Member Article

Northern businesses in need of a productivity boost

Employees across the North could be wasting more than 40 per cent of their working day on unimportant activities such as irrelevant reports and unnecessary meetings.

The claim comes from productivity expert Kory Kogon who will be addressing business leaders at The Palace Hotel in Manchester on Wednesday, June 10.

Ms Kogon is the co-author of a best-selling book based on the findings of a six-year, global survey of 351,000 employees carried out by performance improvement specialist FranklinCovey.

Analysing how people spend their working day, the study found that insufficient time is devoted to the activities that are most likely to drive growth – for example creative thinking, relationship building and planning.

Ms Kogon, who is FranklinCovey’s global practice leader for productivity, identifies two main reasons for this – the draining effects of constant demands for employees’ attention and a failure to consciously and proactively choose what is most important.

She said: “The combination of these factors has a significant impact on how accomplished or how buried alive we feel on any one day.”

“Our brain can become hardwired to react to what feels urgent and it actually gives us a dopamine high when we respond to and immediately act on that which seems important, because it is urgent. We feel busy and productive in the moment, but then realise at the end of the day that we made decisions to spend time on activities that were not of high value.”

Ms Kogon, who is based in the United States, explained that technology has made it both easier and harder to achieve greater productivity.

“It is easier, because technology enables learning, accessibility and connections in ways never before possible; and it is harder because it enables an unstoppable flow of information and demands that are irresistible to our brain,” she added.

“We will remain captive by this productivity paradox unless we take a fundamentally different approach to addressing the overwhelming flow of decisions and information.”

In her book, ‘The 5 Choices: The Path to Extraordinary Productivity’, Ms Kogon explains how individuals can make five choices to rewire their brains to make intentional, high-value decisions whilst retaining the sustainable energy to make it all happen.

The 5 Choices are:

Choice 1 - Act on the important, don’t react to the urgent

Choice 2 - Go for extraordinary, don’t settle for ordinary

Choice 3 - Schedule the big rocks, don’t sort gravel

Choice 4 - Rule your technology, don’t let it rule you

Choice 5 - Fuel your fire, don’t burn out

Drawing on the latest brain science, technology and performance psychology research, the book sets out an underlying ‘Pause-Clarify-Decide’ strategy, which enables individuals to pause their ‘reactive brain’ long enough to use their ‘thinking brain’ to clarify everything that is coming at them.

Ms Kogon will be sharing insights for improving productivity throughout her free seminar at The Palace Hotel which runs from 9am to 12.30pm on June 10. Anyone who is interested in attending must book in advance by calling 01295 274176.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by FranklinCovey .