The truth about wasting time at work

If you look at the standard organizational model, the first thing you notice is that it’s a pyramid. It is narrower at the top than at the bottom. There are a lot of worker bees at the bottom of the pyramid — that’s why the base of the pyramid is broader than the top of the pyramid is. There are fewer managers than employees, and there are a very small number of executives at the top of the organization, calling the shots. 

Since the typical organization has lots of non-management employees and only a small number of senior-level leaders, it stands to reason that every minute of a highly-placed executive’s day has great impact. The decisions C-level leaders make have huge ramifications on everything from the company’s stock price tomorrow to the firm’s existence or nonexistence five years from now.

That’s why it is so strange that we fuss and obsess about low-level employees’ every move at every second while the top dogs do pretty much what they want. Nobody tells them to move faster. Nobody clocks their activities, the way we do to rank-and-file employees.

When the top brass are sitting in the conference room mixing business ideas with friendly banter about sports and current events, no one says “Listen, you folks are wasting time.” Down on the shop floor and in the cubicle farms, that is all we hear!

We are stupid and deluded about time at work. We measure how long it takes to perform every minute task, until the measurement itself becomes more important than the task.

We won’t build a great company by saving femtoseconds in the duration of each customer service call or by doubling the number of invoices that an A/P person can pay in an hour. We have left the Machine Age far in the past. Why do we still foolishly reduce complex Knowledge Work to menial piecework by clocking every activity, even creative projects that can’t and shouldn’t be timed?

We miss the forest for the trees. What makes people effective? Their brains connected to their hearts make them effective. Speed, passion, creativity and diligence all spring from the same place — from a working person’s connection to his or her power source. That sacred connection is the very thing our weenie measurements trample and destroy.

Who can connect to a higher place when he or she is being hounded to produce more, work faster and hustle, hustle, hustle?

What is the fuel that powers our efforts at work? Our own creative juices fuel are the fuel– along with our excitement about our work and the good energy on our teams. Those are the things leaders and HR folks should be reinforcing and exalting, instead of yammering about pointless measurements whose only purpose is to goad people to work harder and faster – power source be damned!

We need to lose our “Production First” mindset in order to thrive in the 21st century. We are sixteen years in. It is time to wake up and see what really differentiates so-so organizations from outstanding ones. In the great organizations, we assume that the people we’ve hired are capable of doing their jobs on their own, and much better than we could ever do them.

What gets in the way of your team’s excitement and kills their natural urge to win? Watching them like hawks and treating them like criminals gets in the way. We measure too much at work. Our obsession with measurement and time-keeping is a fear reaction. We are terrified that our own employees might be slacking off or ripping us off.

Why would they do that, if they are fairly paid and treated like the valued collaborators they are?

We are afraid to face forward and lead, so we face backward and supervise our teams into the dust instead. We take away any reason they might have to give a dang about anything loftier or more exciting than hitting the goals we’ve given them. We measure their smallest movements and tell them “You can do it faster!”

People will plug into their power sources at work, whatever their power sources are, if we give them room to do that. If we allow people to bring themselves to work and create something powerful in the process of doing their jobs, they’ll blow their goals away. That is the secret to Leading with a Human Voice, the polar opposite of the old-fashioned, fear-based management approach that is still so prevalent today.

We rip ourselves off, we rip our customers and shareholders off and we take away our teammates’ principal incentive to care about their work when we measure, poke, prod and evaluate them on every breath they take and keystroke they make. If you employ adults rather than children, why not let them do the jobs they were hired to do with a minimum of interference?

You don’t stand over the plumber and direct him and push him to hurry while he removes your kid’s sock from the tub drain. Why do you trust the plumber who walks into your house for the first time more than you trust the people you hired after a thorough recruiting process – one that you and your colleagues designed yourselves?

Fear is epidemic in the workplace, and our obsessive need to control and regulate every aspect of work is one big piece of evidence. Fear makes us create yardsticks for every activity, lest somebody slack off in his work for five minutes. We forget how human  beings operate. We need mental breaks and diversion to stay awake, much less to stay sharp. We are not machines. We need to laugh and get up and move around.

 Credit: Liz Ryan