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Julian Birkinshaw
Jordan Cohen
To identify the tasks you need to drop or outsource, take this interactive
assessment.
More hours in the day. It s one thing everyone wants, and yet it s impossible
to attain. But what if you could free up significant time maybe as much as 20%
of your workday to focus on the responsibilities that really matter?
We ve spent the past three years studying how knowledge workers can become more
productive and found that the answer is simple: Eliminate or delegate
unimportant tasks and replace them with value-added ones. Our research
indicates that knowledge workers spend a great deal of their time an average of
41% on discretionary activities that offer little personal satisfaction and
could be handled competently by others. So why do they keep doing them? Because
ridding oneself of work is easier said than done. We instinctively cling to
tasks that make us feel busy and thus important, while our bosses, constantly
striving to do more with less, pile on as many responsibilities as we re
willing to accept.
We believe there s a way forward, however. Knowledge workers can make
themselves more productive by thinking consciously about how they spend their
time; deciding which tasks matter most to them and their organizations; and
dropping or creatively outsourcing the rest. We tried this intervention with 15
executives at different companies, and they were able to dramatically reduce
their involvement in low-value tasks: They cut desk work by an average of six
hours a week and meeting time by an average of two hours a week. And the
benefits were clear. For example, when Lotta Laitinen, a manager at If, a
Scandinavian insurance company, jettisoned meetings and administrative tasks in
order to spend more time supporting her team, it led to a 5% increase in sales
by her unit over a three-week period.
While not everyone in our study was quite that successful, the results still
astounded us. By simply asking knowledge workers to rethink and shift the
balance of their work, we were able to help them free up nearly a fifth of
their time an average of one full day a week and focus on more worthwhile tasks
with the hours they saved.
Why It s So Hard
Knowledge workers present a real challenge to managers. The work they do is
difficult to observe (since a lot of it happens inside their heads), and the
quality of it is frequently subjective. A manager may suspect that an employee
is spending her time inefficiently but be hard-pressed to diagnose the problem,
let alone come up with a solution.
We interviewed 45 knowledge workers in 39 companies across eight industries in
the United States and Europe to see how they spent their days. We found that
even the most dedicated and impressive performers devoted large amounts of time
to tedious, non-value-added activities such as desk work and managing across
the organization (for example, meetings with people in other departments).
These are tasks that the knowledge workers themselves rated as offering little
personal utility and low value to the company.
There are many reasons why this happens. Most of us feel entangled in a web of
commitments from which it can be painful to extricate ourselves: We worry that
we re letting our colleagues or employers down if we stop doing certain tasks.
I want to appear busy and productive the company values team players, one
participant observed. Also, those less important items on our to-do lists are
not entirely without benefit. Making progress on any task even an inessential
one increases our feelings of engagement and satisfaction, research has shown.
And although meetings are widely derided as a waste of time, they offer
opportunities to socialize and connect with coworkers. I actually quite look
forward to face-to-face meetings, one respondent told us. A call is more
efficient, but it s a cold, lifeless medium.
Organizations share some of the blame for less-than-optimal productivity.
Cost-cutting has been prevalent over the past decade, and knowledge workers,
like most employees, have had to take on some low-value tasks such as making
travel arrangements that distract them from more important work. Even though
business confidence is rebounding, many companies are hesitant to add back
resources, particularly administrative ones. What s more, increasingly
complicated regulatory environments and tighter control systems in many
industries have contributed to risk-averse corporate cultures that discourage
senior people from ceding work to less seasoned colleagues. The consequences
are predictable: My team is understaffed and underskilled, so my calendar is a
nightmare and I get pulled into many more meetings than I should, one study
subject reported. Another commented, I face the constraint of the working
capacity of the people I delegate to.
Some companies do try to help their knowledge workers focus on the value-added
parts of their job. For example, one of us (Jordan Cohen) helped Pfizer create
a service called pfizerWorks, which allows employees to outsource less
important tasks. We ve also seen corporate initiatives that ban e-mail on
Fridays, put time limits on meetings, and forbid internal PowerPoint
presentations. But it s very difficult to change institutional norms, and when
knowledge workers don t buy in to such top-down directives, they find creative
ways to resist or game the system, which only makes matters worse. We propose a
sensible middle ground: judicious, self-directed interventions supported by
management that help knowledge workers help themselves.
What Workers Can Do
Our process, a variant of the classic Start/Stop/Continue exercise, is designed
to help you make small but significant changes to your day-to-day work
schedule. We facilitated this exercise with the 15 executives mentioned above,
and they achieved some remarkable results.
Identify low-value tasks.
Using this self-assessment, look at all your daily activities and decide which
ones are (a) not that important to either you or your firm and (b) relatively
easy to drop, delegate, or outsource. Our research suggests that at least
one-quarter of a typical knowledge worker s activities fall into both
categories, so you should aim to find up to 10 hours of time per week. The
participants in our study pinpointed a range of expendable tasks. Lotta
Laitinen, the manager at If, quickly identified several meetings and routine
administrative tasks she could dispense with. Shantanu Kumar, CEO of a small
technology company in London, realized he was too involved in project planning
details, while Vincent Bryant, a manager at GDF SUEZ Energy Services, was
surprised to see how much time he was wasting in sorting documents.
Decide whether to drop, delegate, or redesign.
Sort the low-value tasks into three categories: quick kills (things you can
stop doing now with no negative effects), off-load opportunities (tasks that
can be delegated with minimal effort), and long-term redesign (work that needs
to be restructured or overhauled). Our study participants found that this step
forced them to reflect carefully on their real contributions to their
respective organizations. I took a step back and asked myself, Should I be
doing this in the first place? Can my subordinate do it? Is he up to it?
recalls Johann Barchechath, a manager at BNP Paribas. This helped me figure
out what was valuable for the bank versus what was valuable for me and what we
simply shouldn t have been doing at all. Another participant noted, I
realized that the big change I should make is to say no up-front to low-value
tasks and not commit myself in the first place.
I realized that the big change I should make is to say no up-front to
low-value tasks and not commit myself in the first place.
Off-load tasks.
We heard from many participants that delegation was initially the most
challenging part but ultimately very rewarding. One participant said he couldn
t stop worrying about the tasks he had reassigned, while another told us he had
trouble remembering to push, prod, and chase. Barchechath observed, I
learned about the importance of timing in delegating something it is possible
to delegate too early.
Most participants eventually overcame those stumbling blocks. They delegated
from 2% to 20% of their work with no decline in their productivity or their
team s. I overestimated my subordinate s capability at first, but it got
easier after a while, and even having a partially done piece of work created
energy for me, Barchechath said. A bonus was that junior employees benefited
from getting more involved. [She] told me several times that she really
appreciated it, he added. Vincent Bryant decided to off-load tasks to a
virtual personal assistant and says that although he was concerned about
getting up to speed with the service, it was seamless.
Allocate freed-up time.
The goal, of course, is to be not just efficient but effective. So the next
step is to determine how to best make use of the time you ve saved. Write down
two or three things you should be doing but aren t, and then keep a log to
assess whether you re using your time more effectively. Some of our study
participants were able to go home a bit earlier to enjoy their families (which
probably made them happier and more productive the next day). Some
unfortunately reported that their time was immediately swallowed up by
unforeseen events: I cleared my in-box and found myself firefighting.
But more than half reclaimed the extra hours to do better work. For me the
most useful part was identifying the important things I don t get time for
usually, Kumar said. I stopped spending time with my project planning tool
and instead focused on strategic activities, such as the product road map.
Laitinen used her freed-up schedule to listen in on client calls, observe her
top salespeople, and coach her employees one-on-one. The result was that
stunning three-week sales jump of 5%, with the biggest increases coming from
below-average performers. A questionnaire showed that employee responses to the
experiment were positive, and Laitinen found that she missed nothing by
dropping some of her work. The first week was really stressful, because I had
to do so much planning, but by the middle of the test period, I was more
relaxed, and I was satisfied when I went home every day.
Commit to your plan.
Although this process is entirely self-directed, it s crucial to share your
plan with a boss, colleague, or mentor. Explain which activities you are
getting out of and why. And agree to discuss what you ve achieved in a few
weeks time. Without this step, it s all too easy to slide back into bad
habits. Many of our participants found that their managers were helpful and
supportive. Laitinen s boss, Sven K rnekull suggested people to whom she could
delegate her work. Other participants discovered that simply voicing the
commitment to another person helped them follow through.With relatively little
effort and no management directive, the small intervention we propose can
significantly boost productivity among knowledge workers. Such shifts are not
always easy, of course. It s hard to make these changes without the discipline
of someone standing over you, one of our study participants remarked. But all
agreed that the exercise was a useful forcing mechanism to help them become
more efficient, effective, and engaged employees and managers. To do the same,
you don t have to redesign any parts of an organization, reengineer a work
process, or transform a business model. All you have to do is ask the right
questions and act on the answers. After all, if you re a knowledge worker, isn
t using your judgment what you were hired for?
Julian Birkinshaw is a professor at London Business School and the author of,
most recently, Reinventing Management: Smarter Choices for Getting Work Done.
Jordan Cohen is a productivity expert and the recipient of the 2010 grand prize
from the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) for his previous work at Pfizer.