Are You Running a Chocolate Teapot Factory?

How to refocus commitment towards adding value 

How can you ensure that the work that your employees are doing is useful and adds value 
to the business? You could look at factors such as employee engagement and productivity 
– but you might be looking in the wrong place.

Briggs and Sons set up a factory to produce chocolate teapots. They paid for a top designer to craft an elegant teapot, bought the latest state-of-the-art plant and equipment, employed enthusiastic staff with excellent references, highly-experienced quality controllers, and packers assisted by cobots, to dispatch the goods. They even hired branded consultants to measure employee engagement, and everyone agreed that morale, commitment and productivity were all sky-high. There was just one problem, when the teapots were delivered to the customer and used for the first time, the boiling water that was poured in melted them into a pool of liquid chocolate, rendering them unusable. The owners had focused too much on the enthusiasm of the workers and how efficiently they carried out their tasks, and not paid attention to the need for, or the usefulness of their work. Ultimately, the employees’ efforts were, to quote the British idiom, “as much use as a chocolate teapot”.

The chocolate teapot factory is, of course, an absurd example, yet every day, in many companies, we are lulled, in a similar way, into a false sense of security by the sight of a committed workforce meeting expectations, often doing more than is asked in order to do a brilliant job. In fact, many of us, including bosses, business owners and managers, are working harder than ever. As far back as 2013, Harvard Business Review revealed a report finding from the Covey Leadership Center that many American executives had kissed goodbye to the 40-hour working week and were averaging 72-hours. In the UK, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found that many workers, despite their keenness, were less productive than they could be due to having to follow bureaucratic rules and procedures, and a