Are Scorecards and Metrics Killing Employee Engagement?

Staff Sgts. Fred Hilliker and Robert O'Hair were boarding Delta Flight 1625 in Baltimore for the final leg of their journey home from Afghanistan with 32 others in their U.S. Army unit when their homecoming came to an abrupt halt. Delta personnel told the soldiers they needed to pay $200 for each person that had a fourth bag with them, even though their military orders stated that these bags were covered.

Unable to gain resolution with Delta, the two Staff Sgts filmed a YouTube video about the incident. The story generated considerable buzz for an obvious reason: What Delta did to these soldiers was wrong. I'm fairly sure that the Delta employees who were demanding payment knew it. So why didn't they just waive the fees?

The Delta situation could be dismissed as an unfortunate case of miscommunication if it didn't seem so familiar. It highlights a trend in management that favors the fulfillment of quantifiable, top-down metrics. I'd bet that you've had an experience dealing with customer service where you were told that there was no one else you could talk to and no one was authorized to take the necessary action to resolve your complaint. As psychologist Barry Schwartz has observed, many areas of life are increasingly bound up with rules that limit the ability of individuals to use judgment and make the best decision for the specific situation.

It would be wrong to place all the blame on workers for their failure to take discretionary steps. The blame lies with management that sets rigid rules and metrics that disable employee judgment and create so many approval hurdles for mundane decisions, that overworked employees say, "Why bother?" Employee disengagement has reached crisis proportions as evidenced by a recent Mercer study that found that 50% of employees are checked out on the job.

It's not hard to see how we got here. Performance metrics are a critical tool for achieving excellence and motivating outcomes. But as important as performance metrics are, problems arise when performance metrics become overly dominant as a managerial principle, as they are in too many organizations.

Metrics earn an outsized role because managing by the numbers is easier than managing people. Employees make mistakes, their actions are difficult to predict, and the outcomes of their decisions are hard to measure. When employees make wrong judgments the resulting mess, in terms of customer satisfaction and legal liability, can often be difficult and expensive to clean up.

Rules are comfort food for management. When something goes terribly wrong, the first response is to add more rules and policy. Of course, managers have good intentions: protecting the company from bad choices and creating accountability. That's what everyone learns in Management 101. Yet the net effect often shifts accountability to the wrong places. Unassailable rules and metrics shifts accountability away from management and down the chain to the front-line employee. Rules allow managers a surefire way to dodge their responsibility and protect their career.

The blame for poor employee action should be placed on the managers who set rigid metrics, and fail to invest in employees. Yet customers need more judgment, not less, from the employees they come in contact with. When customers contact a call center, it's because there is an exception within the existing process and they need judgment that only employees can provide. Corporations need to build guidelines and values — not absolute rules and measures. "Doing what's right for the customer" is a value that can drive appropriate action. Judgment requires coaching, practice and training.

Metrics, policies and scorecards are not bad per se. There are many benefits when used appropriately. The pendulum seems to have swung too far away from employee judgment, though. Let's bring it back in balance. Invest in your front-line employees and then trust them to make the right decisions for the customer. Otherwise you'll be managing a group of automatons who, when confronted with situations outside the rigid rules, will be virtually guaranteed to make the wrong judgment.

Adrian C. Ott - Harvard Business Review

Do You Actually Work 40+ Hours?

The last few months, I’ve been wondering about something. I am self-employed. I work in an office by myself. No one watches me or looks over my shoulder. I work flexible hours.  Do those hours really add up to 40 or more a week?

My Productivity Experiment

I did an experiment in which I calculated all of the hours I was actually working (i.e. writing, attending phone meetings, pursuing leads, responding to business-related e-mails) versus doing personal tasks or surfing the Internet.

It turns out that I do indeed work 40 or more hours a week, but those hours aren’t organized in 5, 8-hour chunks like the hours of traditional employees. Rather, I am able to complete several administrative and business development tasks for my business in the morning and do heavy lifting writing in the late afternoon, when my energy level is highest.

Especially if I’m sitting at my computer the whole time, I definitely lose steam between 11AM and 3PM, and again between 6PM and 9PM. But it’s not uncommon for me to continue working with all cylinders firing after my children are in bed.

9 to 5 as inefficient?

Even though I’m pretty efficient overall, my rate of efficiency during the “traditional” 9 to 5 work day is not that great. And yet I suspect I’m not alone. I don’t think most employers would be thrilled that people are tooling around on social media for hours every work day, but this is common and part of being human.

Human beings only have the ability to focus intensely for a few hours at a time, at which point our energy slackens and we switch to an activity that requires less brain power. In the days when most of us worked in the fields or in factories, it didn’t matter if we were able to concentrate because so much of the work was rote. But a great deal of today’s work relies on creativity, analytical ability, and strategic thinking, and for that, we need to be sharp.

Long Breaks for the Self-Employed

Everyone’s productivity cycle is different, and as a result of my research, I’m learning how to manage mine. After working for a few hours in the morning, I go to the gym, run errands, grab lunch outside, or take a nap during my low energy time in the early afternoon. I write like a fiend in the late afternoon and continue through the early evening, and then, after a two hour break engaging with my kids and having dinner with my husband, I’ll sit down at the computer and finish a project or catch up on e-mails.

Unfortunately, if you’re employed in a traditional business environment, you can’t have a schedule like a self-employed person. You are expected to work productively for 8 hours straight, and at some point during this long stretch, you are likely kidding yourself.  Coffee can only do so much. The typical office culture does not allow you to recoup your energy in an effective way, so you sit at your desk clicking mindlessly or staring into space. This isn’t good for anyone.

The Solution for the Average Employee

Given that productivity cycles vary by individual, knowledge workers are most effective if they set their own hours and leave the workspace to do something else when their energy depletes. Thanks to technology, being tied into the business from home 24/7 is now feasible.

However, I’m a realist, and I don’t think the majority of workplaces are ready to employ telecommuting on a grand scale (although I can see this happening in the next 10 years).  What employers can do is encourage flex-time. Let your people come and go as they please provided the work is getting done with great results.

Get them up and away from their desks by setting up fitness and recreation programs onsite or nearby, and create a culture where eating meals is a social and/or networking activity instead of yet another thing to be done in front of the computer. When people are permitted to work when they feel their best, productivity will improve across the board.

40+ Hours?

Alexandra Levit

Productivity Made Simple: How to Keep Your Projects from Killing You

 

Some projects can be a real pain in the you know what. Not all of them, of course. But there are some that just keep us awake at night. There can be many reasons of such a situation. Sometimes the tasks that need to be done are simply difficult to perform. Other times it’s the amount of time required that frightens us.

But sometimes the most frightening thing of them all is that we don’t know what’s going on in a project, and can’t seem to find a way to plan everything out and get a clear picture of what needs to be done.

In the previous parts of the series we were discussing what to do once everything is perfectly laid out. 

Once we’re clear about the exact tasks that need to be done, and once we even know when we want to take care of them. But there’s one part missing, and that’s of course the part of planning your projects and selecting your priorities.

Most projects we decide to execute should be defined and planned according to five main steps. These are:

1. Setting goals and rules.
2. Defining your vision for the end result.
3. Brainstorming.
4. Organizing.
5. Selecting next tasks.

Of course, not every project requires such an elaborate sequence of steps. Some projects are really simple, and defining things like goals or visions would be a complete overkill.

If you just want to get your car fixed then you don’t need any smart rules to be able to get it done … you probably know what needs to be done without any additional help.

However, GTD was designed to be able to handle any kind of project, no matter how big or small.

The steps mentioned above are doing just that. They can be applied to anything. And after you go through all of them you can be sure that your project will be clear and understandable. This, in the end, will improve your chance of executing the project successfully.

To explain this whole thing we’ll have to leave our simple examples and take on something a bit more complicated… So imagine that you’re buying a new apartment for you and your family.

 

1. Setting goals and rules.

This is the part where you answer the questions of why and what for.

For our example the question is: Why do you want a new apartment?

Some possible answers: you want to live closer to your workplace, you want your kids to live closer to school, you want to have more space for yourself and your family, you want to live in the city center because all the interesting things are happening there, you want a more modern environment, and so on.

The reasons behind every project are of course different. Furthermore, personal projects are entirely different in nature from business-centered projects. But they still have a lot in common. If, for example, instead of buying a new apartment you’re starting a business then the question remains – why do you want to start a business?

So no matter what you’re thinking of doing you always need to start with your goals and rules. Goals we have covered (it’s the why). Rules are even easier to grasp.

Going back to our example; some rules: what is your budget? where do you want to live (what neighborhood)? do you want to get one room for everybody? do you need a garage? and so on.

Once you have all these things lined up you can go to the next step.

 

2. Defining your vision for the end result.

This is where you’re answering the question of what.

Create a complete vision of what you want to get as the end result of the project. The more details the better.

Your vision reflects the goals and rules you’ve set in the previous step. The goals are the main guidelines on what should and shouldn’t be done inside a given project. So now, you’re using these goals to come up with your vision for the final result of the project.

A possible vision for our project:

I want a 4 bedroom apartment in the city center. At least X square meters of space. Large kitchen. It must have a garage. The price should be less than X. Modern furniture.

This sounds like a good vision. Of course there’s a lot more things we could include here, but for now it’ll do. The next step is to take this vision and do some brainstorming around it.

 

3. Brainstorming.

Brainstorming is probably the most creative activity for any project. You’ve been doing it many times, I’m sure. However, brainstorming has very little point when done prior to executing the two previous steps.

A brainstorming session always has to be created around a strongly defined main idea, so we have some guidance and know where we’re going with it. And this is exactly what defining goals and vision gives us.

The brainstorming session itself is a very simple thing to do. Essentially, it’s the answer to the question of how.

Some people like to set some restrictions, for example, time constraints. This is good if we’re working on a given project at work, and more than one person is doing the brainstorming. But if it’s just you then you can spend as much time as you want. Of course, within reason.

Start by taking your goals and visions and placing them in a visible place. Then simply let your creative mind loose and write down every idea that comes to mind about the things you might do in the project. And I mean EVERY.

This is not the time to assess the ideas and erase the bad ones. Not now. This is the time to write everything down, no matter how stupid it sounds at first.

Our example: call the real estate agency, go to IKEA, hire a contractor, ask around and find out if it’s a good neighborhood or not, choose paint colors, get a full-size Elvis sculpture, get an internet connection, get a bank loan, hire a van, check all the installations (electricity, etc.), and so on. The list for such an example can go on and on, so we’ll just stop here.

Once you reach a point when you can’t think of anything else it’s probably a good moment to stop brainstorming and go to the next step.

 

4. Organizing.

Yes, this is where you get to select the good ideas and remove the bad ones. Brainstorming should give you a lot of both.

Why brainstorming and organizing at the same time is not the best choice? Because these activities are opposing to one another. On one hand you have to be creative and invent stuff, but on the other you have to get back to the ground and be reasonable while assessing it. Doing this at the same time simply doesn’t work. That’s why organizing is a separate step.

The process is simple. Just look at your brainstorming list and remove everything that doesn’t have much to do with your goals and visions, or is simply stupid (like the Elvis sculpture … or is it?).

Once you spend some time on looking through all those things your brain will automatically start to arrange things according to their priorities and what needs to be done first. You should use this state of mind and quickly shift to the final step.

5. Selecting next tasks.

This is where our old friend – the Next Tasks List – comes back into play.

At this point selecting the next task for your project should be easy. After the phase of organizing all ideas you should have a nice set of actionable things that are in tune with your goals and visions. Things that are absolutely crucial for implementing the project. Now, simply select your next task for the project.

Everything you have at this point goes into your Projects List. And the next possible task goes to your Next Tasks List. From that point on you can go back to your usual work (GTD style). This is where everything ties together.

 

What’s next?

Basically, that’s it. All you have to do now is use the system to help you get more organized and execute your projects more effectively. Both in personal life and in business.

Just to recap, and point you towards the specific parts in this series.

• Start with the brain dump exercise.
• Create your first Next Tasks List, and remember about the rules of choosing which tasks to handle at any point in time.
• Plan your projects according to the strategy in this post.
• Put all seven main elements of productivity in place.
• Remember to work according to your daily graph of activity.

I admit, there’s a lot to do if you want to have GTD fully implemented in your daily life. But would you rather be running around like a chicken with its head cut off because you don’t have a clue what to do next? Probably not.

One final encouragement for you: if you think you don’t have time for playing around with such methodologies then suspend your disbelief for a moment and have a little trust because after you implement GTD you will find time for everything.

Feel free to share how GTD is working for you. I’m curious to know. I, for example, have been using it since 2009 and it truly works like a charm.

Productivity Made Simple: How to Keep Your Projects from Killing You
Karol Krol

Searching for the Perfect Productivity Tool

 

How many productivity systems, methodologies, strategies or tools have you tried so far? Do you already use something that fits your needs perfectly, or are you just doing OK, still have a feeling that something could be better?

Many people want to find the perfect productivity system or tool. Having such goal, they consider the “searching phase” as something bad. They think about it as time they have to waste for experimenting.

If you still haven’t found your Holy Grail of Productivity – don’t worry. No one said you have to. Maybe there’s even no such thing in your case. That’s perfectly fine and doesn’t mean you cannot be more productive than others.

Searching is not a waste of time

Searching for the perfect solution may be frustrating (that’s completely normal), yet it doesn’t have to be. Even changing your attitude may work – turning “wasting my time” into “getting experience” can do wonders. Think that all this trying, searching and experimenting is in fact learning about yourself, your habits, what solutions fit you, and which methods are good.

Of course this is a perfect example of truism. People know these things, but unfortunately they make use of such hints rarely. I always remind others (and want to be reminded as well!) to think in a way that will make them search for opportunities and “lessons learned” instead of wining that something didn’t turn out as expected.

So how exactly is searching for a productivity system good for you? The keyword here is “routine,” but routine cannot occur when you’re constantly changing something, right?

Here is how I see it: when you find a way to be productive, like GTD for example, you stick to the system’s or tool’s rules. Even if you are just using a tool, like a calendar or a web app that helps you organize your to-do lists. After we use a tool or process for some time we tend to not have to think about it as much. We eventually become productivity machines and do things automatically.

This may not sound very tempting when we put it that way, yet it’s what most of us would like to achieve; to become productivity ninjas. But when we fail over and over, trying out new patterns, tools, and strategies, we get frustrated or filled with other negative emotions. And that’s where I ask, “why?”

We’re all children – new things mean fun

When I was in school and had to do projects or homework I usually visualized myself sitting at my desk, getting bored and feeling like I’m wasting my youth. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re a kid. But I found a way to cheat; I simply bought something new that I thought would help me.

In such situations I went to a shop and got myself a new pen, pencil, notebook (not a laptop — we wrote directly on paper then), an eraser, a ruler and a compass (if it was math) or whatever I needed or wanted. All that stuff was cheap, but it was new and selected by me, hence I liked it. And I simply wanted to start using it; I just needed a reason.

This is the same thing that happens when a child gets a new toy and wants to play with it immediately. Who would waste time to say “thank you” to auntie who bought it? Let’s play NOW!

How’s this relevant? When you find a new tool or system, you’re excited and you want to use it. After all, you thought it over a few times and even if you’re not sure whether it’s perfect, you’re at least eager to find out. You’re full of optimism and happiness and you have fun organizing your work. Even if the tool isn’t perfect, there’s a good chance that you’re more productive than not using the tool or methodology at all.

Done is better than perfect

Of course you’d like the perfect methodology – we all would. But you won’t find it without trying. So, keep at it.

And in the meantime, just think this: you’re not wasting time if you’re already productive; it’s just that you haven’t found the perfect tool yet. You’re still on the journey to get to it.

Searching for the Perfect Productivity Tool
Jan Makulec

Shifting Finance from Controlling to Improving

It's difficult to get senior executives who have been successful managing a particular way to realize that they need to change their approach. Yet this is exactly the challenge facing leaders of the finance function who are asked to help their organization improve the way that work is done. As finance shifts its focus from controlling costs to advising managers on improvement activities, CFOs must change their thinking and behaviors.

Consider for example CFO Ric Magnuson of Group Health Cooperative, a nonprofit health care system in Seattle with 10,000 employees, who started out as a skeptic on the process improvement activities his company launched in 2008. He had not been exposed to the approach his company chose ("Lean"), and all the tools and concepts were new to him. "I didn't get it. I saw a lot of money being spent. I was against it." But along the way he switched from being a skeptic to being an advocate. He gives credit to mentors who helped him. "We had Orry Fiume (one of the founders of "Lean Accounting") come in a couple times. (Lean Accounting redesigns a company's performance measurement system so that it encourages continuous improvement.) I got a mentor ("Lean Sensei") who became my shadow, 40% of their time through the first seven months, helping me through. Then I became an advocate. I had to throw out 25 years of learning. Getting the CFO on board is key. Now I know that."

CFO Tim Olson of ThedaCare, a healthcare system in Wisconsin, went through a similar conversion. "Before I came to healthcare, I was at a manufacturing company and a trucking company. There it was all about the shareholder. It was about handling ups and downs in the economy, including laying off employees. The culture here at ThedaCare is different. People are treated with respect. I've learned to balance customers, quality and safety, people, and cost. Even though when I get up and talk, because it's my role, I talk about finance, I'm always thinking about the impact on customers, quality and safety, and employees as well."

How did the finance function at Group Health, ThedaCare and others make the transition from business policeman -- focused on oversight, surveillance and compliance -- to coach and adviser on improvement activities? In four main ways:

• Provide information managers and the front line can use
Most accounting information is prepared by finance for external use. Internally, finance typically facilitates centralized goal setting and then drives financial targets down into departmental plans and budgets. However, to support improvement, financial information needs to be presented in simple terms that everyone, especially frontline workers, can understand and use. For example, as described in the book Real Numbers, CFO Jean Cunningham revised the reporting at her manufacturing company, replacing accounting code words like "variances" and "ROI" with simple language so that everyone could participate in monthly reviews of operations. Finance became a coach and educator on the financial view of the organization and helped manage improvement activities.

• Balance the financial view with customer and employee views: While speaking for the financial (shareholder) view, finance should always keep the employee, customer, and quality views in mind. For example, at ThedaCare they use a triangle to think about the benefits of improvements. At the center is the customer. On the three points of the triangle are safety/quality, employee engagement, and financial stewardship. They try to impact all positively with any change they make.
  
  
• Streamline financial processes to focus on improvement. As I described in my last post "Stop Budgeting, Start Improving," ThedaCare and Group Health eliminated their budgeting processes and replaced them with rolling quarterly reviews. Many other companies, such as Boeing and Parker Hannifin (a $12 billion manufacturer of motion and control technologies), have adopted similar approaches that reduce time spent on budgets (and other bookkeeping and accounting activities) and engage cross-functional teams in discussions of improvement activities. (For more on the Boeing and Parker Hannafin stories, you can see webinars at BMA, Inc.)
  
  
• Get help. Both Group Health and ThedaCare had advisers work with them who had been through a finance transformation. CFO Ric Magnuson had a personal coach working with him for seven months.

Having grown up with a mission of controlling the expenses of the organization, measuring performance, complying with regulations, and focusing the organization on shareholder value, CFOs need to unlearn command-and-control thinking before they can learn how to help lead improvement. They need to develop their ability to see the way to profit through improvement activities, not through manipulating financial quantities. The best way to do this is to get out of the stands — keeping score — and onto the playing field — helping improve operations.

Question: Have you seen CFOs and finance organizations shift their time and activities from controlling to improving operations?

Shifting Finance from Controlling to Improving
Brad Power