I COULDN'T agree more with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong ("PM: Further rise in wages hinges on productivity"; last Friday).
Improving employee productivity goes beyond just training and equipping our workforce with the skills they need to be more productive.
A quicker way to improve productivity is to take a long, hard look at how we are doing things today and asking ourselves if there is a better way, a more efficient and effective way, to get it done.
When we do the same things over and over again for a long time, we tend to think of the status quo as the only way to get things done.
Sometimes, you need to challenge the old ways and shake that apple tree and see what falls out.
Many years ago, an insurance company in the United States did just that. Its customers were dissatisfied with how long it took for a car claim to be processed. The company looked into their claim process, discovered that there were many redundant steps and came up with the very radical idea of empowering the claims adjuster to settle a claim on the spot.
Claims adjusters were given a chequebook and authorised to settle small claims below a predetermined dollar value on the spot on the day of the accident. The change enabled the company to settle over 50 per cent of claims, freeing resources to focus on the larger claims.
In a case I personally know about, delivery drivers were able to make more than 40 deliveries a day, double the usual number, by reviewing how they were making these deliveries and remapping their delivery routes.
This significant improvement in productivity meant that they could do more with less, without sacrificing service quality.
There are other ways to improve productivity that range from consolidating work to get economies of scale, reducing process cycle time by reducing the number of steps from, say, 13 to five, to reducing errors that create unnecessary reworking.
This does not mean that training is not important, but that it is not the only way.
Perhaps we should be training our workforce to think outside the box and to look for better ways to get the job done.
This could include training our workers to use basic analytical tools, like how to collect data to do trend analysis to identify process abnormalities, to upstream thinking for root-cause analysis.
We need a thinking workforce and not just manual workers. This is how we can enhance the quality of the Singapore worker.
Finding new and better ways to work should not be limited to management. Our workers can be a thinking workforce too - we just have to show them how, provide them the tools, opportunities, and empower them.
It is time to reflect on how we have been doing things. Albert Einstein once said: "Insanity is doing the same things over and over again, and expecting different results." Apple's late chief Steve Jobs said the same thing with just two words: "Think different".
Matthew Ong Koon Lock
