Search results for: “productivity”

Some years ago CNN asked 12 well-known leaders including Carlos Ghosn of Nissan, Marissa Mayer of (then) Google and Wynton Marsalis how they manage their time and stay efficient.

My favorite answer is this one:

I know that it’s expected of executives to start the day extremely early, but frankly I feel I make better decisions and relate better to people when I’m well rested. So I usually get up around 8 after a good night’s sleep.

I also make sure to almost always work a standard 40-hour week and never work on the weekends. This is important to me for two reasons. First of all, I have a life outside of work. I have a family who likes to have me around and friends and hobbies that I also want to have time for. I find that the time I spend outside of work recharges my batteries, expands my horizons and actually makes me more efficient at work.

Secondly, if I’m always seen arriving at the office at 6 in the morning and leaving at 9 in the evening, not to mention taking calls and writing emails late at night and all weekend, it’s sure to send a signal to my employees that this is what the company expects, that this is “the right way”. But it isn’t.

It’s a simple fact that for most leaders and employees, the first 40 hours they work each week are worth much more to the company than the next 20, 30 or 40 hours. But those extra hours spent at work can harm your private life, your family and your health. Which in turn becomes damaging to the company.

Frankly, if you can’t structure your time so your work fits inside a 40-hour week, you need to get better at prioritizing and delegating.

Refreshing words. Guess which of the executives said that?

Come on, take a guess!

NONE OF THEM! Not one.

Instead, there’s a lot of “I get up at 5 and arrive at the office at 6” and “I work 16 hours a day” and “I take a lot of calls on the drive in to the office” and “I usually leave the office at 7 and then work a few more hours in the evening at home.”

I fully expected one of them to go “I get up at 4 in the morning, half an hour before I go to bed, and work a 27-hour day, only stopping for a 3-minute lunch break in which two assistants stuff food down my throat like a foie-gras goose.”

I know it’s normal to view people working this hard as heroes of the organization, but still I think they would be more efficient and enjoy life more if they cut down their time at work. They may find that they become more open, less stressed, have more fun AND are better role models for their employees. This cult of overwork has got to stop.

The school of “work your butt off, everything else comes second” is bad for business and bad for people. Can we please retire this tired idea once and for all?

If you liked this post, I think you’ll also enjoy these:

• The cult of overwork revisited
• The cult of overwork is killing startups
• New research: Overwork kills productivity and employees

It pays to be happy. Studies show that businesses with happy employees consistently outperform their less happy competitors in the marketplace and in the stock market.

Considering the challenges that modern organizations face, creating a happy organization is the number one strategic imperative and the only way to long-term success.

This article will tell you why happiness is so important for businesses today, and how you can make your business a happy one.
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When the geeks at NCR in Australia threatened to go on strike, it was a move that could have paralyzed ATMs, supermarket cash registers and airplane check-in. This underlines the fact that IT has become so central to almost all corporations, that any disruption may cost a lot of time and money, which again means that keeping the geeks happy at work is an absolute requirement for a modern business. Happy geeks are effective geeks.

The main reason IT people are unhappy at work is bad relations with management, often because geeks and managers have fundamentally different personalities, professional backgrounds and ambitions.

Some people conclude that geeks hate managers and are impossible to lead. The expression “managing geeks is like herding cats” is sometimes used, but that’s just plain wrong. The fact is that IT people hate bad management and have even less tolerance for it than most other kinds of employees.

So where does it go wrong? I started out as a geek and later became a leader and an IT company founder so I’ve been lucky enough to have tried both camps. Here are the top 10 mistakes I’ve seen managers make when leading geeks:
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Most modern countries are seeing a steady rise in the amount of time people spend at work. There is some evidence, however, that this trend contributes neither to the bottom line nor to our overall well-being.

Esther Derby euthanizes the idea that long hours are a sign of employee commitment. She cites some alternative reasons people stay late at the office, including:

• One woman’s marriage was disintegrating and she stayed late to avoid tension at home.
• Another woman was using company assets to run a side business… and it was easier to hide it when people weren’t around.
• Two people who were having an affair stayed late at work to be together.

Via Jason Yip’s excellent blog.

As for productivity, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in one of her books mentions an IT copany that were in big financial trouble. Rather than lay some people off they switched to a 30-hour work week and a corresponding pay cut, and experienced no reduction in production. They did the exact same amount of work in 30 hours a week as in 40.

When the company righted itself each employee could choose to return to the original work schedule and pay or remain at 30 hours a week. They all chose to keep the short work week. Read the whole amazing story here.

A recent Danish study found that 90% of managers who worked 30-37 hours a week were satisfied with their work-life balance. Among managers working more than 48 hours a week, that percentage dropped to 46. The consequence: More stress, less job satisfaction and an increased risk that they will leave the company.

We’ve long known that reasonable working hours are one of the most important factors determining whether people are happy at work (and in life). Long working hours are not a sign if commitment and may not even contribute to business productivity.

Therefore businesses should stop encouraging (implicitly and explicitly) long work hours and start rewarding the people who go home on time. They’re good for business.

Can you know something, that you haven’t measured? Of course you can. I would actually argue, that by far the largest percentage of what you know about the current state of your organization was not something you measured – it was knowledge that came to you via some other process than objective metrics. A few recents posts in different weblogs have been talking around this topic.

On Intellectual Capital Punishment Sam Marshall (via Smart Meeting Design) wrote about an article in Financial Times:

What did disappoint me though, was the quote from HP’s CKO, Craig Samuel: ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’. Shame on him for using such an outdated cliche. It reinforces the view that management is something you do with spreadsheets. He should be pushing an agenda that changes expectations about what information you need to manage, relying much more on trusting perceptions and qualitative evidence.

On Reforming Project Management Hal Macomber wrote that:

When a supervisor, manager, or organization declares measurements people will quickly adjust their behavior to correspond to their understanding of the measurements… But most organizations have too many measurements… the practice of establishing these measurements keeps management detached from the exactly the operations that they are interested in performing well. Try something else: forego the measurements. Get engaged instead.

Chris Corrigan took a more political perspective and wrote that:

How do I know I have four apples? I count them. This is notable because the subjective truths, the good and the true (in Wilber’s terms) are truths that only exist if you participate in them… To simply sit back and accept the measured approach (pun intended) is to give up responsibility for the truth, and to become complicit in the system that generates that truth from outside of its subjects.

I was thinking about this when a thought struck me that may be painfully obvious to everyone else, but seemed kinda interesting to me. I thought that there are two reasons why we measure anything:
1: To know
2: To become aware

Measuring something will ideally give me concrete, specific knowledge, but it will also affect whatever it is that I’m measuring. Remember the experiments they performed in the car industry (in the 50’s I think) where they modified working conditions to increase productivity? For instance, they turned up the lighting in an area, and that made the workers more efficient. They tried dimming the lights in another area and, strangely, this also increased productivity! What affected the workers’ productivity in these cases was not more or less light, it was a couple of guys with clipboards in the background constantly taking notes. (On a side note, the notion that you can’t measure anything in a system without affecting the system is also a consequence of the uncertainty principle in quantum physics.)

So metrics aren’t bad. Not at all. The problem comes mostly when metrics are seen as the only way to increase knowledge and awareness – eg. when HP’s CKO, Craig Samuel says ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’.

The question then becomes whether you will allow yourself to trust knowledge obtained without objective metrics and, frankly, I believe that not to do so is absurd. I would even take it one step further, as I did in a previous post and say that most of the important stuff that goes on in an organization is
a) Not measured
b) Not even measureable

Metrics are used to generate both awareness and knowledge, but to treat metrics as the only trustworthy source is absurd!