Leadership Development and Productivity Challenges

Nariman Mokbel, Senior business development & leadership professional, HEISCO, KUWAIT

Due to the great change in work environment and market volatile, the leadership development must be changed too. Adaptive thinking is highly needed to train the skills of guiding leaders in order to match the observable work transformation.

In this brief editorial, I exemplify one of the challenges that leaders face is the improvement of employee productivity. Since high productivity is the main target of leaders. Companies’ daily routine is not always the right track to achieve productivity. From my experience, in which now I completed 20 years of working in companies with international standards, I believe that one of the best ways to improve productivity is changing the company culture and the usual working hours’ routine.

The Covid-19 work situation demonstrated that life still goes on despite the global lockdown because of the existence of the advanced technology devices and tools

The shared values, attitudes, and practices usually reflect the company culture where leaders must enhance the employees’ feelings to be more attached to what they do and to love what they are involved in.  The well-known praising methods and the publicized flexibility are amazing techniques that leaders should adapt to increase the employees’ feelings of belonging.

Eight working hours a day, five to six days a week, eleven months a year is too much load that burdens the employees’ shoulders. Loaded employees are not reliable to carry out their work perfectly. Studies proved that employees with little burdens and social life stabilities usually perform better than others who don’t. The weighing scale of employees’ social life indicates that most employees need more time to spend with their families, to do shopping or to entertain. If leaders do a brief exercise to intimately examine the status of every employee to see what makes them more productive, he/she will figure out that decreasing the office working hours is vital as well as the location flexibility.

The role of the advanced technology is currently very essential. It gives a hand to employees to work from distance places. It fundamentally contributes to decrease the working hours and enables employees to remotely work from outside their offices with little physical efforts.

The Covid-19 work situation demonstrated that life still goes on despite the global lockdown because of the existence of the advanced technology devices and tools. Universities and schools are very good examples of the technology power in continuing work progressing and completion.

In view of the above, I direct the current leaders’ attention to exploit the facility of technology to improve productivity and to boost the employees’ feelings of belonging. This is called a win- win business situation that satisfies and pleases both parties- employees and leaders.