The Influence of Flexibility on Productivity

When a manager demands an employee a more flexible attitude, will this have impact on the productivity level of the employee? And in which situations is this reasonable?

Being productive is almost everybody, but according to the specific role in business, in a variety of ways. Lets take a few examples:

The brain surgeon versus the traditional physician; it is more likely that the latter is able to be more flexible than the former.

A Sales representative versus the client. Could you come back another day, is a normal response of the client, but is the sales rep. able to ask the same to the client?

You are at your lawyers for a civil case, you ask him or her to give advice on a criminal case. Would the lawyer get into this you think?

Flexibility is at least about three things, but they have in common that they are dealing with a tradeoff;

• Time do it now versus do it later.
• Function do this instead of that
• Volume do more or less

Some functions are broader than others or less specialized. Like the physician (less) versus the brain surgeon (more specialized). Functional flexibility is there fore related to the depth of the specialization.

Most people have a choice in being flexible on volume, work longer today or this week and work less when the business is less hectic.

The tradeoff between now or later is causing productivity gaps. For some reason your time is more important than mine. In an normal organization this is not often felt, but it is in partnerships and this redundancy will have to be paid for.

All three also affect the productivity level. The time-tradeoff is trading productivity for goodwill, which is a loss on the short term. But people do this because they receive credits (at work).

The tradeoff in function requires a competence to be able to switch and a broader productivity-profile. Without such a profile it will mean a loss to the organization on an individual level, but a probable gain for the organization as a whole.

The tradeoff on volume has no productive impact, but often it is the case that more hours of work (more volume) mean a lower productivity per hour.

2007 Hans Bool

Hans Bool writes articles about management, culture and change. If you are interested to read or experience more about these topics have a look at: Astor White or sign-up for our newsletter.

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