If you've been searching for a commonsense, results-oriented approach to improving employee productivity, look no further. The dean of human resources consulting, Robert E. Sibson, has developed a process known as EP (employee productivity). The beauty of this proven method is that it doesn't require organizational upheaval or large investments in time, money, or new personnel. "If your company or unit has management know-how," says the author, "you already have what it takes to implement and profit from EP." EP shows you how to focus sound and familiar management practices to achieve significant productivity yields in any kind of organization. You won't be sidetracked by Total Quality Management or similar concepts, which Sibson believes are faddish and likely to fail. Instead, you'll learn exactly how to apply his basic 2-step method. It begins with four steps required for every organization: getting executive commitment; developing a productivity culture; making productivity part of every manager's job; and measuring productivity. The remaining steps vary according to specific need. You'll determine how to proceed by measuring the results of your initial work and investing your gain into future actions: using technology more effectively; eliminating unproductive practices; empowering employees; utilizing networking; ensuring excellence in staffing; restructuring through streamlining and possible staff reduction; managing performance; and rewarding performance. At each step, you'll find specific guidelines for implementation and performance measurement. Here, too, are the results of two surveys made by the author - one reporting the experiences of 227 companies with productivity management, the other covering worker attitudes toward productivity - provided as benchmarks for your own productivity management efforts.

From one of the top HR specialists in the world comes this much-needed guide to help people maximize productivity and increase revenue. Whether it’s in corporate America or in our own living rooms, people are wasting time. From the minute we wake up and check our Facebook page or emails—before we even crawl out of bed—to late at night when we stay up longer than we should, watching our favorite show. There’s a precise moment that falls between working enough hours to be productive and working too many hours, yielding a diminishing marginal return. The difference between the person able to master this and most Americans that fail miserably at it is quality of life! If one continues to work past this moment, a negative return will ensue, and that negative return produces guilt. It lowers the amount of time for recreational activities and spending time with family. We’ve siloed productivity to our work life, however; the impact on our personal life is often loss. An alarming 39% of workers in high-tech companies believe they are depressed, as reported by PC Magazine in December 2018. 72% of people who have daily stress and anxiety say it interferes with their lives—anxiety and stress alone have reduced productivity by 56%. More than 80% of people have experienced some form of anxiety, stress, or depression in the workplace. People are spending more time at work than at home or with their loved ones; or, if they are at home, they are working. They are always “on.” As a result of this disparity, people are not fully living their lives. And the “work-life balance” marketed by some HR consulting firms and employers simply does not work. It’s all work and no life! Studies have also proven that when people are unhappy in their personal lives or careers, their productivity goes down and everything and everyone around them suffers. This causes a domino effect, which trickles into every area of their lives. Previous generations used to say, “Work harder,” but we’ve now learned we must “work smarter.” Polak has practiced and tested his methods in hundreds of opportunities and has been paid millions by the largest corporations in the world to share these tools. He feels that every individual and business should have these tools, and will share them with us here.

The success of your company largely depends on how well employees perform their tasks. Yet, you would not be the first company to struggle with defining what that looks like. Knowing how to maximize employee potential may seem just as foggy, even while morale suffers and turnover is at peak levels. This book provides helpful tools like self-assessments and real-life scenarios and gives managers specific, practical guidance on using these techniques to improve the performance of all their people. This updated and revised second edition includes useful scripts for talking to employees about sensitive issues and new material on topics including working with off-site employees, what to say when an employee denies a problem exists, whether or not to coach temps and part-timers, how to draw the line between the mentoring and supervisory role, and what to do when counseling fails. This is an essential guide for managers who want to build their confidence and skill in getting the most from their people.

Great companies don’t just depend on strategies—they depend on people. The more great people on your team, the more successful your organization will be. But that’s easier said than done. Statistically, half of all employment decisions result in a mishire: The wrong person winds up in the wrong job. But companies that have followed Bradford Smart’s advice in Topgrading have boosted their successful hiring rate to 90 percent or better, giving them an unbeatable competitive advantage. Now Smart has fully revised his 1999 management classic to reintroduce the topgrading concept, which works for companies large and small in any industry. The author spells out his practical approach to finding and managing A-level talent—as well as coaching B players to turn them into A players. He provides intriguing case studies drawn from more than four thousand in-depth interviews. As Smart writes in his introduction, “All organizations, all businesses live or die mostly on their talent, and any manager who fails to topgrade is nuts, or a C player. . . . Those who, way deep down, would sooner see an organization die than nudge an incompetent person out of a job should not read this book... Topgrading is for A players and all those aspiring to be A players.” On the web: http://www.topgrading.com/

Managing Your Scarcest Resources Business leaders know that the key to competitive success is smart management of scarce resources. That's why companies allocate their financial capital so carefully. But capital today is cheap and abundant, no longer a source of advantage. The truly scarce resources now are the time, the talent, and the energy of the people in your organization--resources that are too often squandered. There's plenty of advice about how to manage them, but most of it focuses on individual actions. What's really needed are organizational solutions that can unleash a company's full productive power and enable it to outpace competitors. Building off of the popular Harvard Business Review article "Your Scarcest Resource," Michael Mankins and Eric Garton, Bain & Company experts in organizational design and effectiveness, present new research into how you can liberate people's time, talent, and energy and unleash your organization's productive power. They identify the specific causes of organizational drag--the collection of institutional factors that slow things down, decrease output, and drain people's energy--and then offer a pragmatic framework for how managers can overcome it. With practical advice for using the framework and in-depth examples of how the best companies manage their people's time, talent, and energy with as much discipline as they do their financial capital, this book shows managers how to create a virtuous circle of high performance.