The Performance Improvement Blog

Worker Interrupted

What if I prefer to be distracted? According to a BusinessWeek article, a business research company has determined "...that distractions consume as much as 28% of the average U.S. worker's day, including recovery time, and sap productivity to the tune of $650 billion a year..." First of all, I am curious how they define an "average U.S. worker," and secondly, I would like to know how they were able to calculate a number for lost productivity due to interruptions. I think if the "average worker" (obviously not from Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average) has attention on a job 72% of the time, we must have extremly productive workers. I wouldn't change a thing.

Apparently, there is much concern about work time that is interrupted. University-based research programs as well as the usual suspects, e.g., Microsoft and IBM, are all working on ways for workers to manage distractions. This is all well and good and, for some workers, could be welcome relief from what they perceive to be an onslaught of annoying technological noise. However, I would caution the researchers, product developers, and workplace managers that some people thrive in an envrionment of interruptions and distractions. It's how they learn and are most productive, consciously and subconsciously creating these envrionments for themselves. It sounds counter-intuitive, that someone is more productive when they flit from task to task, but it's true. So I would be careful in making assumptions about how each worker works best.

Psychological Safety

Amy Edmondson argues that organizations successful over the long-term are ones that are constantly learning from what they are doing. She calls it "execution-as-learning", and, like GE and Toyota, these organizations have a mind-set and culture that supports continual examination of their systems and processes to understand what works and how things can be improved. One of the major factors that can make or break an execution-as-learning culture is "psychological safety." Reporting on her research in the July-August 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review, she writes:

My research on why people withhold constructive ideas in the workplace suggests that before execution-as-learning can occur, organizations must fulfill one big prerequisite: They need to foster psychological safety. This means ensuring that no one is penalized if they ask for help or admit a mistake...In psychologially safe environments, people are willing to offer up ideas, questions, concerns - they are even willing to fail - and when they do, they learn.

You'd think that in teaching hospitals, people would be routinely encouraged to offer up ideas, questions, and concerns. But Edmondson's research in teaching hospitals found a large range among hospital units in the willingness of staff to report medication errors, for example.  While some units were constantly improving care for patients, other units were putting patients at serious risk by not creating a psychologically safe envrionment that supports organizational learning.

Change

Popular wisdom holds that it’s in the nature of people to resist change. Therefore, we have to find ways to overcome this resistance.  We have to teach employees to embrace change, seemingly no matter what it is. This view of change in organizations has always bothered me. So I was pleased to see journalist Stefan Stern’s recent column in the Financial Times challenging this popular wisdom.

 

Stern contrasts two examples of major infrastructure change in London. One was the opening of Terminal 5 at Heathrow and the other was moving the cross-Channel train service to a new station.  Both of these were major projects that involved thousands of people and complex project management. Apparently, from what Stern reported, opening the new train station was a great success and opening the new airport terminal was a disaster. The difference was preparation, both in terms of skills and emotions.  Train station employees were prepared and emotionally engaged in the effort; airport terminal employees were not adequately trained, systems were deficient, and nobody responded to employee complaints about these problems. Stern writes:

 

Managers sometimes complain that their people “hate change”. That is just not true. People hate stupid change, change that they have no influence over, change that is simply imposed on them...To err is human. We all do it, even – you will just have to believe me here – journalists. But looking back at the T5 fiasco, it seems clear that a bit of honest, straight talk (and action) at the right time could have helped avoid much of the subsequent aggro.

 

I think he’s right. Most people don’t hate change. People change jobs, change homes, change vacation locations, change food, change cars, change their hair and the way they look, change doctors, and change partners. In fact, many people seek out change in their lives. What they resist is “stupid change.” They want to understand the rationale for change, they want to have input, they want to be informed about what and how things will happen, they want to know their roles and how they will be affected by the change, and they want to feel confident that they have the knowledge and skills to be effective in the new situation.

HR's New Target: Waistlines

What if U.S. employers were required by law to measure employee waistlines annually and take steps to ensure that everyone between the ages of 40 and 74 did not exceed established government limits? SHRM members would probably be in an uproar and ASTD and ISPI members would be scrambling to design waistline reduction training (preferably e-learning that could be completed during a lunch break).

 

Fiction? You think this could never happen in personal-freedom-loving U.S. of A.? Well…it’s happening in Japan: a 33.5 inch limit for men and a 35.4 inch limit for women. The cost of health care has risen to a point where Japan had to do something dramatic. NEC, Japan’s largest maker of personal computers, fearing severe financial penalties, has started measuring waistlines of all employees over 30 years old.

 

The U.S. is faced with its own health-care crisis and reducing the number of cases of weight related diseases would lower the cost of health care considerably in America (The International Diabetes Federation puts the waistline threshold at 40 inches for U.S. men and 34.6 inches for U.S. women.). Of course, the U.S. is already on a legally-enforced mission to improve the health of its citizens, by local governments eliminating smoking in public places and heavily taxing cigarettes. Japan has yet to pass laws against smoking. It’s interesting that Japan has attacked the waistline and the U.S. has attacked the lungs. What does this say about the two cultures?

 

I wonder what an employee in Japan does if his job is Sumo wrestling?

Dysfunctions of Teams

Many organizations today claim to be team-centric but fail to build truly effective teams. Patrick Lencioni gave a keynote address about this issue at the recent ASTD Conference. Tony Karrer attended the conference and, in his blog, reminds us of the value of attending keynotes and brings renewed attention to Lencioni’s 2002 book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. Derrick Eggbert summarized the contents of the book in a review he wrote for Roundtables for Executives. A summary of Eggbert's summary is provided here.

 

Five dysfunctions of teams:

• Absence of trust – Members will not be vulnerable with each other. They will not “air dirty laundry, admit mistakes, weaknesses and concerns about fear of reprisal.”
• Fear of conflict – Members will not engage in “unfiltered and passionate debate about ideas.” They refrain from disagreement and comments are guarded.
• Lack of commitment – Members don’t have buy-in regarding important decisions. They don’t believe they’ve been heard in the group and, therefore, don’t get behind the decision.
• Avoidance of accountability – Members are unwilling to confront each other regarding the quality of plans and actions.
• Inattention to results – Members put their individual wants ahead of team goals.

Five functions of healthy teams:

• Members trust one another.
• They engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas.
• They commit to decisions and plans of action.
• They hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans.
• They focus on the achievement of collective results.

I would argue that there are different kinds of teams and not all should or could achieve the level of functioning suggested by Lencioni. High performance teams, which are intended to leverage the collective wisdom and abilities of the group to achieve maximum results for the organization, should aspire to the healthy functions that Lencioni has identified in his book and at the 2008 ASTD Conference.

Best Buy Brings Business to Buyers

Employee empowerment sounds like a good thing, but we don’t always know the business value of giving front-line employees more authority. Best Buy Inc. is providing evidence of the link between empowerment and business results. The company is finding success by allowing store managers to make local merchandising decisions.  As part of its “customer centricity” strategy, it is empowering employees in each of its 900-plus stores to adapt merchandising to local markets. One example of the benefits of this policy is the story of what happened at a store in North Carolina. See BusinessWeek, May 26, 2008.

 

After the chairman of a local retiree club called the Golden Boys bought a high-def TV at the Mooresville (N.C.) Best Buy, store manager Walt Goney invited the club's members to come by at 8 a.m., two hours before opening time. Eighty-five members showed up for a hand-holding session on switching to digital television. They bought $350,000 worth of TVs and equipment that morning. The cost to Goney? Just $99 in labor, plus coffee and doughnuts.

 

While many large chains and franchisers are tightening the reigns on local stores during these uncertain economic times, Best Buy is giving its employees more latitude in terms of each store’s situation. This is a great example of how a company can push down responsibility and authority (within limits) to the people who interface most with customers. For Best Buy, empowerment is a business strategy that appears to be working. I don’t know if Best Buy has studied the impact on employee learning, engagement, and retention yet, but I assume this policy will have a profound effect on these factors.

Leading Teams With Persuasion and Influence

Managers, now more than ever, need to be persuasive. Marci Alboher, in her New York Times blog, wrote how effective leaders in flat, team-oriented, global organizations must have good powers of persuasion. She wrote:

 

…beefing up our ability to persuade people is crucial to succeeding in today’s team-oriented, less hierarchical work environments.

Erin White, in the Wall Street Journal, wrote:

 

Managers say they increasingly must influence -- rather than command -- others in order to get their own jobs done. The trend is the result of leaner corporate hierarchies and the erosion of division walls. Managers now work more often with peers where lines of authority aren't clear or don't exist.

Global companies are realizing that they must help their managers develop influencing skills. These managers might, for instance, be assigned to lead a team made up of engineers located in the U.S., China, and India. In this case, the team leader is faced with two enormous challenges. One challenge is trying to influence the members of the team when that team leader has responsibility for results but no authority over the participants, when they are not the team leader’s direct reports. The other challenge is that of trying to influence cross-culturally. Each team member has a different understanding of expectations because of language and behavior differences.  Team leaders must learn how to overcome these authority and culture barriers to influence.

Global companies are not the only organizations that need managers with the ability to persuade team members.  Any organization that is low on hierarchy and autocracy and high on teamwork depends on leaders who can influence others using the carrot, not the stick.

A blog post by Jo Owen, “Power at Work: Why You Need It, How To Get It”, offers some tools that can help team leaders be persuasive and influential. Owen calls these “laws” for building power (and, therefore, influence) in the workplace. For example, one of the “laws” is to develop a support network. This is done by building trust with the people that know you, which you do by following through on your commitments. This is good advice for any manager in any organization who is trying to influence the work of a team.

What's Your ELTV?

The Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement at Northwestern University and the Incentive Marketing Association’s Performance Improvement Council conducted research and wrote a whitepaper about ELTV (Employee Lifetime Value). They argue that just as companies build their efforts around  CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value), e.g., the amount a car-buyer will spend on a particular nameplate over the course of his/her lifetime, they should seriously consider calculating an ELTV. They wrote:

 

The reasons are obvious – in the prevailing mindset, products and brands and, to a lesser extent, customers, have been regarded as the source of profit and value while employees have been treated as a cost. When a workforce is regarded as a cost, an organization seeks to minimize it.

 

Calculating an ELTV brings attention to the value that people contribute to the performance equation. No longer can employees be considered an expendable resource simply based on their cost. With ELTV, executives must consider the value that the knowledge and actions of employees contribute to a company’s bottom-line. The report goes on to present issues and concerns with actually calculating that value and coming up with a number, e.g., the high degree of fluctuation in work hours and job assignments over the course of employment.

 

I am intrigued by the concept of ELV, not so much the computation but more the way of thinking that it provokes. It’s like determining the ROI for training. Calculating the dollar amount saved or increased because of training requires consideration of so many variables and assumptions that, in many cases, it’s probably not worth the time and effort. However, the concept that training adds value in excess of its cost is extremely important to making decisions about that training investment. ELV is a similar kind of notion. That is, all of the caveats to calculating ELV make it no more than a rough estimate, but the fact that there is an ELV should be considered when hiring and firing people and when estimating the value of a business.