Effective Resource Utilization

Too many organizations suffer from ineffective resource allocation. The problem may stem from various factors like inadequate delegation, employee burnout, or unclear direction, vision and goals. And the solution may lie in experimentation, for example reducing – yes, reducing – work hours, and studying what others who allocate resources well are doing and emulating them. Listen in for ideas you can bring to your organization.

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*Note: The following text is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors

Bill Berthel: Welcome to the Get Emergent podcast, where we discuss various leadership topics, team and organizational development ideas, and current leadership challenges and successes. I’m Bill Bertell.

Ralph Simone: And I’m Ralph Simone.

Bill Berthel: Ralph, we’ve got a great topic today. We wanna talk about effective resource allocation. What does that even mean to be effective in allocating our resources and our teams and our organizations?

Ralph Simone: Well, I wanna start with what I recognize is an ungrounded assessment. I believe that many people in most organizations are underutilized, that we are not allocating our resources in the most effective or optimal way. And, and by the way, I wanna be clear, I don’t mean that people are working a hundred percent of the time because first of all, I don’t think that’s sustainable and it’s probably not, you know, really, uh, good for their performance over time.

Bill Berthel: Well, I’m glad you said that because I think most of us feel busy. I know we like to overuse that word of being busy. We’ve talked in previous podcasts about that idea of being whelmed or overwhelmed. So what do you mean by utilized?

Ralph Simone: Well, I think it’s being able to get the job done that’s assigned, but also to be thinking about how to do the job differently. Also, to be thinking about what doesn’t need to get done. So I think when we think about effective utilization of people, there’s gotta be space for doing, thinking, being, experimenting, and you know, I mean, you brought up the word busy. You know, we don’t like people to use that word because I think the, you know, work is the path of least resistance.

But we don’t wanna just be doing the work. We wanna be thinking about the work. I mean, this is how companies get into these big cost overruns or margin erosion or too much overhead. They just kind of add, add, add, keep their headcount. And we’re really not looking at creative ways in which we could utilize the resources that are currently, uh, in our employment.

Bill Berthel: So we’ve got an opportunity to think about how we utilize our people, their talents, their contributions differently in our organizations.

Ralph Simone: Absolutely. I, I think one of the things that we, why we don’t utilize or allocate effectively is that we have many underdeveloped people. Mm. And you know, I, I think there are a lot of go-to people that are overutilized.

You know, we rely on them, you know, too much. And so we have to kinda look at, well, why aren’t we utilizing these people for this? An