Which word do you like better – Productivity or Efficiency?  I would like to make a guess, but I believe it really depends on where you sit at the boardroom table.  Owner, Manager or Employee.

Business Owners across most parts of North America are craving productivity from their employees but are also looking for efficiencies and areas to save money in the workplace.  Flip the table around to the employee and they are scared to death of the word “productivity”, especially at work.  Why?  According to many business consultants and regular joe-blow employee I have spoken with over the past few months, productivity means that they are required to work even harder.  Many people are working hard enough to pick up on the slack.   On the flip side and during the same conversion.  When the word “efficiencies” are used at work this provides an opportunity to work smarter?

Would love to hear what you think?

by Scott Messenger

Classic Car Photo Gallery

Instead of decorating his office walls with family photographs or framed diplomas, Dave Weidner proudly displays images of classic cars. Some of them are specimens from the family collection: 40-some cars and trucks he shares with his brother Robert and which include everything from a 1905 Oldsmobile “autobuggy,” to a ’31 Cord L29 owned by Lady Eaton, to the youngest of the bunch, a beefy-looking, burgundy Olds Toronado from 1966. There’s a 1950 cherry-red MG convertible in the collection, too, and it’s featured in his office gallery as his first car, purchased in 1957 for about $600 by his dad, Lou, who bought into Lacombe’s downtown General Motors dealership the year before. It’s a vacant lot today, but it was MacTaggart-Weidner Motors back then, and Dave swept the floors as a kid. He’s 68 now and, like his brother, who’s 65, he’s been selling cars pretty much all his life.

“We don’t really know much else to do,” says Weidner of his and Robert’s relationship to the business. “We grew up with it and we like it.”

But like more than 700 independently owned and operated GM dealerships across Canada, this May saw the Weidners contemplate life beyond automotive retail. Dave, general manager at the store just off the QE2 highway since 2002, knew of a coming “realignment of dealerships” as far back as February. GM representatives travelling across the country invited regional dealers to a meeting in Calgary to explain the need for reductions of store numbers in “overdealered” areas (mostly in Quebec and Ontario), springtime cuts that would slim the Canadian GM dealer body by about 40%, to roughly 400 outlets.

“I felt we were reasonably safe here because of our sales rate over the past few years,” says Dave. Besides that, he’d been notified that Weidner Motors Limited had just been awarded GM’s Triple Crown award for outstanding performance. “But then you also get afraid when you get looking at our proximity to Red Deer, to Ponoka, to Stettler, to Rocky, and they’re all in the same business we are, so you wonder.”

And even now, after an email arrived May 20 and exempted Weidner Motors from the list of more than a dozen Alberta dealerships with which GM Canada is terminating retail licences, neither Weidner brother is seeing an end to the uncertainty. As Robert points out – the sales manager joining us only briefly before being called away by his duties – “there may be some conditions” associated with the reprieve.

What’s certain, however, is that decision-makers in Oshawa and Detroit have changed a major Alberta industry so profoundly as to have disrupted decades-old businesses and left towns and cities with economic scars that will take months, perhaps years, to heal. It’s hard proof that, even with a 100-year history like GM’s, nothing lasts forever. For the sake of dealers set to carry on, the same applies, one would hope, to any damage done to the household brand they’ve been left to sell.

Until recently, GM would have seemed a good company for a dealer to stake its future upon. And that’s not just because of the boom years, when Alberta was setting monthly sales records, like in December 2006, when dealers moved 22,079 vehicles. Until 2008 the company was the world’s biggest automaker, a title now belonging to Toyota. But Canadian sales as of July, when GM emerged from 40 days of bankruptcy protection, were down nearly 42% from the same time last year. As reported in The Economist in June, to merely break even in the North American market, GM will need to move 10 million new models a year.

Name: Steven Searle, director
Company: N’Take EcoDurable Products, Edmonton
What They Do: Wholesaler of environmentally friendly reusable carry bags
What They Would Do Over Again: Carefully consider the name

What We Did
Our focus when we started Pop Packaging Inc. (now N’Take) was reusable grocery bags. We had seen the polyfabric style of bags (which is our primary focus right now) widely used in Europe and Japan. I thought those areas tend to be years ahead of North America in terms of environmental initiatives. We started to slowly generate some interest with smaller companies and then from larger companies, and it started to cascade from there. Even though we’re known in the U.S., we’re going to become a whole lot more well-known because of our marketing efforts there.

The Fallout
We looked at some of the liabilities that the name Pop Packaging entailed, and the biggest one is that not only does it not describe what we do, but it can also be a bit confusing. A lot of people associate the word “pop” with point of purchase. The other thing is “packaging” – we probably get several calls a week from people looking for plastic packaging or cardboard boxes or something that’s completely not what we do. We decided that what we’re going to do is have a name that’s non-descriptive and gives us leeway as to what type of products we’re going to carry in the future.

In Hindsight
We would have given a bit more careful thought about the name. At the time, it was a name that was available, it was catchy, it “popped.” At the time we started, we really didn’t think it was going to turn into the runaway success that it has turned into. Of course if we knew then what we know now, we would have done quite a few things differently. The name probably would have been closer to what it is now.

You can’t spell pandemic without panic. It’s no wonder: the World Health Organization reported 719 H1N1 influenza cases in Canada as of May 22, and 15% to 35% of the workforce could end up catching the virus at any one time. – Stephanie Sparks

PANDEMIC PLAN
A highly communicable disease could hit the province hard before local companies know what to do about absent employees. “When we talk about business in general… I would say they’re not as prepared as they should be,” says Bob Klay, the president and founder of Klay Information Management Consulting Ltd. in Calgary. If the company has a smaller staff count or its business doesn’t provide “essential services” (like the police, firefighters or hospitals), it likely hasn’t considered a pandemic plan.

BUSINESS CONTINUITY
Historically, pandemics have occurred only three or four times per century, according to Health Canada. But should a breakout of infection arise, companies without pandemic plans can turn to their business continuity plans, in which they can “identify what things you can prevent, what things you can mitigate and the other things that are just imminent,” says Klay. “And then the question is, ‘What steps can we take to continue business or even recover from an incident?’”

LEADERSHIP
Every ship needs a captain. If management start to feel under the weather, “one of the starting points is figuring out who will be in charge and what their responsibilities and roles are,” says Katie Virtue, a management consultant at Klay. Management team members are just as vulnerable to the flu as their employees, and it’s hard to lead with a high fever.

WHO’S YOUR BACKUP?
Because the mailroom clerk isn’t qualified to serve as CEO, it helps to establish the skills and qualifications of employees. Klay says using a skills matrix can help identify individuals to fill critical roles. “Not every function you perform in a company is critical.” Employees in critical roles (ones that make or break the company’s success) should have a backup person, either already on the payroll or willing to take a temporary position The purpose of pandemic planning: to reassure your employees that they belong to a well-prepared organization.