Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

Those who have been consultants know a simple truth: when you go to an office that is under siege by workload, you’ll usually find that only half of the problem is the workload. The rest is poor study habits translated into office form, and most offices have these.

Just like most software is junk, most offices suffer confused management and workers misapplying their time. You’ll probably notice some of these at desks in your own office, if not your own desk. It’s not your fault that they occur, but it’s your job to fix it. These inefficient and non-productive habits plague most offices I’ve seen as a consultant, and are really easy to fix. You’ll recognize a few from your own experience:

An inbox jammed with stuff. Whether it’s your email, or a physical inbox on your desk, you’re caught in a chicken and egg situation. You won’t get anything done until you clear that inbox of old tasks expiring and causing you new tasks of dubious value, and you won’t clear the inbox until you’re “less busy.” Here’s a hint: getting unbusy for 2 hours of a time a day is a lot less painful than the fallout from all those emails. A clean inbox is a clean mind. It means you can react to new items when it’s important to — right now — instead of three months down the line when they’re irrelevant and the new tasks needed to compensate for you not addressing them are already piling up in your inbox. Every single manager on the verge of burnout with an efficiency problem has exhibited this task.

That burnout schedule. I’ve been to high offices, and I’ve been to low offices. I’ve been to small business and big ones. I’ve been to tech firms, law firms, dental firms and waste management firms. What do I see in common with all managers on the verge of burnout and becoming inefficient? They like to work late hours… a lot… and so they come in late, take longer lunches, and frequently have periods of ineffective activity like meetings, conference calls and email marathon sessions. After all, they deserve the break, because they were here until 2 am last night! Are you kidding? Work normal hours. Cut the work you can’t do, and with your newfound energy, stop enervating your team with bad habits like endless droning meetings. If you can’t do it in your eight hour day, you need to change process, not try to work more. Working more leads to more work. Working harder and smarter leads to you keeping business hours and being there when people need you.

Multitasking. I’ve written about the illusion that multitasking is more effective before. It’s not, because instead of completing a task and moving it into the workflow where you can get others working on it and responding to it, you hang on to it while you also handle lower priority tasks. You need to collaborate with others — get that stuff off your desk and move on to the next, or you’ll end up like every bad manager in the book: with ten things undone on your desk at 9 at night, with people waiting on these things, and you’re too burned out to be effective so you’ll stay at your desk half-working and half “doing computer” until 2 am, so then you can come in tomorrow and tell us all how hard you worked.

The status meeting. You manage ten people. You need to find out what they’re doing. So you call a meeting, and you put them on the carpet in front of others, and get them to ramble on for a bit about what they’re doing. Then you get tricky and summarize what they plan to do in a more ambitious light, and ask them if that’s what they’re going to do. When they say yes, you feel clever. You got them to sign up for more work! It must be more efficient! The meeting took an hour and everyone is stupefied after it, but you got more blood from that stone. You must be a good manager. After all, no one would start inflating tasks in response to your strategy, would they? Or even just to cover how demoralized and bored they are after being treated that way? If you have ten employees, they probably don’t need to know what each other employee is doing. Stop by their offices for ten minutes a week and you’ll get more realistic answers and better loyalty.

The eternal, big project. This one gets me. A big piece of the future strategy needs doing, and I’m the only one who can do it. Even worse, I’m already overloaded. The best solution is to start reserving the first part of your day, when you have the most energy, toward slaying the dragon and putting everything else on hold. Alternate strategies include: prototyping (get a barebones version complete, then modify it until it meets your standards), hand off portions, get a personal assistant (not a committee), hire consultants.

The protected, supervalued employees. Almost every office has a superstar or person whose role is sacred because no one else can do it. This person then takes advantage of that status to escape supervision (as well as those boring status meetings). You can either make this person the drama queen of your department, or tackle them head on with the realization that if they don’t start toeing the line, they’ll eventually end up moving on regardless. Create team roles, and assign someone to manage this person directly but force them to see reality. Measure their performance along with their team. Finally, hand them challenges that are not so easy for them, forcing them to reach beyond their comfort zones and possibly, humble themselves.

The demands from sacred cows. Clients are king, or management is king, but if your strategy is to jump when they say jump, you will never get to plan a path. Your strategy then becomes non-strategy, which means you will spend all of your time putting out fires that could be easily prevented if you picked a path, listed the tasks you need, and built infrastructure. Employers seem to love this situation because they get immediate attention but it’s ineffective. I’d write more, but we’ve got small fires popping up everywhere, so I’ll get back to ROI-bearing work sometime before 2017. Panic! panic!

The illusion of metrics. Managers fear being unaware of what’s going on. To compensate, they create mountains of information measuring what employees are doing, called “metrics.” If you have ever wasted time filling in a time sheet, or seen a spreadsheet predicting your time usage, or tried to parse a ridiculously complex Gant chant whose distance from reality increases linearly with the duration of the project, you have encountered metrics. Some metrics are a good idea, such as time billing to clients, but generally they’re a source of misery for employees that beat them into submission. What’s worse, they don’t give managers a realistic view of what’s going on because employees learn to game the system. Almost every mismanaged office I’ve seen has had some form of metrics that kept everyone confused and lying up until they realized productivity had been halved.

The uneasy arrangement. Somewhere in the business, something so instrumental exists that everyone is afraid to suggest it be changed for fear of killing the goose that laid the golden egg. The problem is that soon this tail wags the dog. A better solution is to enumerate on paper what it can and can’t do, and assign roles as a means of compensation for it. In addition, wake people up to the fact that they can’t assume not touching it means it will keep laying golden eggs. The market changes, and entropy happens.

The jerk. I’m not against people who are divisive, or even so forthright that some call it abusive, because these are the people who cut past the fog of confusion that grips others and make things happen. Compromise and being nice are only good values when they help get things done. But, there are some people who are abusive without helping any part of the work process, or divisive without an end. People start tip-toeing around them, which cuts them out of the knowledge stream, which makes them even more abusive. If you can’t discipline such people, or move them close to supervisors so their comments can be heard, assign someone to document their activities. Abuse on paper comes alive and makes what is happening obvious, even to them, which may change the behavior. They’re probably in denial of their crudity and frustration.

The yes person. If you find a yes person, stop your investigation and look to the person above them. This person is a manager who is afraid of doing his or her job. Remove the yes person to another department, and give the manager help in getting organized or less “too busy” so they can gain some confidence through success.

Process like a litany. Bad office environments are always disorganized and people are too exhausted to start the infrastructure changes they need to move ahead. When people require the process, like “first we do a feasibility study, then a department meeting, then a conference call, and finally a needs document” without questioning the validity of the task, you have employees acting by rote. Give them all a four-day weekend and get with the highest manager you can find to make a list of tasks that do return value. You’ll jump start a return to thinking about the reason the business actually exists.

Too busy. If I had a buck for every time I’ve heard the “I’d do that, but I don’t have the bandwidth” excuse, I’d be more than rich. It’s an excuse. Disorganization leads to “too busy” which leads to paralysis. Make two lists: tasks that must be done now, and tasks necessary to make infrastructure more reliable for the future. Then, cut that list off at a reasonable point for the first week or month or quarter, and send the person off with their new priorities. It will get them out of their cycle, and they’ll find that most of what they spent their time on was not immediately necessary, while things they ignored were, resulting in them spending time firefighting when productivity was needed.

Personality-based organized. Jim always codes the memory manager, and Sylvia is the one who does marketing integration. While we need roles, a confusion can arise, especially in small businesses, where the role becomes the person. This means that when that person leaves, everything falls apart. Find out what each person is good at doing and redistribute tasks so each person has their own area, but they don’t overlap and produce these custom, non-transferrable roles. The added benefit: your workers will suddenly perceive more areas they can influence to success, and will rise to the occasion, instead of pigeonholing as they had been.

I can’t claim this list is scientific, but I’ve been into and out of more than a few offices in the past, and have learned from what I’ve seen. While these concepts are easy, putting them into practice, like getting the family out the door for a Saturday outing in under a half hour, is a grapple. The only redeemable fact is that having a disorganized office, while less work, is more frustrating and depletes employees of what excitement and forward drive they retain.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.