What are you doing to improve team and individual productivity?

Low productivity is to business what a canker is to a tree

Canker and stem dieback diseases are most common on trees and shrubs under stress. More often than not, they prove lethal. As with trees, so with business.
80% of the American workforce lack passion for their job. So says Deloitte.

Poor management, poor collaboration, poor leadership, low morale, employee disgruntlement, rigid hierarchy, office politics, inept leadership, a lack of purpose-its causes are many and varied, as indeed are its effects:

• Lower profits
• Decline
• Ill-feeling between employees
• A lack of motivation
• Mass resignation
• A weakened brand

In short, it’s disastrous. Here’s how to stop the rot in 3 steps:

1. Invest in Lumina Spark, a next gen psychometric tool which is taking the business world by storm.
2. Fill out the questionnaire, sit back and let Spark crunch the data.
3. Study your Portrait. Find your inner Spark. Discover better ways of working by yourself and with others which you can put into action today.

What is Productivity?

Productivity can be defined as the effectiveness of productive effort as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input. To make a profit, one needs to build a business in which the rate of output is greater than the rate of input.

Once upon a time… there was a Feedback Loop. Meet your new best friend in the fight against low productivity-the feedback loop, ably supported by Lumina Learning. A feedback loop can be defined as a system in which outputs are fed back into the system as inputs, increasing or decreasing effects.

Feedback loops come on two flavours: positive and negative. A positive feedback loop amplifies the output of a given system resulting in growth or decline, whereas a negative feedback loop lowers output to bring about a state of equilibrium or homeostasis.

The thermostat is an example of the latter. As the temperature rises, the thermostat turns off the furnace, thereby allowing the room to rest at a certain temperature. The ripening of fruit is a good example of a positive feedback loop. Fruit passes through a number of stages, from unripe, to ripe, to overripe. When a fruit becomes ripe it releases a gas (ethylene) causes the nearby fruit to ripen. They in turn release more ethylene, which in turns causes more fruit to ripen.

At the risk of stating the obvious, to do a job well it helps if you like it. And if you like it, the chances are you will do it well. When you like something, you do it more often, you see more progress and this progress in turn adds fuel to the flame of motivation, and thus you like it even more. We have, in short, a positive feedback loop.

Key point: positive feedback loops create change; negative feedback loops bring balance. Both are necessary to increase productivity.

But how does one go about creating a feedback loop? There’s the rub. Let’s say hypothetically, you are a CEO 0f a middling company of 100 people. According to Deloitte, a whopping 80% of the American workforce lack passion for their job: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/worker-passion-employee-behavior.html?id=us:2el:3pr:dup825:eng:tmt:100814

80%! How then can you ensure that your people get up in the morning given this sobering statistic?

First, you need to address the 3 P’s: Purpose, Pride and Passion and the most important of these is Passion.

Next, you need a scientifically robust way of measuring the personalities and behaviours (input and output) of your staff. Otherwise you will be working blind. Step forward Lumina Spark, the last word in cutting-edge personality assessment, a sovereign remedy for low productivity, bringing as it does a proven financial return when used for HR, selection and assessment.

Armed the wealth of insights Lumina Spark provides, staff will be better able to understand their own strengths and development areas, how they behave when under stress and make changes accordingly.

By capturing your whole personality (blind spots and beauty spots, Paradoxes and Hidden Treasures) Lumina Spark gives you and your people the means to increase or decrease input or output, which in turns effects the running of the whole system. Think of Lumina Spark as a metasystem – a system about systems, primarily systems of personality.

Lumina Spark is a 100% customised psychometric instrument which, thanks to some clever algorithms couple with an intuitive easy-on-the eye design (think Mac, rather than Microsoft) helps you better understand yourself, to improve your working relationships with others, how you react to pressure, how you may dial up or down certain qualities dependent on context. All of which serves to boost productivity and increase ROI.

Small wonder Lumina Spark is the scientifically validated tool of choice for such companies as Heineken, the UK’s National Health Service, Adidas and Deloitte to name but a few.

1 tool, 3 lenses, Zero headaches

Lumina Spark encourages people to cultivate the skills most needed in the workplace – adaptability, agility, a growth mind-set, collaboration, resilience, authenticity, and the ability to lead self and others, all of which makes it ideal for supercharging productivity.

It is one highly effective tool with three lenses through which to see personality: the Underlying Persona, your Everyday Persona, and your Overextended Persona. Other personality assessments artificially compartmentalise personality. By contrast Lumina Learning takes a more nuanced approach: no labels, just your whole personality beauty spots and blind spots personality and how it may change with context.

Result: consistent, cost-effective insights into your whole personality without the need for additional tests.

The good news is that all of Lumina’s products will help you improve teamwork and this in turn will raise your own productivity and that of an organisation. Whether it is Lumina Spark, Leader, Team, Emotion or Sales, Lumina Learning can be relied upon to give you vital intel on the way in which your staff collaborates.

Lumina Team

Lumina Team (which, incidentally, comes as standard with Lumina Spark) will help you foster a culture where employees thrive and where they can cultivate that most elusive of things-a growth mind-set. If you want give you staff greater autonomy and improve collaboration and teamwork, then it is the ideal tool to do so.

One its most useful features is the Team Viewer with which you can explore the team’s dynamics visually. At a glance, it enables you to see if there any imbalances, differences and how the personality of the team may shift under stress. Each team member is represented as a dot in the octagonal mandala. Its position is determined by the average score on the Lumina Spark Questionnaire in each persona.

Lumina Leader

Lumina Leader helps you become a better leader by answering some of the most intractable questions that beset executives today:

• What sort of Leader am I? A Napoleon, a Gandhi or an Alexander the Great?
• How can I adapt my leadership style?
• How can I lead with authenticity?
• How can I maximise my strengths and improve my weaknesses?
• How can I develop greater confidence in how I lead?
• How can I spark passion in my staff?

Lumina Leader takes the nebulous concept of leadership and breaks it down into four key areas: Leading with Drive, Leading to Deliver, Leading through People and Leading with Vision.

Peer feedback with the optional Lumina Leader 360 review affords you the opportunity to see yourself through others’ eyes. The insights so gleaned are invariably enlightening.

Lumina Select

Psychometric tests allow employers to identify highflyers with great deal of accuracy. At the risk of stating the obvious, the best people will create more value for your company which in turn will help raise productivity.

Make no mistake: hiring the right person is no easy task. However rigorous your interview technique, however sound your judgement of character, the decision to accept someone into the bosom of your company is not without risk.

While psychometrics cannot eliminate the risk of making an error of judgement, they can significantly reduce it. Thanks to the insights that you will glean about a candidate, you will be able to better come to a reasoned decision and avoid the costs of recruiting someone ill-suited to the role.

The beauty of Lumina Select is that it considers the values of an organisation as well as the requirements of a particular post. This ensures that the candidate is good for the organisation, and the organisation is good for the candidate. It measures 16 ‘Job Competencies’, puts a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses under the microscope, predicts a candidate’s likely behaviour when under stress and even allows for a certain amount of exaggeration on the part of the interviewee.

In short, Lumina Select in particular and all of Lumina’s suite of digital tools in general can generate a significantly larger ROI, both through improving performance and reducing costs.

Measuring a candidate 8 Aspects plus their 24 Qualities affords you a highly accurate picture of his or her likely future performance, making them essential employee selection tools.
Hiring the right candidate is vital for financial health of any organisation.

Bottomline: Using Lumina Select makes it much more likely that you will make a big return (output) on your investment in the form of a salary (input).

Work/Life Balance

One way to increase productivity is to foster a culture which strikes a healthier balance between life and work. There is a perception in some quarters that the more hours an employee puts in, the higher their productivity will be. This is a fallacy. More is not necessarily more.

As the law of diminishing returns states that that profits or benefits gained from something will represent a proportionally smaller gain as more money or energy is invested in it. There comes a point where more effort will not lead to greater productivity. Quantity is important, but so, too is quality.

Another sure-fire way to increase productivity is passion. Quite simply, it is the sine qua non for business excellence, for staff with oodles of passion will always perform better than staff without, even if the latter earn more money. Not unnaturally, people want to be enthused by their work and those that will do a much better job.

In addition, they want their career to be worthwhile and meaningful. Studies show that employees perform better and a more engaged if they find their work purposeful. Lumina Learning suite of tools, particularly Lumina Leader, will help you build a sense of purpose. So let purpose be your north star. And they want to take pride in what they do. Doing so builds self-, which in turn boosts self-esteem which in turn strengthens confidence which in turn enables someone to accomplish more at work.

So, there you have it. Purpose, pride and passion – the P’s plus Lumina Learning. That’s the way to increase productivity in the 21st Century. Let us give you the insights to stop the progress of the low productivity disease before it spreads or better still prevent it altogether.