It’s one of those words that conjures up visions of bean-counters in grey suits crouched over slide-rules, pie-charts in hand. Certainly it is not a word that typically comes to mind when speaking of the often glamorous world of online advertising. Are there awards for ‘most efficient website team’ or ‘top efficient designer’?  Too often, efficiency takes on a negative connotation to creative teams – something that steps on creative freedom and expression at the behest of the bottom line, with far too little reward.

Sure, deep-down everyone recognizes that increased efficiency in any facet of work makes sense, but its hard to get excited about process – no one ever got written up in Wired or Computer Arts because they cut their turnaround time by two percent.  Efficiency just isn’t sexy. Or is it? It depends who you ask.

Ask a client how sexy efficiency is when a two percent decrease in turnaround time saves his account several hundred thousands of dollars. Ask their team how excited they get about efficiency when it makes the difference between an average year-end raise and a great one.

Still, asking the man in the trenches to examine the way he does things on a daily basis can be a hard sell. Worse yet, at some workplaces there is an unspoken fear of efficiency – the hushed idea that one might work themselves right out of a job. How then, to dispel the myths surrounding this unenvied word, and present the bright side of efficiency?

There are many excellent and comprehensive works to be found on the subject, and many dogmas. We’ve all heard the legend of the guy who saved a million dollars by cutting out the second olive in each martini on a popular airline. You never hear what they did with that extra million though. Me, I say follow the yawns. Any time you see red eyes and tonsils, there is a good chance someone is doing something they’d like to see automated.

The greatest efficiencies come from identifying the areas that people, yes living breathing people, find extremely boring. Then seek ways to make those tasks as painless as possible.

As early as 1853, John Ruskin in his landmark work “Of Art and Life” wrote “You must make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.” He spoke at length of the worker’s need to feel invested in his work, rather than following a set of specifications ad nauseum (he was a great proponent of Gothic Germanic art). While his notes were founded in the observation of architecture, the same holds no less true in the field of online experiences.

In reality, no one goes to school to become a designer or coder with the hopes that they might someday spend all day updating text fields, or resizing images. Thus human nature inevitably has its way when one is faced with such a redundant task – errors creep in, things get named wrong, files get misplaced, wrong versions get sent. These are all symptoms of the mind complaining, the sub-conscious sabotaging us despite our best efforts. Such mistakes are costly and completely erode efficiency. They are also a good sign that something needs to be automated.

People are rightly resistant to any change in process when they feel they have been left out of the development process. They are the experts in their particular field, and should not be ignored when examining better ways of doing things. They probably have many ideas on how they might update their efforts, given the chance and the assurance that such updates will mean greater opportunity for them. Therein lies the key to making efficiency sexy – roll those efficiencies into greater opportunities, the kind of thing that DOES win accolades. Show the worker the direct correlation between their increased efficiency and improvements to the business, and credit them for it.

Here at Organic, we recognize the efforts of efficiency experts in the form of the Exceptional Innovation Award. This is an award that absolutely anyone who has a good idea can win. You don’t have to be assigned to the most high-profile contract, or on the cutting edge new technology. If you are a good observer, and you find a better, more efficient way of doing what you do, you can win this prestigious award. But you have to do a little more than that as well, you have to document how you did it, and put that documentation up where others can see it and emulate your results. Therein lies the second factor in making efficiency sexy – let people know about it!

In their excellent book “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything”, Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner propose the idea that all factors affecting human motivations can be classified as economic, social, or moral. By following the first two suggestions on making efficiency appealing, we cover the first two great motivators, and send the following messages; by improving the way we do things we can win some cash, people will notice what we do, and both our bank accounts and our reputations will benefit.

But by far the strongest motivator is the third one, the moral motivation. Fortunately, this is one that takes care of itself. People inherently want to do good work. They are aware that they have a certain amount of time to make their mark – the only thing that stands in their way is fear, fear of change or being left behind. This can be allayed in only one way, by building trust between the employer and the employee that increased efficiencies mean increased opportunities.

The truth is that efficiency is the difference between a journeyman and a master in any trade, including the trade of electronic communications. This fact gets expounded very well the “Pragmatic” series of programming books by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, who drive home the point that after a certain level of technical skill is established, the only way to continue improvement is by doing what you do faster and better – both as individuals and as an organization of individuals. And so, the third great motivator is addressed, the moral need people feel to fulfill their full potential.

How to make efficiency Sexy:

1. Roll time saved into cool, fun work (concepting, r&d, learning programs)
2. Don’t let increased efficiencies pass quietly into the night, document and recognize them.
3. Build a trust that increased efficiency does not mean decreased opportunity.
4. Recognize efficiency as the difference between the journeyman and the master worker.

In the end, any organization involved in a creative field should strive to build an atmosphere where efficiency is recognized and rewarded, knowing that many such small strokes go into the painting of a masterpiece. If that Kaizen philosophy of small but constant improvement can be distilled down to the level of the individual employee, the results can be phenomenal.

Tim Willison