Getting more out of your staff through simple and effective strategies can deliver immediate returns.
It began as search engine optimisation. Then there was talk of website optimisation. Mobile optimisation. Social media optimisation. Whatever way we look, optimisation is everywhere.
You’ve all heard of optimising your website. Now it’s time to optimise your workforce.
Take cycling as an example. Under the stewardship of Sir Dave Brailsford, British Cycling and latterly Team Sky Procycling have seen unprecedented success. A large part of this has been down to Brailsford’s aggregation of marginal gains theory.
In a nutshell, this means finding small percentage improvements across everything you do. In terms of optimisation, this is performance optimisation.
Brailsford and his team began with the basics: training, mechanics, tyres, weight. Then they took it a step further than anyone else had ever thought about. They hired the best psychologists for riders, provided unique bedding for each rider, purified the air of the hotel rooms they were staying in…they found gains in areas that others took for granted.
Finding percentage gains in revenue and making marginal savings on cost soon add up.
With Team Sky, Brailsford set the target of winning the Tour de France, cycling’s premier race, with a British rider within 5 years. It only took them 3 of these years. Not only did they win it, the following year thy successfully defended the crown with a optimisation methodology that was relentlessly applied.
The same theory and methodology applies to business. With an effective workforce management tool you can find gains in scheduling, reporting, communications, staff morale, forecasting, budgeting and time management. It can be applied to all your costs and all your revenue streams, then to every element that make them up.
All these marginal gains add up to a much bigger overall again. If a 10% reduction in cost can be found in making every aspect of workforce management more efficient and 10% increase in revenue can be found by small increases in all aspects in productivity then all of a sudden you’re looking at a huge difference.
Find the areas where you can make marginal gains, put the process in place to make them happen and then work towards the result you want to see.
Workforce management leads to workforce optimisation. And an optimised workforce is one that is constantly performing at its peak, constantly evolving and constantly striving to deliver better results.