As American workers, we spend at least 1,700 hours a year working, according to the Federal Reserve’s Economics Data - and if you think that is a lot, consider our Eastern neighbors: workers in Singapore, Korea and Hong Kong each spend more than 2,200 hours a year on the job!
But while we spend so much time working, are we taking any time to focus on what matters? Do we know how to engage, motivate and energize ourselves? Based on various recent research studies about low employee engagement, the answer is no.
Last week I attended
Workforce Myth #1: Employees need a strong work-life balance in order to be energized and engaged in the workplace.
Busted: These days, work is life and life is work; our jobs are seamlessly blended into all aspects of our personal lives. According to research by Samsung, we even spend more time on our smartphones today (119 minutes a day) than with our partners (97 minutes a day.) If you challenge this fact, I encourage you to test it out at your own home.
So why do we so often hear leaders espouse the value of a strong work-life balance, as if this was the only way to engage and retain the workforce? It no longer is. While researching my book, The 2020 Workplace, many of the Millennials I interviewed, (born between 1977 and 1997 and soon to be 50% of the workforce) said they already believed the work-life balance concept was long dead. They expect work and life to completely blend together in today’s 24/7 world.
Really, we all do - especially as we all now have become digital citizens, with devices that make it easier and more appealing to stay connected. Rather than balance, we must juggle our work, personal lives, and community involvement. Research from Kenexa shows that employee engagement levels rise when workers are passionate about what they are working on. They become energized, when they are mission-driven by a “BHAG” (big hairy audacious goal), or challenged by a tight deadline.
It’s during these times that work increases, personal time suffers, and stress levels increase. Yet engagement levels rise as workers confront the challenges they face. Why? Because employees experience greater satisfaction when they are part of a high performing team.
Workforce Myth #2: Training Is The Answer To Improved Performance.
Busted: Often, the first step companies take to improve employee performance is to develop a formal training program. They spend significant sums on design, development and delivery along with fancy graphics, only to be disappointed that results did not follow. How many of you have fallen into this trap?
AMC Theatres did, too, until Keith Wiedenkeller, former Senior Vice President and Chief People Officer realized that training cannot address every problem. “It’s very difficult to train a front line concession worker to be intrinsically friendly and deliver exceptional customer service,” he said. So instead, AMC turned its focus away from training existing employees, and toward ensuring they were hiring the right general managers – the most crucial players in developing engagement –with the right skills, talent and cultural fit for the theaters.
The results of AMC’s reduction in formal training were a corresponding reduction in staff turnover (from 200% to 90%) and increases in both guest satisfaction (from 43% to 53%) and front line employee engagement (from 58% to 70%). On top of all that, the general managers hired under the new system generated an extra $300,000 in yearly concession sales than did the control group.
So while training is important, it’s key to focus on hiring the “right” type of employee, so that a mix of formal, informal and social training on the job can have a better chance to produce results.
Workforce Myth #3: Knowledge Workers Must Spend Hours Each Day Searching For Information To Do Their Jobs.
Busted: According to the McKinsey & Company research report The Social Economy, the average knowledge worker spends an estimated 20% of his or her time each week looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues to help with specific tasks. But when companies leverage an internal social collaboration tool, communication with colleagues becomes into searchable content, and this reduces search time by 35%. Think of this as getting back 35% of your workweek!
Take the case of Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD, a company that recently launched an internal social collaboration platform for the use of its sales team. The platform reduced the average time salespeople spent searching for information from 10 hours a week to 18 minutes a week. Sound unbelievable? Not if you consider that the AMD social learning platform has a robust search function with the ability to rate, tag, comment, and like all types of content ranging from articles, videos, and white papers to forum discussions. All of this prevents the guesswork that used to waste employees’ time, and frees them up to spend time on new and engaging projects.
Workforce Myth #4: Hire people who have all the answers.
Busted: In today’s information-rich environment, it is more important to surround yourself with people who ask questions, rather than those who are quick to respond with answers.
In the 1990’s Peter Drucker identified the five most important questions a leader should ask, namely: What is our mission? Who is our customer? What does the customer value? What are our results? and What is our plan?
In today’s fast-paced business world, leaders often feel they don’t have time to focus on questions but instead must leap to answers. However, truly effective leaders realize that their role has changed from providing answers to asking their team the right questions.
Workforce Myth #5: Keep Yourself Organized At Work With A To Do List.
Busted: In fact, it’s the Not-To-Do list that allows you to reap the greatest level of productivity. As Peter Drucker says, “It’s amazing how many things busy people are doing that never will be missed.” Drucker believed that one of the most important things any organization can do is to identify which products, programs and policies to shed in order to make way for tomorrow’s innovations.
This same discipline can be applied to all of us! We should focus not on creating a To-Do list each day or week, but on creating a Not-To-Do List that allows us to cut out time-wasters. It’s the only way we can ensure the focus we need to protect our most valuable asset: our time.
Readers: what’s on your Not-To-Do List? Share your tips below.
Jeanne Meister is Partner, Future Workplace, co-author of The 2020 Workplace book. You can follow Jeanne on Twitter, connect with her on Linkedin, and sign up to receive the latest Future Workplace newsletter post here.
