Fake Work

Why People Are Working Harder than Ever but Accomplishing Less, and How to Fix the Problem

Brent D. Peterson, Gaylan W. Nielson

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781416586357
• eBook ISBN: 9781416967750
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Business

How many countless working hours have you spent on projects, proposals, paperwork, and meetings that felt useless or were ignored or dismissed? Hard work is not the same as real work. Half of the work we do consumes valuable time without strengthening the short- or long-term survival of the organization. In a word, it's fake. Not only does fake work drain a company's resources without improving its bottom line, it steals conviction, care, and positive morale from employees, and adds the burden of high turnover, communication breakdowns, and cultural patterns of poor productivity. But how can you turn fake work into real work? Internationally renowned business consultants Brent D. Peterson and Gaylan W. Nielson explain how to identify needlessly time-consuming and sometimes difficult tasks (which aren't always as easy to spot as they seem) and shift your focus toward rewarding work that will achieve results. With more than twenty years of experience, Peterson and Nielson have successfully helped corporations, government agencies, nonprofits, schools, and community groups increase their productivity and retain talented employees by understanding and using their skills on things that actually matter. They illustrate their advice with stories about real world employees who have been trapped by fake work. Fake Work offers solutions that will change the way you view work, including how to recognize fake work and how to get out of it, how (and what) to communicate with your colleagues to eliminate fake work, how to recognize and counteract the personality traits that encourage fake work, and how to close the gap between your company's strategies and the work that needs to be done to reach the results critical to your and your company's survival.

PART 1

Understanding Fake Work and Its Causes

CHAPTER 1

Fake Work: Building a Road to Nowhere

Joyful is the accumulation of good work.

—Buddha

SUPPOSE YOU ARE building a road on a mountainside leading to the site for your new cabin. You have worked for months clearing sagebrush and aspen trees. You’ve moved rocks and filled in roadbed through the exhausting heat, the raging downpours, even early snow. You’ve pushed forward, working from your best understanding of the surveyor’s plans. Your road winds over a dusty hill, cuts through the trees, moves along a rocky ridge, and then—you find yourself looking down from the edge of a cliff.

Fake work looks and feels like that. The building of the road was purposeful. Your effort was admirable. The blood, sweat, and tears you poured into the project were real and your commitment was profound. But none of that really matters! You are still left with a road to nowhere.

So many of us have dedicated weekends and long nights to a project, proposal, or presentation that ended up being canceled, ignored, or dismissed—essentially roads to nowhere—and see all one’s efforts lead to nothing. That is the road to fake work—work that, at the end of long days, weeks, months, or even years, just seems to drop off a cliff.

What Is Real Work and What Is Fake Work?

We spend more than half our lives and a vast percentage of our waking hours going to work, being at work, leaving work, and thinking about work—even when we’re not at work. What we sometimes miss, when we think about work, is outcomes.

Real work, as we define it, is work that is critical and aligned to the key goals and strategies of an organization—any organization, corporation, nonprofit company, government agency, church, school, or family. It is work that is essential for the organization’s short-term and long-term survival.

Fake work, on the other hand, is effort under the illusion of value. Fake work is work that is not targeting or aligned with the strategies and goals of the company. Fake work is what happens when people lose sight of their personal or company goals—whether it’s increasing sales, opening new offices, or designing new products—and what, amid all the work being done, they’re actually doing to achieve those goals. Prime examples of fake work—which drains both the individual and the company—are meaningless paperwork, time-wasting meetings, empty training initiatives, or countless other activities that do nothing to move us toward our objectives, either as individuals or as companies.

Often it is easy to identify fake work, simply because it is so blatantly obvious and stupid. One manager, Ricky, describes one such situation:

PICKED TO WASTE MY TIME

I was put on a committee to study my company’s travel policy. A lot of complaints had surfaced, and employees seemed to have a lot of problems interpreting the policy correctly. But most of us on this committee felt that the real intent of upper management, which put together the committee, was only to validate the current policy, because we had been through the same kind of charade before with other issues.

In the first meeting, Katrina, a committee member, asked, “Does anyone think that we can make any changes, or make any difference at all?” Most of us answered no. Kurt, another coworker, added, “Nothing is going to change, so let’s write up a proposal and get this over with.”

I had been here before. I’m in HR, and last year I was asked to renew our benefits plan and make recommendations on changes. So I wrote up a long analysis and proposed a lot of changes. Then later I learned from a coworker that most of those changes had already been determined. They just wanted to say that they’d asked for my contribution. I knew—most of us knew—that we could write or propose anything, and the leaders would say they had given all the issues due attention and were confident that the current policy was working.

There were a few committee members who felt honored to have a seat at the table. But not me, not most. I just wondered why management would pick me—“honor me”—with a total waste of my time.

But we went ahead and did our work. We reviewed the travel policy and benchmarked it against other company policies. We gathered data and recommended four key changes in the policy that seemed to respond to the criticisms. We filed a report and we presented our recommendations to some key people.

And what do you think happened? Sure enough, a while later, the company leaders announced that, after looking at all the data and reviewing our report, they would make “no changes at this time.” We can’t say we were at all surprised, but we sure were annoyed.

Other times, fake work can be hard, dreadfully hard, to detect, as we will explore in the following chapters. As the next story illustrates, the line between real work and fake work can be thin, but very costly and time-consuming.

ENGINEERING VS. REPORTING

A large engineering firm asked us to pinpoint areas where its engineers and managers could be more productive. Management thought the fault lay with engineers who were not planning and organizing their work effectively. But we discovered a more obvious culprit that was stealing enormous amounts of essential, client-focused work time each week: the lengthy activity reports that the engineers had to write and file.

Management expected a through activity report from each engineer each week. In addition, the engineers were also to file monthly reports. The reports were extensive, averaging about fifteen pages each. In fact, the reports took about four days per month per engineer to prepare. Managers told us the reports were important. We didn’t disagree, but we were concerned. For one thing, we found that most of the content in the weekly and monthly reports was lengthy narrative that was already captured in their daily logs.

We asked several managers if they would show us how they used the engineers’ reports and what important information they disclosed. One manager, Rafael, seemed to represent the other managers well. He pulled a huge stack of reports from his in-box, complaining that he would never get through them.

We asked Rafael to mark, with a yellow highlighter, the parts of the reports he was interested in reading—what was most important. He stopped reading and started hunting for the pertinent information by jumping from the front of the report to the back and then skimmed it over page by page. When we asked what he did with the reports when he was finished, he showed us a huge bookshelf crammed floor to ceiling with past reports.

We then asked him why he read the last page so early. He said, “If anything of value appears in the report, I usually find it in the last few pages.” Then we tried to pinpoint what he was looking for. We reviewed the highlighted content and found that Rafael was looking for three key pieces of information:

1. Problems that had to be solved
2. Recommendations that managers or others needed to act on to solve the problems
3. Conclusions from projects. Something final of importance.

Given that most of the managers had needs quite similar to Rafael’s, we helped the company design a two-page summary that the engineers could file every week, instead of the fifteen-page reports they were currently writing. It had three headings:

1. Problems found on ______ project
2. Recommendations for action
3. Conclusions regarding ______ project

Then we cut out the monthly report entirely because the short summaries gave the managers all the information they needed.

This simple change significantly reduced the time managers spent reviewing the reports. But it was the engineers who saved the most time; their reporting time was reduced by 75 percent, freeing three more days each month for them to do real work. More important, eliminating so many hours of wasteful, fake work on the part of both management and the engineers, added to their enjoyment of the work, helped solve retention issues, and improved overall job satisfaction.

As challenging as it sometimes is to answer, can you afford not to ask yourself the critical question: Am I doing fake work? And once you’ve asked yourself if you’ve fallen into the fake-work trap, other important questions will arise: Are my coworkers doing fake work? Where does fake work begin, and who has the ability to control it? How do leaders affect fake work? How can work teams control the value of their work? What about individuals? Throughout this book, we hope to illuminate these questions and offer meaningful answers. In the process, we will challenge readers to ask the right questions, to understand the issues, and to find their way back from the road to nowhere.

The Changing Nature of Work

Go to a bar, restaurant, hotel, or sporting event on any given night, and you’ll find people checking their work voice mail and reading work-related e-mail on their BlackBerrys or iPhones; you’ll see conference calls happening on commuter trains at 6 a.m.; and in the airport you’ll see people who routinely travel to a faraway city during the day for work and return home at ten p.m., often multiple nights a week. As a culture, we’re defined by our work, and many of us are consumed by doing our jobs all the time. We’re working harder and faster than ever before, and we’re doing it on a 24/7 schedule.

But our research points up a painful fact: All too often the incredibly hard work spent on a project or task is not what needs to be done to meet company goals: It is fake work. The intent is to accomplish good work. The intent is to be responsible. The intent is to be proud of our work. But can you be working hard, with good intentions, with amazing effort, and still be doing fake work? Sadly, yes, and way too often. Much of the reason for this grim reality is found in the fact that work has changed. In fact, the very nature of how we see and measure work has shifted dramatically in a very short time, and we must ensure that we understand real work and fake work in the context of these changes. Plenty has been written about the shift from products to services, from manufacturing to knowledge and information workers, from low use of technology to high use. And each of these shifts makes a huge difference in how we perceive work.

The following is a story shared by Collin, the CEO of a technology consulting firm, in which he takes a mental journey as he walks through his work environment and queries the activities he’s observing.

WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED WORK?

I am walking around our office building and people are busy—very busy. There is a lot of quiet space, and a lot of people are talking on cell phones—possibly to our customers or colleagues around the world. There are lots of people frantically typing on computers. I feel like peeking through the shades of offices and over the cubicle walls to see what is actually happening on those computer screens and eavesdropping on all those cell phone calls. I know we are billing for work, but I don’t know how much is justified—I mean, how much of what we are billing for is real work? How efficient are we? Sometimes I don’t know if work is happening at all. I know I employ good people who are highly involved and very busy. But I don’t know enough about our focus. I don’t know how much of the activity I see is just distraction.

I hear Janice laugh in the distance. Some people talk over their cubicle walls. The concept of work is not the same at all as when I was young. Information is a nebulous concept. Because we get paid for thinking, I am careful not to interrupt, but I am concerned that people don’t know what is truly valuable and critical in our work. I am not sure I have helped make it clear. I am not sure I always know what is valuable and critical myself.

Vincent is at his computer. He answers e-mails, writes e-mails, develops ideas, shares them with his colleague working in Malaysia. He researches the Web. Is it what he—and we—need to be doing? Jared brings me two hundred pages of articles on design that he has reviewed. I didn’t want to discourage him, but there was nothing in those pages that addressed our big issues or served our clients. I don’t know how at-risk we are because I can’t possibly know enough about all this amorphous work and how clients perceive the value. A lot of this activity feels like work. People stay late and come in early. Weekends are not much quieter here, and even then the e-mails keep flowing to me and everyone else. And yet I see work tasks tackled on the weekends evaporating into meaningless discussions. I am guessing that I could change some lives if we could define “critical” and eliminate as much else as possible.

Collin’s ponderings explore the changing nature of work and point to the fact that it is sometimes hard to know if work is being done at all—because banging on the computer or searching the Web has as much potential to be fake work as real. The shift challenges the way we think about and how we see, understand, and measure the effectiveness and relevance of work. Activity alone does not define work’s value. In a manufacturing environment, drilling holes and placing bolts through the holes defines the work, making work and intent easy to connect. Baling hay in a field is easy to see as real work; farmhands are either baling or they’re not.

Collin won’t be able to see whether his company is on track unless he acquires a better understanding of the actual work his employees need to be doing and unless he improves his evaluation skills. Collin is wondering if he has done his job—defining and clarifying the critical elements of his employees’ work. He also wonders if he even knows what those elements are. So if he doubts himself, he has a right to wonder whether others in his company are doing what they need to be doing.

As companies employ more and more remote workers, people working at staggered hours, and people working on research and less product-related work, our view of work must be adjusted. The models for effective management, the measures of success, and our ideas about value hav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Stephen R. Covey
• Introduction: Why Do You Need a Book About Fake Work?
• PART ONE Understanding Fake Work and Its Causes
• PART TWO The Pathways out of Fake Work
• Epilogue: Choose the Road to Real Work
• Acknowledgments
• About The Authors