Innovation - Ze'ev Ronen - Business Excellence

Do you remember the days when we worked six days a week? Has moving to five days had a bad effect on employers or employees? Has efficiency decreased? Have we been achieving less?

Yesterday we hiked from Neve Ativ to Birkat Man and from there to the lower parking lot of the Hermon site. The weather was wonderful. The sun was with us all day. There was snow, there were amazing views and an excellent group of hikers. Bottom line - it was excellent. But as sometimes happens, the road to the goal – the trip – was full of pitfalls.

Every year, CofaceBDI and The Marker magazine conduct a survey, on the topic "the 100 best companies to work at in Israel". The survey had about 150 thousand participants, and also uses internal surveys by the above companies. The survey then asked 2,000 participants to rank the parameters according to their importance.

If you have a convenience store at a gas station, you need to stock a number of essential items customers might suddenly need, or buy impulsively when they stop to fill up. Nobody does their weekly grocery shop at a gas station.

One of the questions I routinely ask managers is, how much of their time they spend doing their employees’ jobs (putting out fires, problem solving, answering questions). Most, almost all, say they spend 70% to 95% of their time at the operational level. A level which includes mostly activities which could be delegated, or have officially been delegated.

It might seem odd, but some businesses and people benefited from the global effects of the pandemic. For example, let's say you're a manufacturer of a niche product like facemasks, and suddenly it becomes the most sought after product worldwide, sold for exorbitant prices. It can seem as if luck fell out of the sky, into your lap. What will you do?

Javier is a young tour guide, Until recently, he had a lot of work. He speaks Spanish fluently, and as a result he had, among is other clients, many Birthright groups from South America.
And then came the Coronavirus, and Javier found himself without work, and with the realisation that life is unlikely to return to how it was anytime soon.

Covid-19 changed many things in one fell swoop. One of those is the prohibition on face-to-face meetings. With the meetings we were used to no longer possible, we started using Zoom or similar softwares. School and university lectures, management meetings, consultations, workshops, coaching sessions.

In my last article I discussed strategies for businesses during the Coronavirus crisis: the gazelle and the hedgehog strategies. When the gazelle senses danger it raises its head, looks around, and runs forward. At times it will change direction, but will always continue moving and keep its head up. 

I drew a big pyramid on the board, with him at the top, below him 8 VPs, and at the bottom 10,000 employees. I asked – how can you guarantee they'll efficiently produce quality products, if they aren’t engaged or invested in company goals?