Working with many of Australia’s leading employers has given us strong insights into the planning and habits of the leaders of high performing organisations.

It is virtually an absolute that these organisations have a clear view of what business success looks like for them – they have a clear but flexible strategy and are relentless about executing it.

Importantly in managing their workforce and its culture – they know what high productivity looks like for their business and workforce.

It sounds like a statement of the obvious: on the docks crane lifts per hour are a standard productivity measure. Performance can be measured against competitors domestically and globally. Best practices are transparent and something to be aimed for.

But in other businesses the notion of productivity is a murkier one. The productivity of a senior banking professional or a teacher can be harder to measure, particularly if their role is not clearly defined or their performance not linked to an overall business strategy. There may be no universal or even widely applicable standards of high performance for benchmarking purposes.

This is where we see leading employers stand out. These are organisations that know what high performance means for their business. They have their own understanding of what productivity means to them and how to improve it. They can then make decisions about how their labour arrangements will facilitate higher productivity. They are conscious of hand brakes on productivity and work to remove them. We have the privilege of working on projects – sometimes brief, sometimes with work streams that run for years – to constantly move organisations to their desired frontier of high performance.

Whilst the productivity of Australia’s workforce overall has steadily increased (climbing approximately 10 index points to 104 index points since 2011 – good but not great) the picture looks different when we look through a magnifying glass at particular sectors or organisations. There the performance is more mixed – with factors such as legacy labour restrictions and underinvestment in capital resulting in some organisations being well behind the eight ball.

The positive story here is that productivity can always be improved – and the lower the starting base the more room for improvement!

But the first and most fundamental step is to know what it means for your organisation and to have a system to measure it. From there, the metaphorical sky is the limit.