What are my employees actually doing?
As a leader, do you find yourself wondering how your team is really spending their time? Your HR business partner tells you that they’re all overwhelmed and getting increasingly burned out, but you’re confused as to why. Even worse, they’re not producing the results that you or the organization expects.
Let’s start with the bad news: your team is truly exhausted.
It’s likely that they’re spending the bulk of their time responding to emails, going to meetings, and handling urgent demands (which often come from you). For sure they are running – too bad it’s merely running in place.
Across the board, collaborative demands are out of control. According to research by Atlassian:
- Employees spend about 62 hours a month in meetings and report about half of that time is wasted
- The average employee spends 28 percent of their time on email
- Employees are interrupted more than 50 times a day on average
All that adds up to a week where only about 60 percent of working time is productive. Employees are compensating for that by working more and more to produce the same results.
It’s a common and vicious cycle with two common – and inadequate – solutions: 1) adding more people, who will just contribute to the collaborative chaos, and 2) telling your team to work smarter, which can be read as code for “a layoff is around the corner.”
So what can you do to recoup all of that lost productivity? Try turning down the collaborative noise – those emails and meetings and interruptions that are consuming nearly half of their week, and probably even more of yours. Here are three strategies we recommend:
Break the meeting cycle: In many organizations, all roads lead to meetings. Want an update on that cross-functional project? Schedule a meeting. Need to solve a thorny HR issue? Schedule a meeting. Can’t remember what you decided in your last meeting? You guessed it…
Before you hit send on that meeting invite, ask yourself a couple of questions first:
- Am I looking to collaborate and / or gather input from others?
- Is a live conversation required to advance the work?
- If I were a meeting participant, would this meeting be a good use of my time?
If the answer is no to any of these questions, find a less time-intensive, asynchronous way to advance the work or secure the answer you need, and encourage your teams to do the same. Hot tip: “Get an update on…” is never a good reason to meet.
Make focus time a requirement: Thanks to collaborative noise, our priority works gets squeezed into early mornings and late nights, if it gets done at all. As leaders, we can shift this dynamic by making focus time a requirement rather than a luxury or nice-to-have.
As with most leadership directives, actions here speak louder than words. Work with your EA to block focus time on your own calendar and ask them to protect it the same way they would an important meeting. Encourage teams to designate “meeting free” zones on the calendar to be used for focused work at times that make sense for the business.
A note for the skeptics: yes, there will be exceptions to every rule, and urgent meetings may sometimes override focus time. The key is to make this a conscious choice, rather than the default move.
Match the medium to the message: Ever been trapped in a painful email thread that could have easily been ended by a quick meeting or phone call? Or in the infamous meeting that should have been an email? We all do it, and we all need to stop.
The key is establishing a set of norms that outlines when a method of communication – an instant message, a post to shared platform, an email, or a meeting – should be used, and when you should escalate to the next level. Sure, it takes effort to create and socialize, but the confusion and wasted time it eliminates will pay back exponential returns.
Leaving 40 percent of our working time on the table is no recipe for success. Wasted time takes a toll on morale, efficiency, and effectiveness. Trying replacing your collaborative noise with some joyful productivity instead.
Forbes
