According to the results of a recent survey that appeared in USA Today on Dec. 29, 2008, productivity has become one of the top challenges for executives.  The survey was conducted by Robert Half Management Resources.

If the survey is to be believed — and there’s no reason why it should not — then there’s never been a better time to institute GTD either was an individual or within your company…

Based upon the study, 30% of CFOs felt that increasing productivity was their top challenge, followed by boosting profitability (20% of respondents).  1400 CFOs working for firms with at least 20 emplooyees from across the country were queried in telephone interviews to generate the results.

They were asked:  “Which one of the following was the greatest challenge you faced in your first 100 days in your current position?” Their responses:

Increasing productivity
30%
Increasing profitability
20%
Personnel decisions, such as hiring or staff reductions
13%
Building rapport with new staff
13%
Building rapport with your CEO
8%
None
9%
Other/don’t know
7%

100%
From the original article:

“New financial managers need to make an immediate impact,” said Paul McDonald, executive director of Robert Half Management Resources. “In today’s economy, especially, executives may have less time to prove themselves and are expected to demonstrate tangible results.”
McDonald noted that while just 13 percent of CFOs cited building rapport with staff as their top priority, managers should not overlook this critical step. “A creative and motivated team is essential to enhanced productivity. Corporate leaders need to connect with their employees and understand what motivates them to perform at their highest levels.”
About the Survey
The national study was developed by Robert Half Management Resources. It was conducted by an independent research firm and is based on more than 1,400 telephone interviews with CFOs from a random sample of U.S. companies with 20 or more employees. For the study to be statistically representative and ensure that companies from all segments are represented, the sample was stratified by geographic region and number of employees. The results were then weighted to reflect the proper proportion of employees within each region.
About Robert Half Management Resources
Robert Half Management Resources has more than 150 locations worldwide and offers online job search services at www.roberthalfmr.com.

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Editor’s Note: Pat Smith is the President & CEO of The David Allen Company. He has worked in the HR/OD/OE field for over twenty years, and is considered an expert in the field of organizational development, change management and leadership development. Pat can be reached at pat.smith at davidco dot com

In Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The New Rules for Getting the Right Things Done in Difficult Times (McGraw-Hill), renowned management consultant Ram Charan offers executives a detailed guide to surviving the worst financial and business crisis since the Great Depression. The key, Charan says, is “management intensity”-deep immersion in the operational details of the business and the outside world, combined with hands-on involvement and follow-through.

Plans and progress must be revisited almost daily. Big-picture, strategic-level thinking cannot be abandoned, but every leader now must be involved, visible, and in daily communication with employees, customers, and suppliers. In this world, everyone needs detailed, up-to-date, and unfiltered information. And they have to act decisively when trouble looms. “If you don’t prepare for the worst,” says Charan, “you will put both your company and career at risk.”

Management Intensity and HR
HR has been pretty intensely consumed with issues related to talent management over the past decade. This has been largely as a response to economic and demographic factors. The economy has been booming (meaning a higher demand for skilled workers) and the birth rate has fallen (meaning a decreasing supply of them).

In response, many organizations have increased their focus on attraction, retention and development–to put it another way, getting the right people in the right seats and keeping them there.

Major initiatives such as career development, employee engagement and retention, workplace satisfaction, and mentoring have been widely implemented to support the achievement of talent management goals.

As I sit here in January 2009, however, recession once again dominates the business headlines, and in boardrooms across the country executives are meeting to discuss falling revenues and budget cuts.
Now comes a study from Leadership IQ, a training and research firm, which bears out the conventional wisdom. Three-quarters of layoff survivors say their productivity has declined while customer service has worsened. The survey also found that 69 percent of the remaining workers believe the quality of the company’s products or services has declined since the layoffs.

The company’s survey of 4,172 workers who kept their jobs after a layoff also found that an astonishing 64% of surviving workers say the productivity of their colleagues has also declined.

Getting the right people remains critical, but in the short term, hiring will decrease and employees will become more security-conscious and thus less eager to jump ship.  There will be a renewed focus on costs, and that includes salary costs—-specifically productivity per employee (be that in terms of revenue, profit or production units).

HR to the Rescue?
Inherent in the current economic condition is an opportunity for organizations (and HR in particular) to expand their focus beyond attraction and retention to also include productivity.

Now that the new economic reality has set in, leaders have an extraordinary opportunity to add new value to the enterprise by focusing on initiatives to increase productivity and efficiency in the midst of economic downturn.  In this case, that equates to what people do—and how they do it.

GTD as a Possible Solution
As the world’s leading skill set for personal and organizational productivity, one unique aspect of GTD is that it can be immediately applied to the current projects an individual is working on. For this reason, personal and organizational productivity can be immediately impacted. In our various GTD seminars, most of the work that participants work on is real world project work. This ensures that every participant departs fully enabled to immediately be more productive—both on the job and at home.

Another important aspect of GTD is its scalability.  In support of a company-wide productivity initiative, GTD’s productivity behaviors can be easily scaled across even a global multinational organization.  GTD is commonly mapped to an organization’s core competencies to ensure that productivity is systematically supported by the various HR systems.

Finally, a distinctive feature of GTD is the amazing residual benefit that participants experience in their personal lives. GTD offers the participant and the organization tremendous value - not only because of the improved quality of work life that often lasts for the rest of one’s career, but also because of the increase in personal satisfaction, stress-relief, and productivity that people practicing GTD experience.  For organizations, this translates to more productivity in troubled times as well as more satisfied employees.

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GTD’er Daniel Higgenbotham clearly isn’t the sort of guy to let himself get too down in the dumps about a little thing like losing his job.  At least not twice in a row. Instead he decided to turn his misfortune (He really did get laid off twice in quick succession) into a learning experience for himself and a tool to help others suffering the same fate.

His tool - a website called HappyJobSearch is designed to help you organize the opportunities you find interesting, rank them in terms of their personal appeal to you, and keep track of details such as the location and any  interviews you might have scheduled.

It’s not a tremendously complex application and so far it doesn’t sync with your other calendars (which would be a nifty trick for those interviews you have scheduled), however as a dedicated, task-specific tool that’s available from any web browser it might be just  the thing you’re going to want if you’re in serious job-hunting mode.

The fact that someone made this simply to help other people that are going through something as traumatic as the loss of a job - particularly given the current economic conditions - is something that we should all appreciate.

Perhaps if everyone had an attitude like Daniel’s and acted so selflessly under such trying circumstance we’d all be better of, job or no.

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“Is it even possible to implement GTD across the Company?” That was the question that was plaguing me and Ali.  Even if we get tools for everyone and teach them all the basics, it’s still very likely that most employees will stick to their old ways. Change is hard from within an organization.  In spite of our efforts it is possible and maybe even likely that our people won’t crank widgets as we expect them to.

Considering these facts the question “should we then go ahead and invest so much time and energy into the training?” is one to consider seriously.  On the other hand if we don’t pursue a company wide GTD implementation what are our alternatives?  Not to teach GTD and accept the current standard of performance & accountability hardly seemed like a viable choice so we decided that we might as well give it our best shot and keep our expectations low.

Here’s what we did:

First we got  everybody their GTD Gear (covered in earlier posts of Rolling out GTD @ Vakil Housing series).  Then we kick started the Training.  The key to our methodology  has been the regularity and persistence with which we’ve gone about “the Vakil Housing Weekly GTD Training Meet”.  This is  the secret-sauce we found for implementing GTD at our office.

Logistics:
Day: We had set upon a Day for our weekly meeting, say every Friday
Time: 9:00 Am. We wanted to get started first thing every morning.
Duration: 1 hr. Many times it would stretch to an Hour and a Half.
We’ve been dong this for almost two years so to date we have conducted more than 100 hours of Weekly GTD Training at our office.

The General structure of the meeting is:
- Recap of what was learned last week.
- Take Any David Allen Podcast Interview, Article or Audio session from GTD Connect.
- Watch, Listen to or Read out loud the material while I would simultaneously draw a mind map of what is being read on the whiteboard, while explaining further what David covered.
- Pausing the presentation occasionally and going over any heavy concept that David touched upon.
- Once the interview/podcast is over, we would run through the mind map recapping what was covered. Typically I’d share my personal implementation examples, with my “aha” moments during the presentation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                -Asking if anybody had “aha” moments of their own to share.
- Possibly give everybody an exercise to work upon and get back with feedback next week.

The topics that we covered:
- Obviously, the first course was an intro to GTD. We covered the concept that we are most effective when we are relaxed, but that we can’t be relaxed when we have a million other things pulling and pushing us. In this session we played the David Allen Video on the home page of the David Allen Company.

- In the second session we distributed the various tools (covered in earlier posts) and assisted everybody in setting those up.

- We did sessions where we told everybody to grab whatever papers are lying at their desks or in their drawers and get them all to the conference room where we proceeded to do a live joint processing session with the actual stuff that they have to deal with.

- We had a session on clearing emails from people’s inboxes. The session included sitting with one volunteer and taking 30 minutes or so to clear his email inbox while others watched to see how it was done.

- We had sessions on the Three Fold Nature of Work and the Limiting Criteria, for which we used the relevant articles on the website.

- We once did a GTD-Quiz. Where we made teams to whom I asked questions on the podcast that was just played and we distributed sleek leather bound little pocket calendar diaries as prizes.

- After we felt our employees had truly ingrained the core concepts we did individual sessions on the Natural Planning Model and Horizons of Focus.

- In addition to the very specific GTD sessions we had many other sessions that were just general, just as many of David Allen’s interviews are. We just listen to them and we each pick out the nuggets that mean the most to us.

If you are a senior Manager within your organization and you’ve strictly implemented GTD for yourself but are having difficulty convincing others to adopt it, I would highly recommend trying out the weekly meeting the way we’ve done it as explained above. Keep your expectations low. Having your whole organization/department implement GTD is a big change and as every experienced manager knows most change only happens in small doses.

After more than 100 hours of GTD Training are we all following GTD 100% today? No, we’re not. But we’re certainly more GTD-compliant than before.  We are still working on it too. That alone made the whole process worth it. Persistence always pays. Remember, A big shot was once a little shot, who kept shooting.

This is the fourth post in our series of Rolling Out GTD at Vakil Housing. Earlier posts have been:
First Post: How we Successfully Implemented GTD across our Company thereby Increasing Productivity & Making Work Fun.
Second Post: Cool GTD Gear to motivate all in your Organization to Collect & have a mind like water.
Third Post: The remaining GTD Tools I used to build my Corporate army of GTD Champions.

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Scott McDaniel and Derek Scruggs from SurveyGizmo discuss the Core Conversation - GTD for Startups: Getting Things Done in the Real World they led at the recent South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. They discuss how they use GTD in the fast paced environment of a startup. Scruggs has a handy tip he uses for his weekly review.

Original coverage here.

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