• Posted April 4, 2016, 12:22 p.m. - 7 years, 12 months ago

Productivity & Innovation Week held by Singaporean firm Straits Construction

Would a Productivity & Innovation Week benefit your business?

Teamwork

Straits Construction, based in Singapore, held their inaugural Productivity and Innovation Week last week, wc 28th March, and have reported great feedback to the event.

Chief Exec Wong Chee Herng said that the company had realised it was important that they increased productivity and reviewed the way they did things. Employees were given the opportunity to take part in workshops, exhibits and lectures and also took part in a challenge to submit product ideas to improve on-site works, including saving time and labour costs. John Keung, the company’s Building and Construction Authority Chief Exec has said that “productivity can be improved on three fronts: adopting productive technology, upgrading workforce skills and collaborating across the construction chain.”

Straits Construction are one of Singapore’s leading builders and work on both residential and commercial projects. As such, the workshops and lectures held during the week focused around topics such as safe working practices, effective processes and innovative ideas for tools to save time, but there is no reason why this idea can’t be applied to other industries away from construction. The idea of an event dedicated to enhance productivity and innovation is certainly a good one, especially to help motivate employees to work more effectively and utilise the tools at their disposal for optimum working performance. For example, those based in an office could be given challenges to find new software to utilise different processes and save time in the process. Those in manual jobs such as engineering could be given the challenge of finding or creating new tools – after all, who is better to say what works well and what doesn’t than those using the equipment day in, day out!

Do you think your workplace would benefit from a Productivity & Innovation event, dedicated to optimising the company’s performance? Let us know in the comments!