Boosting The Productivity Of Knowledge Workers
Organizations around the world struggle to crack the code for improving the effectiveness of managers, salespeople, scientists, and others whose jobs consist primarily of interactions—with other employees, customers, and suppliers—and complex decision making based on knowledge and judgment. The stakes are high: raising the productivity of these workers, who constitute a large and growing share of the workforce in developed economies, represents a major opportunity for companies, as well as for countries with low birthrates that hope to maintain GDP growth. This lack of clarity is partly because knowledge work involves more diverse and amorphous tasks than do production or clerical positions, where the relatively clear-cut, predictable activities make jobs easier to automate or streamline. Since knowledge workers spend half their time on interactions, our research and experience suggest that companies should first explore the productivity barriers that impede these interactions. The communities feature online tools to help geographically dispersed members search for basic information (say, member roles and the specific challenges they are addressing) and sometimes use the latest social-networking tools to provide more sophisticated information, including whom the members have worked or trained with. Complex interactions often require contact with people in other departments or divisions, making it hard for workers to assess a colleague’s level of expertise or apply the advice they may receive. To overcome contextual barriers, organizations can rotate employees across teams and divisions or create forums where specialists in different areas can learn about one another’s work. The final barrier is time, or rather the perceived lack of it. If valuable interactions are falling victim to time constraints, executives can use job roles and responsibilities to help identify the employees that knowledge workers should be interacting with and on what topics. In some cases, companies may need to clarify decision rights and redefine roles to reduce the interaction burden on some employees while increasing it on others.