Smart Work

Why Organizations Full of Intelligent People Do So Many Dumb Things and What You Can Do About It

Steven A Stanton

• Publisher: FCB Partners
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780998082233
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

Smart Work makes the argument that organizational transformational is needed now. When the urgent drives out the important, organizations are trapped in the status quo. When employees are frantically busy with email madness and dysfunctional meetings, there’s no time to think. Without reflection, there’s no way to create a smart future for the organization.

New York Time best-selling author, Steven Stanton describes how organizations become prisoners of their bad habits and how Continuous Improvement programs only provide expensive “better sameness” and unintentionally constrain big change.

Smart Work describes a dramatically new organizational model, based on new technologies, which will provide organizations with unprecedented levels of self-awareness and sentience – the ability to sense, understand, and respond to marketplace information.

Readers of Smart Work will learn:

• To recognize the symptoms of Project-itis and how to defeat it
• What digitized processes are, and the role they play in performance improvement
• How to identify key metrics and develop a balanced measurement scorecard
• How to proactively sense deep customer and competitor actions and to avoid surprises
• When to power-up governing processes to achieve higher levels of organizational synergy

Smart Work presents both a clear and compelling argument for why BIG change is needed, and a roadmap for successful execution.

Unfortunately, traditional organizations have developed formidable defenses against the very changes they need for survival. For all their assets, large organizations are weaker than the sum of their parts because their basic design is explicitly intended to limit change and innovation.

CHAPTER ONE
TOO BUSY TO THINK

Are you busy?

In a typical encounter, when you ask someone how they’re doing, the answer is likely to be “Busy.”

Busyness is the prevailing condition of our times. We have long to-do lists that never get completed. The pace of work is relentless, and as soon as one task is done, two more are thrown over the transom and have to be done by the end of the day. There’s so much to do and so little time to do it. A December 2015 Gallup poll found that 61 percent of American workers said they didn’t ever have enough time to do the things they needed to do.

A perfect metaphor for the busyness of work life is the carnival game “Whack-a-Mole,” where, armed with a rubber mallet, you attempt to batter down plastic moles as they emerge, faster and faster, from holes in the machine. Although it may be emotionally satisfying to hammer down those little buggers, you can never ever win. They just keep coming with an unpredictable ferocity. Just like your workload.

But where does all this busyness come from? Let’s see if the following three time-sucking culprits can explain your situation.

ENDLESS EMAIL

On an average work day, how many email messages do you receive? 50? 100? 300? Too busy plowing through them to count?

Whatever the number, it’s bound to be big.

In 2012, Fortune Magazine reported that American workers were spending 28 percent of their time plowing through email. The Harvard Business Review stated in 2013 that, on average, 111 business days per year were spent on email communications.

Whew!

According to the Radicati Group, by 2015, 2.6 billion emails were sent per day worldwide with that number expected to rise by 3 percent per year. DMR research states that in 2015 the average worker received more than 121 emails per day, often requiring 3 to 4 hours to slog through their daily haul.

These numbers just reflect email. In addition, American workers now have to contend with instant messaging, social media, and plain old telephone calls.

Communications is exploding everywhere, not just at your desk. In 2015, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics found that the average number of smartphone checks per person was 46 per day, with millennials clocking in at 74 times a day.

This reflexive communication checking is so pervasive that there’s a new medical phenomenon, “vibrating thigh,” the feeling that your phone is pulsing, despite the fact that it’s in your shirt, purse, or attaché.

For most workers, regardless of rank, communication fills every crack and crevice of their calendar, seeping into every spare moment. By keeping our phones on and responding when they demand attention, we’re giving tacit permission to senders that it’s OK to send messages at any hour of the day. Response is expected. For 62 percent of us, checking email is the last thing we do before sleep and the first thing we do upon waking.

What’s causing this email tsunami? For starters, email is an unprecedented technology. The world has never experienced a free, always on, many-to-many communication media before. Previous communication technologies such as snail mail and telephone were one-to-one and incurred a cost to the sender. These limitations constrained traditional communication. But no longer, because there’s no marginal cost difference between sending to one recipient or to 100. As a result, there are billions of email messages flying around the world every week, and an explosion of emails from vast distribution lists clogs our in-boxes.

Email has made us all screen zombies. Next time you’re walking down the street or in an elevator, check out where people’s attention is focused. We’ve become prisoners of our own devices.

Email is draining away work hours from every employee in every organization. When you’re heads down on email, you can’t be heads up solving problems. Add up all the hours spent on email, and the productivity loss is staggering. Instead of delighting customers or improving processes, employees are glued to their screens busily deleting irrelevant email. What a waste.

Worse, the email mess is a huge problem nobody owns. It’s both invisible to the organization and overwhelming to employees. Who’s responsible for email in your organization? Whose problem is this? Who’s measured or incentivized to solve email madness? Probably no one. Or everyone. Or your CEO or CIO, who just may have a few other more strategic, pressing issues on their plate.

Email is an organizational orphan. It doesn’t fit neatly anywhere in traditional models. It’s pervasive and causes a humongous productivity problem, yet it’s homeless.

To keep on doing nothing about a problem of this scale is just plain dumb.

MEETING MADNESS

On top of all that communication, how many hours each week do you spend attending meetings? If you’re like most employees the answer is “Too many!” You have team meetings, project meetings, status meetings, update meetings, standup meetings, and meetings to plan meetings. The variety is endless, as are many of the meetings themselves.

The Atlassian Group estimates that the average American worker attends 62 meetings per month, which computes to more than 3 meetings a day—a major portion of everyone’s workday.

How many of your meetings are productive encounters that deeply engage you and produce meaningful results?

Atlassian’s research reveals that 50 percent of all meetings are considered ineffective “wasted time” meetings (which personally I believe is far too low an estimate). Another perspective comes from Jim Ware, whose recent book is Making Meetings Matter. He estimates that 90 percent of all meetings are dysfunctional. At one hour per meeting, that wasted time equals 18 percent of the average workweek of every employee.

Which means that it’s both the quantity and the quality of meetings that’s problematic.

There are so many ways to have a bad meeting. Many meetings have no clear purpose or meaningful agenda. Frequently, agenda items offer no clarity on the topic’s purpose, so attendees have no clue if the issue that’s on the table is for update or decision. When meeting discipline is mostly absent, these problems occur:

•The entire meeting is spent on the first agenda topic

•The meeting starts and ends later than advertised

•Action items are hopeful wishes

Any of this familiar to you? Of course it’s not just you.

This problem is even worse for executives, who, according to Atlassian, often spend 40 to 50 percent of their time in meetings; for them, the costs of bad meetings is far higher.

David Grady in his TED talk, estimated that bad meetings cost US companies a staggering $37 billion a year. For every Fortune 50 company, that works out to $75 million a year down the drain.

The authors also state that 73 percent of meeting attendees spend long stretches daydreaming during their meetings. Many others are preoccupied by their smartphones, whittling down their email stack. This is so pervasive that one of the most common comments one hears in meetings is, “Can you please repeat that?” spoken when an attendee hears their name but hasn’t been paying attention.

If asked, these attendees claim that they’re “multitasking,” which is just another way of describing how to fail at several things simultaneously.

Worse yet, the TED talk cited earlier mentions the sobering fact that 75 percent of American organizations did not offer training on effective meeting management, despite the fact that the rules for running a good meeting are relatively well known and not all that difficult to execute.

Nevertheless, organizations continue to generate and require that employees attend more and more meetings. It’s crazy. As the author Rita Mae Brown once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result each time.” But perhaps it’s not so strange after all.

Who’s responsible for meeting management in your organization? Perhaps the same person that owns email. It’s another orphan, dispersed, destructive, and homeless. And another productivity drain.

Why do organizations continue to hold so many terrible meetings? Why do smart people allow this obvious problem to persist?

It’s just dumb.

PROJECT-ITIS

There’s a new malady contributing to business busyness, Project-itis. This occurs when organizations launch an endless stream of disconnected change projects. Because there’s no central repository of project data, there’s absolutely no way for these projects to be counted, prioritized, rationalized, or aligned. It’s not surprising then that many of these dispersed projects are redundant or in direct conflict. There’s just no way to tell.

When Project-itis occurs, no one knows the total investment the organization is making under the banner of improvement. It’s an invisible but huge sum. Even worse, because there’s no clear project inventory, the organization has no way to align its project managers to the right task, track overall success rates, or conduct consistent post-project reviews.

While these projects are hopefully motivated by a sincere intent to improve performance, the execution is pure chaos. Project-itis stems from unbound freedom, where anyone can launch a project at any time. And because they can, they do. The result is a blizzard of change efforts. As George Bernard Shaw once noted, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Because the costs of these projects are invisible to everyone, organizations spend with wild abandon. They behave as if they have unlimited resources to spend and an infinite ability to absorb change. Neither is true.

Of course Project-itis contributes to busyness in other ways as well, as all these project teams hold frequent meetings and email each other endlessly.

Taken together, Email Mania, Meeting Madness, and Project-itis consume huge portions of every employee’s productive time. As one manager sadly explained, “4 p.m. is when I start doing real work.”

Why do organizations allow these productivity disasters to persist?

WHY IS EVERYONE SO BUSY?

What’s behind all of this busyness? What’s driving all this communication? Why now?

The first cause of widespread busyness is the relentless downsizing of the past 20 years. Repeated cost management purges have left many organizations anorexic. In a 2012 Fortune magazine article, a Walmart senior executive sadly admitted, “We have cut costs too far, stores are understaffed, and associates cannot provide customers the service that Sam Walton built the company on.”

Sometimes called layoffs, RIFs, headcount adjustments, or drive-by-shootings, these employee-reduction programs have often been focused on the bottom of the organization, where frontline workers have the least power and most vulnerability.

There’s ample data to prove that layoffs simply don’t work. They don’t provide substantial and lasting cost reduction. Sadly, most of these efforts simply reduce the total number of workers, but never adjust the quality or quantity of the work that needs to be performed. For example, at one very large chemical company, the same amount of work that was done five years ago is now done with one-third fewer employees. The tasks never disappeared, only the workers did, and the survivors are busier than ever—augmented by rehired ex-employees who now serve as expensive consultants.

The last 20 years’ devotion to the principles of shareholder value and its evil twin, short-term-quarterly-returns-to-make-Wall-Street-happy, have driven cost-reduction pogroms to extremes, thinning out the workforce and increasing every survivor’s busyness.

The second driver of busyness is the intensified level of competition in every sector, facing every organization. No one is immune. Technology and globalization have raised the competitive stakes for everyone. Local markets have disappeared and everyone is competing against their best global competitors.

The third contributor to busyness is the explosion of new technologies: artificial intelligence, inexpensive sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT),...