By Blessing Kemlo
Your organisation may not have a productivity problem. It may have a problem with what happens between people, teams and departments.
A sales team meets its targets. Operations completes its work. Finance produces its reports. Human Resources fills vacancies. Every department has numbers to report, and on paper, the organisation appears to be functioning.
Yet customers are waiting. Decisions are delayed. Employees are frustrated. Managers spend hours following up on matters that should have been resolved without their intervention.
Where is the problem?
Sometimes, it is not inside any one department. It is in the spaces between them.
The work nobody owns
Consider a customer order that requires approval from sales, finance, operations and logistics. Each department completes its individual responsibility, but nobody takes ownership of the entire journey.
Sales believes finance is holding things up. Finance is waiting for information from sales. Operations has not received the final instruction. Logistics cannot schedule delivery.
Each team may be working hard. The customer still experiences failure.
This is a difficult organisational problem because individual departments may have reasonable explanations for their performance. Their internal measures can look acceptable while the overall business outcome suffers.
The missing productivity is found in the handovers, clarifications, repeated requests, duplicated work and waiting periods that occur between functions.
Why traditional performance measures can miss it
Organisations often measure performance vertically. A department is assessed against its own targets, costs, deadlines and outputs. But customers experience organisations horizontally. They move across departments, systems and people. They do not experience the organisational chart; they experience the final outcome.
When performance is measured only within departments, employees can meet their targets while unintentionally creating difficulties for another team.
- A department may reduce costs by transferring administrative work to another department.
- A manager may meet a deadline by sending incomplete information downstream.
- A recruitment team may fill a vacancy quickly, while the hiring department spends months correcting an unclear role definition.
- A team may improve its own response time by passing complicated cases to someone else.
These behaviours do not necessarily indicate poor intentions. They can emerge from the way targets, responsibilities and incentives are designed.
The hidden cost of coordination
Coordination is necessary. Every organisation needs communication, collaboration and checks between teams. The problem arises when coordination becomes excessive because responsibilities are unclear, systems do not communicate, or decisions have no obvious owner.
Employees then become informal project managers, messengers, investigators and problem-solvers. They chase approvals, reconcile conflicting information and repeatedly explain decisions that should already be documented.
The organisation may regard these activities as normal administrative work. But some of them are symptoms of a system that has not been designed to support the work properly.
Over time, employees lose hours that could have been spent serving customers, improving processes, developing capabilities or delivering strategic priorities.
Five questions leaders should investigate
Before asking employees to work harder, leaders should examine how work moves through the organisation.
- Where does work regularly wait? Identify the points where tasks pause for approvals, information, clarification or decisions.
- Where is information repeatedly requested? Repeated requests may indicate that information is missing, inaccessible, unreliable or not captured in a useful format.
- Who owns the final outcome? If every department owns a task but nobody owns the customer’s complete experience, accountability may be fragmented.
- Which targets encourage competing priorities? Determine whether one department’s success creates additional work or costs elsewhere.
- What work exists only because another process is failing? Distinguish necessary coordination from repeated corrections, unnecessary follow-ups and avoidable administration.
These questions can be investigated through process mapping, employee interviews, customer complaints, workflow data and a review of recurring delays.
What organisations can do differently
Begin with one important business process rather than attempting to redesign everything at once. Map the journey from beginning to end. Identify the people involved, decisions required, information transferred and points where work stops or returns for correction.
Then establish clear ownership of the overall outcome. This does not mean one person must perform every task. It means someone is accountable for ensuring that the process works across departmental boundaries.
Agree on shared measures that reflect the outcome experienced by the customer, not only the efficiency of individual teams.
Finally, ask the employees doing the work where the process creates unnecessary effort. They often understand the practical obstacles that management reports do not reveal.
The question behind the numbers
When productivity is disappointing, the immediate response is often to demand more output from employees. But before increasing pressure, leaders should ask whether the organisation is making productive work unnecessarily difficult.
People cannot compensate indefinitely for disconnected systems, unclear accountability and conflicting departmental objectives.
At Govel Fraser, we believe better talent decisions begin with understanding the environment in which people are expected to perform. Sometimes, improving performance requires hiring the right person. Sometimes, it requires redesigning the way work moves through the organisation.
The important thing is to understand the problem before prescribing the solution.
Govel Fraser | Unlocking Dignity Through Opportunity.