Small firms urged to tackle productivity with better habits, not just tech
Tuesday, 17 March 2026
Spark is partnering with business incubator The Icehouse to run a series of free workshops aimed at helping several hundred small businesses around the country to tackle one of the issues economists fret most about: productivity.
They aren’t suggesting technology adoption alone has all the answers, however.
Spark chief customer officer Greg Clark said the company saw productivity as a long-standing and significant issue and believed practical support for small businesses could make a difference.
Its research suggests they need help with leadership training as much as hands-on help with the likes of artificial intelligence tools.
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The workshops are relatively small, typically catering for up to about 50 businesses at a time.
Participants would leave with “a personalised 30-day productivity plan” designed to help them embed new habits.
“A big part of these courses is making sure that they don’t just have a good day out and learn a whole bunch of things, but they’ve actually then got some rhythms around how they can instill that back in the business,” Clark said.
“They’ll have a weekly review of the habits that they need to create in order to drive meaningful change in their business.”
The programme also includes exercises designed to identify which activities businesses should “stop, start and systemise” and how to review internal processes that may be wasting time or money.
New Zealand’s productivity record has long concerned economists. Output per hour worked remains well below that of many comparable developed economies, and growth has been sluggish for more than a decade.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, Spark’s survey of nearly 400 business leaders suggests many see technology as part of the answer but struggle to implement it.
About 71% of SMEs surveyed said applying new technologies could deliver significant productivity gains, but only 25% ranked technology as their most important priority for improving efficiency. More than half reported barriers to adopting new tools, particularly cost and lack of knowledge.
Clark said the findings reflected the reality that many business owners were too busy to step back and assess how their businesses operated.
“If you think about a lot of small firms, they’re the chief executive officer, the chief financial officer and they’re in charge of human resources. They’re trying to communicate with customers and often they don’t have time to pause and look at where the waste and cost is from a process perspective in their business.
“They are so focused on keeping the ship running they don’t necessarily have the time and the space to be thinking about how they can do things differently.”
Participants in the workshops receive access to a week-long online “AI foundations” course developed by New York firm Section.
That concentrates on practical uses of widely available AI tools. “It’s really about how do I just get started,” Clark said.
“It might be proofreading documents. It might be using them to more efficiently write copy that they’re going to send to their customers.”
The leadership habits the workshops try to encourage include holding structured one-on-one meetings with staff to discuss how processes can be improved.
Owners often focused heavily on customers and product development but paid less attention to the efficiency of their own internal systems, Clark said.
“I feel like there’s less attention on the internal side of their business, around how they can be more efficient and how they can run their own processes better.”
Alarmingly perhaps, three-quarters of firms surveyed by Spark believed they were ahead of their competitors, which suggests a degree of complacency given that can’t be true for more than half of businesses.
Another goal of the workshops is simply putting business owners in the same room so they can discuss productivity and learn from each others’ experiences.
The workshops have so far been held in Queenstown and Christchurch and the next is in Wellington on April 21, followed by Palmerston North, Hamilton, Tauranga and Auckland through June.
Clark said Spark was conscious such initiatives could be seen as marketing for its technology products. But the programme had been designed to balance commercial interests with practical advice, with The Icehouse providing about 80% of the content, he said.
“We’ve tried with this one to strike a real balance of what we know that customers are actually looking for, rather than just making it a hard sales pitch.”
If there was demand, the programme could expand, he said. “It’s definitely something that we’ll consider based on the feedback that we get.”