you work bit, and we did an episode on getting back in your time machine.

Mm-hmm.

Marty, you remember that?

Yeah.

You know, because if you had the chance to stand back from what you did today, what would you do differently? You know, would you still be working at the same pace? Are you spending time on the right things? If you're about to go on holiday, would you be more efficient? So that's a starting point. And I think it's important to always stop and stand back from it. I don't know if I ever told the story about the lumberjack. Have I bored you with this story?

I don't think so.

Okay. There was a lumberjack. He was the most amazing lumberjack. He chopped down more trees than anyone else. But there was a time where he wasn't chopping down that many trees and he was the best lumberjack out there. And the guy that he was working for one day said, this is a short version, said to him, have you ever considered to take the time to sharpen your axe, because it doesn't matter how good you are, if you're not being efficient, then you won't get where you need to get. Yeah. Because there's only one of you. Yeah. And that, and that's the basis of my eureka moment. There's only one of you.

Yeah.

So if you're a micromanager or you're better than anyone else, which I'm sure you are, even if you're spending 120% of your time, you'll never be as good as two people at 80%. And so my eureka moment is this.

You ready for it? I'm ready.

It's basically So smartly give other people leadership, use other people to help you do your work. I don't mean delegate or dump on people, but my eureka moment is give work to other people, get them involved in what you're doing, give them tasks to do, treat them like they work for you, but share the workload with other people because they're probably smarter at some of the things that you need to get done. People like to be given leadership if you're a manager, for sure. Then you've got a little army of people that are working with you to get the task done. The more you do that, and you do need to change the way you work, the more efficient that you will be. Don't try and do everything yourself. If you're a manager, biggest mistake managers make is to do it all themselves because they're better. And then there's the word delegation. Delegation doesn't mean dump on people. It means get other people to help you do the work. If you think about that, my eureka moment is get other people to help you do the work. Eureka!

Yeah, I love it. And again, as with all of these eurekas, it's quite a simple thing, but it just takes that motivation in order to reframe how you work.

I think that's a good one because now there's like 2 of you, 5 of you, 10 of you doing the work. You divide it between you, work out who's good at doing what.

Well, as you say, people like to be brought into that on those sorts of projects, don't they? It sort of gives them a feeling of responsibility and importance.

Yeah, I mean, I was watching— I very rarely watch The Apprentice. I was watching The Apprentice and they make someone the project manager, which is always a kiss of death., and that person divides the work, normally badly, between the group. Yeah. But generally the whole, the whole group, you can't do it on your own because some of their tasks are going out to meet with someone or finding a partner or designing a product. I think it's a good snapshot of life, right? Where you're trying to do so many different tasks that you can't physically do it on your own. So get the team to do it. Don't be like the apprentice though, because it's, it's not positive experience, but no, have a positive version of the apprentice.

Well, look at this podcast. This is two people collaborating to create one wonderful show.

Two people make hundreds of people. Exactly. Eureka, John.

Love it.

John.

Say the name again.

Thank you, Gary Gamp. Eureka, George.

Eureka, George. Eureka, Gary. Eureka, everybody. Thank you for listening.

I hope you found it useful. Speak to you soon.