Productivity: Two Bay of Plenty Businesses Leading the Way

Two Bay of Plenty businesses are leading the way when it comes to lifting productivity goals.

New Zealand recorded its biggest loss in productivity levels since 2009, Stats NZ announced last month.

General manager GPSit Khan Greig and RMD Transport’s Ryan Sherson were both looking to optimize workforce potential when they signed up to The Icehouse’s Leadership Development Programme. They were able to develop their own individual projects while on the Programme and had the chance to have them assessed by business experts.

We had been seeing a lot of downtime and I’m not the sort of person to micro-manage the team so I wanted to implement new processes that would lift the output without me having to watch what was going on all the time,” Ryan Sherson said.

Managing a bulk storage transitional facility brings variables depending on the time of year and the Port’s traffic.

“It wasn’t a straightforward process because some days are crazy and some days much quieter.

We can have one day where we’re moving thousands of tonnes and other days not so much. So, the starting point was to develop a template for a standard day and identify where the bottlenecks and hold-ups were coming from and go from there.

We hadn’t captured that data before and now we can see what and who is working efficiently and measure it.”

For orchard and farm mapping business GPSit increasing productivity required setting key performance indicators or 'KPIs' for staff.

“In the past, we haven’t had KPIs for the team because they had been tricky to set when our survey blocks all have different challenges with size and location” Greig said.

That made it hard for the staff to reach goals and costs to be measured accurately.

“No one knew how they were going before we did this. We need to have KPIs to ensure we are being efficient when it comes to billable hours and so the staff are on the same page with what they are expected to achieve and how to measure their performance.

This all leads to more structure for the team and more transparency over salary reviews.”

Learn more about the Leadership Development Programme for senior leaders in Kiwi SMEs.