For every dollar your company spends on payroll, how much productivity are you getting in return?This is a question we often ask CEO clients and their answer may surprise you. With a look ranging from defeated to frustrated, the CEOs we speak to rarely say they get more than 50% return for every dollar spent on payroll. This might be why CEOs continue to rank ‘Talent’ each year as one of their top three business risks.

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by this at all. According to Gallup, for the past two decades, only approximately 33% of the US workforce is engaged (the percentage is even lower globally). In other words, in the US, for every ten employees you have, only three are showing up fully committed to helping the business thrive. So, CEOs really aren’t far off in their assessment after all!

Feeling deflated? Don’t be! There are companies that buck this trend and experience wildly different business outcomes including 14% better productivity and drumroll please….23% better profitability. Improving productivity is the fastest way of impacting financial performance, but most companies struggle to do it in a way that not only drives sustainable business performance, but also excites employees.

It’s easier to do this than you think, but it does require you to challenge your company’s current business processes. In fact, we often find companies don’t have to implement new programs. Instead, they just have to adjust their current ways of working.

Consider these negative productivity predictors:

• • Does your company only communicate priorities from the top down?

  • Do your key business metrics resonate with your lowest level employees?

  • Do all leaders tell a consistent story about where the company has been, where it is today, and where it is going in the future?

  • Does your company manage business performance and company culture as mutually exclusive areas of focus?

  • Are culture related programs solely owned by Human Resources?

We believe productivity is the key tangible metric that influences both business performance and company culture. Most companies sacrifice one for the other and as a result, there are unintended consequences in productivity. To WIN in business, companies need to manage business performance and company culture together, in a seamless and integrated way. Imagine your business performance if you had 60%, 70% or even 80% of your employees fully committed to helping the business succeed. That’s winning.

Our newsletter will be dedicated to helping you solve the productivity challenge. We will provide practical tools and resources to help your company thrive. There will be minimal theories and models, but rather data and proven strategies. Our recommended approaches come from the practical experience of our firm’s founders, who have directly led successful transformations across various industries.

We hope you subscribe to our newsletter, and also check out our website to find our Financial Impact Calculator to determine how much productivity you’re leaving on the table, and our performance culture matrix which helps you define your current state and key area of needed focus. As always, reach out to us to learn more about our approach and to see if we are a fit to support your success.