Every single company, whether big or small, is built upon human resource. The owners, workers, executives and administrators are not part of the company, they are the company itself.

And there are several specific areas where a tremendous amount of the company’s human resource potential can be lost. Let’s tackle the easiest one to address globally: employee certainty about their job and their production output.

When you buy a machine for your company, it’s a relatively simple equation isn’t it? It has an exact function, it generates a predictable amount of output over time and it brings a certain amount of value which balances the cost of its investment. Easy.

And many companies lose a ridiculous amount of potential production simply by failing to take a similar mindset to their human resource. If you want to start maximizing your human resource you must understand what human resource you have, what exactly it should be producing and a statistical system which measures that production output against time.

It can sound complex, but it isn’t. It begins by understanding that people aren’t part of a company simply to be part of a company. A company is responsible for producing something of value and selling this to consumers or clients who need that product or products. Every single job in the company should contribute to and add up to that. If it doesn’t, it is either lost potential, wasted resource, deliberate extravagance or misguided charity.

But to understand which of these it is you must clearly understand what the company is producing, how each major area of the company contributes to that and how each person in the smaller areas produce something which adds up to the overall product of the area and then the company.

In it’s simplest form, on a person by person basis, you must have:

1. A detailed description of each person’s job including what it is expected to produce and exchange within the company or outside the company and at what quantity and what quality.

2. A statistic which measures the quantity and quality of that production against expected time.

And here’s a good tip: if you can’t measure the product output of a job with a statistic as given in 2, then something is wrong in naming that job’s product in 1.

With those two things firmly established it paves the way for a tremendous amount of improvements including: Any employee or executive can be certain in understanding what they are supposed to be doing and how fast they are supposed to be doing it.

Employees can work faster and more efficiently and measure their own production.

HR can prevent the firing of productive staff and help accurately correct or fire unproductive ones.

Executives can spot problems in the beginning stages before they become disasters.

Bonuses and raises can be assigned to the personnel who actually deserve them. The list of benefits from these two simple actions goes on and on.

A company is essentially an economical engine designed to create and exchange something of value. Fine-tuning the human resource part of that engine to achieve maximum output is not magic or an art form; it is a precise science which must be known and used to reach optimum performance.

Truly skilled executives and administrators innately sense the logic in such an approach and not only want more efficient, viable companies; they want a staff that is happy to work in the company and who exactly understand that they are a valuable part of it. Doing these two actions above is an excellent place to start achieving that.