You think you are very busy?
LIKE many companies, I am doing my half yearly review with my team, at the moment. This is to appraise their progress and their goals, as well as to help them recalibrate for the rest of the year.
Instead of just revisiting their work over the past half year in terms of performance indicators, I am inviting each member of my team to review together with me, if they felt that they were being efficient.
I figure that if they can adjust their self-efficacy, which is an individual's own belief in their inherent ability, they will achieve more in the next half year. Self-efficacy refers to your personal judgment of how well you can implement the actions necessary to deal with any situation.
I want my team to understand that if they have high self-efficacy, they will be able to put in the right effort to get better results.
Unfortunately for many leaders, and consequently for the organisations they run, the mission to be more effective at work has led to misconceptions about what having a productive workday truly means.
For so many people, being busy is the equivalent of being productive.
This is also why organisations still subscribe to the outdated eight-nine-hour work-day model.
Workers are shackled to this archaic industrial work-force concept of having to be at their work-stations for a non-negotiable number of hours each day. Many employees themselves get trapped in the fallacy that being very busy is very good.
The satirical book, 'We Learn Nothing' which was published in 2012, has a paragraph that reads "…busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day."
I use this as the start point in this mid-year review with my team. We then see if they were actually efficient, or if they were just being busy in the past few months.
So far, at the end of each session, we all realise that for the most part, we were just busy and not necessarily efficient. The real challenge for my team and I, is to make the rest of 2022 less busy yet more efficient.
And, I am happy to share with you the two ideas my team and I agreed to work on, in the coming months.
The first is to work out our highest value tasks and to give those the priority needed.
Recently, I've been running a series of training programmes for the staff of one of Malaysia's most prestigious hospitality groups. The primary complaint by their staff is the long working hours. My task, I realised quickly, was to help them increase their efficiency, and organisational leadership ability.
Through the programme, I got the team to reflect and work out how efficient they were being. By and large, they began to realise that they are just being super busy, lurching from one crisis to another. But they are not necessarily productive or working on things that offer real value to their jobs.
Often, people feel that the best way to progress is to get more things done in their given amount of work-hours. They try to cram-in way too many tasks in their to-do list. Productive people on the other hand know that they need to focus on planning and strategising their work-day.
My team will now identify two or three priority items each day, and concentrate on them. This means they will ensure that they accomplish the tasks that are of the highest value for themselves, and the company.
The second idea that we will concentrate on is 'monotasking'.
This is the practice of dedicating yourself to a given task, and minimising interruptions until that task is completed or a predetermined period of time has elapsed.
Many people fool themselves into thinking that they are good at 'multitasking'.
Earl K. Miller, a Professor of Neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), argues that people cannot really multitask very well at all, and even when they say they can, they are actually deluding themselves.
This is a standard 'interview' question for most companies. HR managers like to ask if you are able to multitask, and the answer they usually want is an affirmative. But the reality is that most of us are unable to do this.
What we can do on the other hand is to complete multiple tasks in sequence; meaning, one after the other.
But for efficiency, you must set time limits on each task. Remember that when you do not concentrate, you make mistakes. As a consequence, you waste more time and energy going back to repair your work.
In my businesses, much of our work requires focus and depth. And for the best results, I realise that concentrated effort with few distractions leads us to a better and a more expedient work product.
To recalibrate for better results in this rather tough year, I suggest you too analyse if you are efficient, or just being busy.