5 Productivity and Motivation Misconceptions Your Boss Believes Are (Not) True

The Truths Behind the Rules

This is not employee motivation.

It’s been a long held belief that, on the broad spectrum, if something is entertaining then it is distracting. From radios to the internet, the workplace has always been a place of…well, work. Rules such as “No Facebooking” or “No music outside of break” have been implemented for supposed reasons such as to increase productivity or maintain employee motivation. Supervisors will tell their employees that such things do nothing but distract from the report that needs to be filled out or from the project that needs to be done. I disagree. Correction: we at WorkMeter disagree.

We have found the top 4 misconceptions in regards to employee productivity and motivation in the workplace and are posting them here. We even tossed in a little surprise as #1 misconception.

#5 Multitasking Does (Not) Get Things Done Faster

Working on a couple of things is ok. Bouncing every 30 minutes between 10 tasks is not. We all have multiple things going on in our office and it is impossible for us to be doing only one thing at a time. WorkMeter has done the research: it takes about 12 minutes to fully concentrate on any single task. That being said, we are interrupted every 96 SECONDS, be it internal interruptions, such as stray thoughts, or external interruptions, such as a person speaking to you. Minimize the amount you do in any single time. Work in hour intervals between 2 of your upcoming deadlined projects. Keep it few and you will find yourself accomplishing more in less time.

This is a Harvard Business Review article regarding much the same thing.

#4 Taking Online Breaks and Socializing Does Increase Motivation

Online shopping, facebooking, even taking to the guy in the cubical next over is enough to kill the monotony and allow you to start fresh. Employees sometimes need to step back and just stop for a little bit. It could be stress, it could be an issue they don’t see a way around, or it could be just an urge to get up and take a little walk for a couple of minutes. Often times, in jobs on computers, this relaxation is seen in the form of net surfing, a huge taboo in the corporate world. Seen as large time-suck vacuums, many offices forbid their employees from accessing social sites such as Reddit or YouTube, regardless of being shown that they do quite the contrary.

A study done by the University of Singapore proved that Internet surfing, socializing, taking a walk, all of these things and their like serve the purpose of clearing the mind and allowing fresh thoughts and ideas come through, so when work is resumed 5 or 10 minutes later, it’s done with greater motivation and, many times, with better results.

To get a better understanding, see this related post and study.

#3 Working Longer Does (Not) Increase Productivity

Contrary to popular belief,
this isn't the productivity award you
want to be winning.

Simply put, staying and working long past your dead zone helps no one. In fact, it hurts. Overtime tends to be a way that managers and supervisors squeeze the extra work out of employees in order to cover an impending deadline or debug a sudden error close to launch, and that isn’t too big of an issue. But when the norm of the workplace becomes 55 and 60 hour weeks, both productivity and motivation will begin to decline. Studies have even shown them to decline exponentially when overtime is pushed week after week.

For a more detailed look at the effects of overtime, check out last weeks post.

#2 Privacy Comes at the Cost of Productivity

Many corporations sacrifice the privacy of their employees in order to maintain an “efficient and productive workforce”. Naturally, Human Resources is there to defend what little privacy right the employees have left. Yet this doesn’t have to be the case as it’s been proven that privacy and productivity can coexist, and WorkMeter itself is a testament to that.

An employer doesn't need to know the specifics of what an employee is doing on the computer (as long as it isn't illegal). All they need to know is whether or not they’ve been, or are being, productive. By using productivity software to record and compare the amount of time spent on productive programs in comparison to non-productive programs, they get their answer. An employee spending 2 hours of productive and 6 on non-productive is obviously wasting time, regardless of what those non-productive applications are. Privacy preserved, productivity gauged.

For more on how you can maintain a productive environment without seeming like Big Brother, check this out.

And the top misconception is….

#1 Maroon 5 (or Music in general) Does Boost Output and Moral

Yes, you read right. Half the respondents in a study done by Songza agreed that Maroon 5 makes them more productive at work. But more importantly, MusicWorks released their own study indicating that 1/3 of employees are less likely to take sick days if background music is playing in the office, given that the Confederation of British Industry estimated roughly 21 million working days lost to illegitimate absences each year. As well, they reported that 77% of people were happier with music playing in the workplace than not. The link is simple: music leads to an increase in motivation and moral which leads to increases in productivity and performance.

3 Reasons Why Overtime Hurts Productivity

The Fallacy of the Going over 40 hours a week

The 40 hour work week is about a common a phrase as the 9-to-5 day. They both go hand in hand in the American work system. Yet those of us who have already been in the workforce for some time now know that it usually doesn’t end there. Some of us reach 50 hours; some 60. Some, like lawyers and doctors, can even go up to 70! This is common place and we all, especially you managers reading this, know it. I recently read an amazing article by Sara Robinson on the Salon showing how the typical employee nowadays puts in an average of 55 hours a week CONSISTANTLY, and its downsides. It’s a lengthy article but I would highly recommend taking a look. If you just don’t have the time, keep reading here and you’ll get the gist.

We all know how the 40 hour work week began; in the early 1900s, Unions pushed employers to bring the work to 40 hours a week and in the end, the industries accepted this, since their own research and data proved the Unions right. The first industrialist being our very own Henry Ford, who doubled worker pay and cut hours from 9 a day to 8. Since then, year after year, studies continually proved how 40 hours a week was the best, causing more and more businesses to hop on board. But then came the “passion crisis”. People who were seen to work more than 40 hours were praised as being more passionate and productive towards the company. This caused employers to slowly begin to demand more and more time from their employees, from staying after hours to coming in on weekends.

WorkMeter has a hard stance that it’s not how long you work, but how you work. Merely putting in more hours isn’t indicative of being productive, and here’s why:

1) Low Recharge Time

                Your body is like a battery. Scratch that. Your body IS a battery. I’m sure we’ve all seen The Matrix and they aren’t far off in that idea. Your body needs to recharge after a long days work. Putting in 8 hours allows you to get home, relax, go to bed, and wake up full charged for a new day. Going over 40 hours throws off that cycle. You get home really late, exhausted from the office; the time is already 10 pm so there is no chance to relax. You go to bed immediately so you can get up in time for another day and there you go; the following day you enter work no longer at 100% capacity, but at 90% or 80%.

2) Short Gains, Long Losses

                Now studies do show there are slight short-term gains in demanding 60- or 70-hour work weeks, but only on demanding and sparse occasions. If an upcoming deadline needs to be met and the whole team is asked to put in more time, then it is conducive to ask for more. Yet employers have forgotten that these short gains cannot be maintained and, if continuously demanded, will end up as long-term losses. After the first overtime workweek, productivity begins to decline, and every consecutive overtime week that is demanded after, productivity falls even more rapidly.
                What’s worse is that, taking the previously mentioned deadline example, after the crisis is averted and the deadline is met, it takes the team several weeks for the burnout to be lifted and to resume a fully productive 40-hour work week, as a Business Roundtable study found. In other words, that small amount of 30% boost was productivity taken in advance and is now being paid back with interest.

Overtime:
Not Necessarily Productive Time

3) Overtime Isn’t Necessarily Productive Time

                Now the most obvious, yet equally the most ignored, point. Many managers believe a direct 1-to-1 correlation exists between pulling overtime out of workers, yet the case is far from it. Here is an example from Robinson:

“By the eighth hour of the day, people’s best work is usually already behind them (typically turned in between hours 2 and 6). In Hour 9, as fatigue sets in, they’re only going to deliver a fraction of their usual capacity. And with every extra hour beyond that, the workers’ productivity level continues to drop, until at around 10 or 12 hours they hit full exhaustion.”

                Pushing people past their capacity doesn’t mean they will bring in more. Lack of rests leads to things such as careless errors that could take days to fix or unproductive uses of time such as checking emails and web surfing.

So What of It?

There will be managers that argue that they will get used to it or it is a demand of the market and world they work in, but to this I reply that you only hurt yourself and your company. Studies have shown over and over again that, overall, you get no more from a 10-hour day than you would have from an 8-hour day. So keep this in mind. The best and wisest supervisors and managers out there keep this in check and never have to go to overtime because 1) they’re aware of the long-term productivity decline that follows, 2) keep the hard pushes as short as possible, only when they are a must, and 3) give the employees a couple of days off to recharge and rejuvenate. As we at WorkMeter have always said, “It isn’t how long you work, but how you work.”

Instant Productivity & Success: How to change your life in 15 minutes

Guest Blog By JC Duarte, The Strategy Guy

"If an organization could teach only one thing to its employees, what single thing would have the most impact? My answer was immediate and clear: teach people how to learn. How to look at their past behavior, figure out what worked, and repeat it while admitting honestly what didn't and change it." This is the catch phrase that caught my attention & inspired this blog article when I read HBR's leadership article The Best Way to Use the Last Five Minutes of Your Day by Peter Bergman.

15 Minute Magical Success Sessions

10h15 & 17h45, could possibly be the two 15 minute increments that will have the most significant impact on improving your quality of life. Are you familiar with the Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu's quote “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step”? Well, two 15 minute segments of your day can give you greater control over your own destiny, both personal & professional.

Having a Master Plan 

How do you start out each day? If you’re like most people, you’ve got anywhere from a vague idea to a rock-solid plan, which in itself is a wide spectrum. Unfortunately, to add to this challenge, most of us have these in our head. The more advanced of you have written things down on a task or to-do list. How’s that working for you? Overwhelmed with the amount of tasks building up from day to day that you can’t seem to clear?

Here's your 1st tip

No more than 3 significant tasks per day!

And this is where your FIRST magical 15 minutes success session comes into play. Just like Peter Bergman’s article suggests, before you pack it in for the day, take a moment to reflect on the day just past. What worked? What didn’t work? What’s within your control to improve your situation? What are you going to do differently tomorrow? OK, now write that down, and more importantly, block out time in your calendar for doing the things you need to get done. I like to call this “making an appointment with myself”. Ever heard the phrase “if you don’t have your own plan you’re destined to be part of someone else’s?” If you miss this step, I’ll guarantee you that each day will end with you having worked on everyone else’s plan instead of your own.

Finding Your Rhythm

Just like our biological clocks, and the rest of the universe, everything around us works in cycles & rhythms, so why should you be any different. If you respect your required sleep patterns, then your mind & body will be ready for the challenges of each new day. Finding your rhythm also means discovering your strengths & weaknesses, and applying a continual learning process that helps you move from theoretical education to applied practical behavioral change.

Here’s your 2^nd tip

You can only effectively focus & execute tasks at optimal performance in 60 to 120 minute concentrated periods.
This means that it’s key to eliminate or avoid disruptions when you’re doing “knowledge work” that requires concentration & focus. And if you think about a typical day, plan it out properly, and hold yourself accountable to being disciplined, I’ll bet you can find three 60-90 windows of time where you can dedicate your focus to 3 significant tasks.

Here’s your 3^rd tip

Even if you don’t want to listen to music, put your headphones on anyway. And if you have noise canceling headphones, better yet! 

The fact is, people are less likely to interrupt you if they see you concentrated on a task & with head phones on, as they will assume you are listening to music, a tutorial video or something else that's important. If your colleagues don’t happen to be this “cluey”, then by all means stand-up and share with those immediately around you that you’re about to start very important work that requires extreme concentration and that you’d appreciate not being interrupted for the next 60 minutes.  Try it, it works!

Back to Your Master Plan

I said there were two 15 minute magical success sessions. Well your next most important 15 minute increment is your early to mid morning pulse check. Just like a doctor’s visit when your pulse is measured to see how you’re general health is, it’s key to take a pulse of how your day has started in comparison to your plan from the previous afternoon / evening, and to make any necessary adjustments before the new day flies by.

If you really want to be on the ball & gain extra bonus points for a satisfying & highly productive life, plan a pulse check just after lunch as well.

Here’s your 4^th tip

I like to call these early to mid morning pulse checks Daily Huddles. And typically I have my team leads or direct reports join me on this huddle. We cover 3 simple things...

1.     What’s up; How did I perform since our last daily huddle & what did I accomplish based on what I set out to do? How am I feeling about that? What am I going to do differently?

2.     My Metrics for Today; What are the three most significant things I want to get done today, and what are the results (quantifiable) that I expect to witness by the end of the day in order for me to declare it a success?

3.     What are My Stucks; What’s holding me back from succeeding on my plan? What are the interdependencies where I need help?

This exercise is not only a great activity to make sure that your focused on the things that need to get done each day, and week, in order to reach daily, weekly & monthly objectives, but likewise it gives you an opportunity to align & (if necessary) adjust individual team members focus. It gives everyone a snap-shot of what’s going on in their department & how it relates or contributes toward success. And most importantly, it gives us all an opportunity to address the things that are keeping us from succeeding (stucks), addressing them before we miss our deadlines (otherwise known as failure).

Has anything in this article struck a nerve with you? Upon reflection of these simple steps, is there anything new that you could apply to your daily routine that would put you back in control of your life, both personally and  professionally?

5 Email Habits Your Doctor Will Thank You For

Email: How to Tame the Untamed Beast

It’s your everyday morning: you wake up with the perfect plan for the perfect day, everything laid-out and ready to go. You think to yourself This is the day I’m going to catch-up and relieve myself of all the stress. So you hit off, eat your breakfast, and drive to your typical 9-to-5 office.

Try to convince your boss
that this will increase productivity.

Fast-forward to the end of the day: you just left another heavy project and you’re exhausted. You managed to get a good lead on your load, yet there’s still a long ways to go. But for now, you’re just on your way home, looking forward to that well planned R&R. You walk inside and are just about to heave a sigh of relaxation when suddenly your phone buzzes. You pull it out and it’s Johnson needing some quick help on the Smith report. Ok you think I’ll just get this over with then it’s me time. A couple of hours later and you’ve finished.

You go to the shower, run it on hot, when your phone buzzes again. You look at it and it’s your boss telling you there was an error in your last layout and was wondering if you could come in that weekend. Excellent. Now you have your lost weekend to fret about.

Then your phone buzzes again. And again. And again. It’s like you never left the office.

This is a scenario we’re all familiar with. Yet the University of California in Irvine recently released a study pointing out how poor work habits, particularly relating to email, impact a person’s overall health and productivity in the office. How you managing the main mode of communication in the office is a strong indication of how stressful you allow your life to get. Luckily, there are a few simple habits you can do to help bring that blood pressure down:

1)     Delete (Turn Off) Your Email When You Leave Work

This at home doesn't increase productivity.
It hurts it.

 This is something most of us can do and that is not to take our work home with us. You work at an 9-to-5 office and it should last just that long: from 9 till 5. During that time, your office life can, and often will, get very stressful, so when it’s time for you to go home, leave it at the door. Same way how you leave your personal life at the door of the office. Your time at home is a time for you to kick back and relax because come the next day, it’ll start all over again and your productivity has to be at it’s best. This is impossible if your phone is buzzing off with emails every hour. The key: turn it off. You don’t need to be checking your email constantly. Whatever comes, you can deal with it tomorrow. This is your R&R, and keeping your mind busy with work 24/7 will only make you worse at it, not better.

2)     Create Priority Alerts

Now there are those of us who’s jobs entail a continuous line to the office and cannot afford the luxury of turning off our emails. In this case, the Priority Alert system is your best friend. What this does is allows you to set an alert that goes off only if an email meets the required priority level, which is in this case “high”. What this will do is any urgent emails you receive that cannot wait until tomorrow will be buzzed to you and the ones that are of lesser importance won’t be. The epitome of time management which takes us directly to our next point.

3)     Don’t Chain Events

Once you take care of that urgent email, you have to resist the urge to look and take care of the rest. Do NOT chain events. Once you start down this road, you won’t finish until it is 4 hours into your home time and you’re productivity and health will take the hit. This crucial time management skill will benefit you in both the long and short run. So stick to that one important email and that one email alone.

4)     Auto-sort: Use It

What's something that nobody wants
but everybody has?

This is a habit for within the office, as opposed to outside it. Use the auto-sort. Create folders such as “meeting minutes”, “Smith project details”, or “misc.” and set your email to automatically filter them into those folders. What this will do is greatly unclutter your inbox and reduce that awful sinking-in-the-gut feeling when you see torrents of unread emails are awaiting you. By automatically sorting your emails, you can instead visit each folder in turn and deal with their respective emails, thereby boosting your productivity with a time management system.

5)     Learn To Ignore

This is a reiteration of a part of a previous step, but it’s important enough to be reiterated. Learn to ignore some emails. Not permanently, but until it’s time to deal with them. This habit is perfect in and out of the office. If it isn’t urgent and your busy working, then ignore it. Worst comes to worst, they will call you. But in the office, learn to stay focused on the task at hand and out of the office, learn to stay focused on yourself. This is possibly one of the hardest habits for employees to develop.

Telework in the Government: Not Just for Businesses

            A few weeks ago, you’ll remember we spoke about the relatively new phenomenon that has hit North America, teleworking. If this is your first time reading, telework is the practice of working remotely from home, as opposed to from a corporate office or cubical. The benefits of this are quite astounding, ranging from more raising employee motivation and increasing productivity to saving the company millions in expenses. You can read more about it in our previous post here.

Jumping on the Telework Bandwagon

Teleworking like the best of us

            You would have expected other companies to have been the first to embrace this new method of work. Maybe one here and one there, first testing the waters to see how well it would work in the general system. But believe it or not, it wasn’t businesses who took to it: it was the government. Already passed by the US Senate, the US House of Representatives accepted and passed it with a vote of 254 to 152, allowing a much greater number of government employees to telework. The legislation creates a policy framework and set of procedures in order to begin teleworking, as opposed to prior, where teleworking was something difficult and near impossible to achieve, causing less than 10% of the employees to participate. Yet just from these low numbers, the Office of Personnel Management estimated it saved roughly $30 million a day on expenses. Not only that, but the Parent and Trademark office estimated they too were able to save $1.5 million a year through avoided rent expenses.

How Does It Work?

            What the bill does is have government agencies decide which employees are eligible for telework. Those who are eligible would be required to complete training programs before signing telework agreements with the agency. As well, much like a company, not all government employees would be eligible for telework, for obvious reasons. The restrictions that limit those who can participate in teleworking are comprised of 3 simple rules: those who have been officially disciplined for “being absent without permission for more than 5 days in any calendar year”, those who have been officially disciplined for “viewing, downloading, or exchanging pornography…on a Federal Government computer”, and, for obvious reasons, those whose job requires an on-site presence to accomplish, such as law enforcement officers, park rangers, air traffic controllers, etc.

Only a Matter of Time

            When the government has acted before the companies, you know somebody is behind. Companies are still slowly getting into the business of having their employees telework for fears of loss of productivity, despite the numbers to prove otherwise. Still remaining in an old train of thought, they believe that the best work is office work and work from home is simply unproductive work. So they turn to software such as WorkMeter, that allows them to monitor their employee's productivity and gives them a chance to see with their own eyes just how effective teleworking is.

Minibreaks: When Not Working Means Working

Earlier this week, we discussed the downside of having those monthly updates. The IT guys coming in, trying to find the right software, getting it installed, and having it work all in the first try is wishful thinking. Productivity end up taking a hit and your time management goes down the drain. But I had left you off with a cliff hanger: given these unproductive moments updates leave us with, how can we turn it to our advantage? The answer is simple: minibreaks.

Wrong kind of productivity minibreak
(Image owned by Kellogg's)

Long Breaks v. Minibreaks

Minibreaks are exactly what they sound like. They’re short breaks throughout the day in which the body rejuvenates its energy, unburdens its stress, and recuperates its focus to resume work one the minibreak is over. Now the conventional workplace has the concept of “breaks” down, but they utilize it in a large sense, i.e. in your nine to five job, you get one large break, which is your lunch period. To employers, this seems enough to keep employee productivity and motivation up, as it is set in the middle of the day and it recharges your batteries. A study done in 2011, entitled Cognition by Atsunori Ariga and Alejandro Lleras of the University of Illinois (linked here), proved that this simply isn’t true.

Burn in Before You Burn Out

Time outs is time management
Minibreaks are just work time outs

Ariga and Lleras’ work led them to discover that short breaks throughout the day are drastically more beneficial to maintaining focus and employee motivation than a single large burst. The effect of a break quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns, in which the employees are no longer benefiting and are then simply wasting time. Instead, keeping these breaks small and plentiful throughout the day (such as 5 or 10 minutes every hour), is enough to give the brain a momentary rest for it to come back more productive than before. As well, these minibreaks provide time for the subconscious to work on any problem solutions that might be eluding the employee, further hindering their motivation. But that’s for another day.

Where do Updates Come In?

By now, I’m pretty sure you can see how updates can benefit instead of hinder. They are just another minibreak for the employee to take. Instead of stressing about the halt in their time management, it has become a moment for them to pause and recover before resuming their productivity.

Updates Hurting Your Updates: The Unseen Bullet in Productivity’s Back

The Norm

Updates are a necessary part of corporate life. If software becomes outdated, it must be replaced. If the system manufacturer has released a new version, it must be updated. Updates are done for the sake of bettering the tools at the employee’s disposal. Otherwise, we would all still be sitting here using Windows ME while the rest of the world ran Windows 7. Ask your typical employee what they think of when they hear updates and you’ll hear things like “My computer will be faster” or “These glitches will stop appearing”. Yet is that all there is to updates? Is there something behind the scenes that we don’t know about? Something that is hurting us as opposed to helping us?

Untimely Updates: The Double-edged Sword

A recent study done by Embarcadero Technologies shows that 72% of Information Technology workers believe that the constant searches, installations, and waiting for processes to finish drastically hurts their productivity level.  

Unforeseen Productivity Consequences
Cited Here

“Today's workers spend too much time in the antiquated method of acquiring software and installing it on their PCs and maintaining licenses,” Michael Swindell, senior vice president of product management and product marketing at Embarcadero, said. “These methods have to change to keep up with today's technologies. The growing trends of BYOD (Bring Your Own Devices) and the Consumerization of IT are pushing the need for "iTunes-like" app stores more than ever before.”

He’s not far from the truth and you know it. While everyone looks forward to the end result of their updates, they equally dread the take-away time that comes before. The IT people take over your computer and you are stuck twiddling your thumbs until they finish. They take time to find the right update, download it, install it, then realize it’s for the wrong version, and the process starts all over again. All the while, you’re anxiously waiting to finish that project with the impending deadline. By this, the productivity of the IT worker and the cubicle employee diminish; specifically, it diminishes their work time by 67.1 hours, equating to about $2,851 per year, per employee.

The Fork in the Road

So what’s there to do about it? Employers have one of two options: they can either organize these updates before or after hours, in which IT employees would have to remain longer than usual, or they can use this gap in work as a relaxation period for the employee. Now the former does not seem to solve the issue as you are still holding back employees to work overtime and costing the company money. Yet supervisors still choose it over the latter because they rationale that keeping the worker busy. Yet this is the wrong idea. How, you might ask?

Come back on Friday and find out.

Internet Freedom of the New Generation

Social Media
More important than you'd think.

The world is changing; specifically, working world. Steadily and no longer slowly, old mentalities are being replaced as new and fresh ideas and ideals are brought in through younger generations. From the world beyond the four-wall-cubicle, thoughts and expectations of freedom are being fought for. Now, that focus of freedom has seeped in from the cracks in the walls and has arrived at the working world with an entourage of young professionals and recent graduates.

 The Freedom Demands of the Employees

A report entitled Cisco Connected World Technology Report was published in 2011 by Cisco depicting the growing trend in the importance of internet freedom and social media. Done on 2,800 college students in the United Kingdom, all were asked on the importance of internet freedom and social media in comparison to salary.

933 believed having internet freedom and access to sites such as Facebook and Twitter was as “important as air, water, food, and shelter,” indicating a critical factor in employee motivation.

1,120 stated that they would accept lower-paying jobs that allowed them their freedom to social media and from internet blocks over a higher paying job that restricted them.

1,960 acknowledged to breaking IT policy on a regular basis by attempting (and even succeeding) at bypassing security measures meant to restrict their online access.

This new wave of future employees are emerging like a grass-root movement, refusing positions that don’t meet their freedom requirements and setting a new bar in employee-employer social media relations. This growing trend is something that old employers are having trouble adapting to.

The Productivity Fears of the Employers

If you’ve been keeping up with us, you know very well that maintaining and increasing productivity is always high on the employers list. So, naturally, when they see demands for increasing internet freedoms, they usually provoke thoughts of “Well why do you want more access” and “Are you going to be wasting time surfing the web as opposed to working?" But it doesn’t have to be that way.

This increased trend of internet freedom doesn’t come from the slackers; it comes from the motivators. They don’t see it as a sink hole to waste company time and money, but instead as a tool to pause and recharge their batteries. Job motivation is a large factor in productivity and if granting access to Twitter allows them to return to work refreshed, then so be it. In the end, the problem for the employers should be the websites themselves, but the time management of the employees.


The Middle Ground

Effective time management is where both the employers and employees must meet; granting access with the assurance that it won’t be abused. Here, conventional software and productivity monitoring programs don’t work since they focus on preventative measure, as opposed to motivational goals. They snoop and locate sites that employees spend a large amount of time on and place a website block, preventing future access.

New productivity software, such as WorkMeter, which has grown rapidly in Spain’s industry, take on a different approach. They work by monitoring application usage on productive and unproductive applications, then displaying the activity graphs to the employer AND the employee. This grants the future hires the internet freedom they wish all the while letting their employers unintrusively see the levels of their productivity. 

The college students are growing from pre-graduates to post-graduates and in no time, they will take over the workforce. The advancement of company productivity depends on who will gain them by deciding to take the first step in workplace freedom and embrace this new method of improving productivity.

WorkMeter - 'Eli Daniel Group' success story

It seems like anywhere we go or whatever we do these days, we are being monitored and tracked. Soon the monitoring and tracking could come to your work computer.

A program called WorkMeter allows managers to track what websites employees log onto, what programs they use and how productive employees are as they go about their days.

“The idea behind WorkMeter is not about spying. The idea is to build a database or look at a performance of an employee from a time management perspective,” said Andre Angel, the Chairman of WorkMeter.

Angel said WorkMeter worked best when managers included employees in the process.

“Nobody is doing anything malicious. Employees want to work, want to improve what they’re doing, and if you give them that feedback, they improve,” Angel told CW 33 News.

Chris Lawson, the CEO of the staffing company The Eli Daniel Group in Allen, Texas, recently installed WorkMeter. Employees at first were less than enthused about the new software.

“I was a little concerned at first because I really thought it was going to be Big Brotherish, Chris and management looking over your shoulder wanting to know what you are doing every moment,” said Kendra Fox.

But the Eli Daniel Group included employees from the start, allowing each person to follow their own productivity with a dashboard on their computer.

“It’s not like it is me over your shoulder wondering what you are doing all of the time. It gives the individual the real time information,” said Lawson.

Fox believed WorkMeter was only as successful as how it was implemented.

“As long as they explain it right and kind of pitch it the right way and make sure their employees are on board and kind of including them in the process, then I think people will be OK with it,” said Fox.

Click here to watch the video

Top 10 ways employees waste time at work

24/7 Wall St. looked at a number of workplace studies on how people spend time online, and found that most say employees with PCs spend 20-plus hours a week on the Web while at work—and about a quarter of that is for personal use. 24/7 Wall St. broke those 5 squandered hours down into the top 10 “time wasters”:

1. Social Networks: 1 hr, 14 min/week; apparently, 77% of employees who have access to Facebook from work check it at least once a day.
2. Online Games: 34 min/week
3. Email: 27 min/week
4. Portals like AOL, Yahoo!: 14 min/week
5. Instant Messaging: 13 min/week

How much time is spent watching pornography at work? It’s staggering. Follow this link for more information, or read what we think ...

 

Productivity is More Than Just a Mathematical Formula

Wikipedia defines “productivity” as a measure of output from a production process, per unit of input, and this is where the fundamental problem of the modern day business begins.

Without real & measurable business benefit as a subsequent output of labor input, then what you are measuring is simple activity & NOT "productivity".

True productivity starts at "why", gains momentum at "what" and accelerates on continuos & measured improvements.

The Power of "Why"

People don't do what they're told, people do as they believe! The way we exercise our thoughts are through actions, likewise we exercise our beliefs through engrained habits or behavioral patterns. Ever go on a road trip that you weren't convinced was right for you? How did that workout for you? Were you enthusiastic about overcoming the challenges that appeared along the way? Did you look on the bright side of ever set-back?

“Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.” - John Fitzgerald Kennedy; A strong sense of purpose, something you can identify with, believe in.. is always a sure bet to get you enthusiastic about the journey your company is about to take you on. It's purpose that gives you faith & courage to seek alternative paths and make proactive efforts to achieve your milestones faster. Purpose is the first key to engagement & commitment to excellence.. it's the self imposed response to an employee who briefly asks themselves "why bother".

What's your company's "why"and how do remind everyone every day of it? And this is just the 1st step..

The Direction of "What"

"If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don't have to be pushed. The vision pulls you." - Steve Jobs; Follow-up strong purpose with a clearly articulated & understood vision, and your powerful formula is more than half-way there.

People more quickly propel themselves toward something they can visualize.. almost touch & feel.. than into a dark tunnel or foggy cloud. How quantifiable is your company's vision? How absolutely clear is the short, medium & long terms goals / objectives of your organization.

What mechanisms are you using on a regular basis to remind people of what your vision is.. the end point of your journey'.. and most important, what are the regular (rhythmic) interval checks or pulse-checks that measure your progress and as well what's left to achieve? Yet this is merely your 2nd step..

The power of metrics.. measurements & continuous improvements

What doesn't get measured doesn't get done, because people don't do what you EXPECT.. they do what you INSPECT!

That's the reality of human nature, and to assume anything else is a guaranteed formula for disaster. If purpose (Mission) & vision need to be quantifiable, then even more so does execution. As Thomas Edison once said, "Vision without execution is hallucination." But how do you know that you're executing? After-all, how do you know whether your teams are being "productive" or simply busy (activity)?

If you've got your act together in what regards setting & measuring against performance, how are you ensuring your team is continuously measuring progress and growing through key learning?

“Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is simply passing the time. Action with Vision is making a positive difference.” - Joel Barker.. Action with vision is measurable! It's when you can identify whether employee's behavioral patterns at work are producing business results. For this, you need to be able to measure activity that drives results and not just activity working on the applications or environments you've deemed productive. I can spend an entire day in a word processing application, just like I can in a spreadsheet, but unless I'm producing business results, it's all just a hallucination.

On the contrary, in parallel to measuring where I'm investing my time, how many uninterrupted & focused work sprints I'm able to generate in a day, if i can associate my activity to quantifiable increases in business results.. then I can confidently state that I'm productive.

How Facebook(ing) Can Improve Work Productivity

In a study dating back almost 2 years ago, Melbourne University's department of Marketing & Management demonstrated how a workforce that takes planned work breaks with Facebook is actually 9% more productive.

The fundamentals behind why this works can be found in guaranteeing the appropriate strategy, effective communication & engagement principles so that a workforce can plan for success. It's about finding the right rhythm & planning your 60-90 minute work sprints.

Social networks are NOT the problem

The problem most companies are facing today isn't the Internet or Social Media, it's the lack of effective Leadership. 86% o senior executive agree that the biggest challenge is to mobilize their workforce, yet 53% of staff are unable to explain their companies strategy. What's wrong with this picture? Leadership is about setting direction & delegating, it's about using a “story-telling cascade” to build a shared and compelling narrative about the need for change.. or the results you expect to achieve. The competitive advantage of the twenty-first century is increasingly derived from hard-to-copy intangible assets such as company culture and leadership effectiveness.

People Strategies First

Leveraging insight from Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage; Charles Darwin’s observation that “the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment” may have become something of a cliché in the literature on change management, but it has never rung more true in the business world. The ability to manage an organization dynamically so that it can both shape its environment and rapidly adapt to it is becoming the most important source of competitive advantage in the twenty-first century. Success is about winning not just in the marketplace for customers, but also in the marketplace for talented employees.

The role of business in society is changing. As we work more and socialize less, the time we have left for traditional activities involving our family, our local community, and our religious institutions is declining. As a result, our sense of meaning and identity is increasingly derived from the workplace (our jobs) and the marketplace (the products and service we buy). The message is that talented employees are not content to be cogs in a machine geared to hitting quarterly performance numbers. They want to work in dynamic workplaces where they feel empowered to make meaningful, positive change happen.

You Can't Manage What You Can Measure

Once you've got your people strategy effectively in place, what mechanisms will you use to measure active contribution toward company results? How will you address the 7 simple questions that drive your strategic plans; Who, What, When, Where, How, Why? And most importantly, how will you answer the always difficult “but Should we or Shouldn’t we?” questions?

By empowering your team with a solid Vision and aligning them around agreed strategies, you'll also need to ensure a fine balance of productive work sprints coupled with recovery breaks.

Why not let them Facebook when you know you're already getting he very best out of your people? What measurements do you have in place that give you confidence of how your team is engaging their available productive capacity?

How-To Fix the Open Space Syndrome

Let's be honest.. the advent of Open Space Offices had more to do with economics than productivity. That said, other than death & taxes, every challenge has a (or various) solution(s).

The current work environment provided by most employers who support an Open Space layout is highly unproductive for getting work done at work. Interruptions & easy distractions are only a few inconvenient truths of why an open space working environment can become highly unproductive. That's what I call "Open Space Syndrome".

Open spaces are economical solutions for housing employees, and in the right configuration can still gain effective transversal (cross functional area) awareness without compromising the concentration required to deliver effective results.

Here are some solutions I've found to help open spaces become more productive.

Focus Time

If you have to do work that requires focus & concentration, find a quite & unused space in or around your office building. The secluded corner table of the coffee shop downstairs, the park bench across the street, the conference room that's not in use, the library down the street or even the office cafeteria during off-peak hours. These are all spaces that you can move to in order to get important work done.

The pre-requisit is that your management team has realized the benefit of fitting out the office with laptop computers connected to docking stations or keyboard, mouse & screens. Given the increased computing power of portable computers and the flexibility of cloud computing based storage solutions, Desktop computers are dinosaurs / anchors that just don't cut it anymore.

Visual Hints

Have you ever seen an "on-air" sign in a radio or television station? Do you remember the last time you walked into a bank, took a number & headed to the information desk? Those are only a few practical reminders of things you can do in your open space office environment in order to get more work done. If you're part of a work team, agree amongst yourselves a rotating "customer service" schedule to take questions and issues from other departments & functional areas. Make it visibly clear who's "on-call" by placing a bright tennis ball on the screen of the person providing Customer Service.. or get even more creative and make-up a sign to hang somewhere visible.

Another effective tip is to put headphones on, even if you don't want to listen to music, so that people will assume that you're taking an online course, speaking on Skype or indeed focused on a task whilst listening to music.

Semi-Open Spaces

Glass partitioning works best to provide an open-plan feel and still be conducive to "noise" cancelation. Glass partitioning also provides the added benefit have creating more "white-board" space to draw up brilliant half-baked ideas & capture spur of the moment brainstorms.

In an earlier article this year, I highlighted how the MCI Group has developed a really inspiring open-plan workspace in their Zurich offices.

The above are only a few effective solutions & I'd like to hear yours. If you're working in an open space & have found handy tricks to maximize your productive moments in-spite of the challenges, I'd love to hear / read your experiences.

How your business is slowly dying

Every business expert will agree that "you can't manage what you cant's measure", yet most of you reading this post are slowly killing your companies prospects to profitably grow because you don't have the appropriate measurements in place.

In your case, "the gap" is the space between your perception and reality. According to a recent survey conducted by 3S in 305 Iberian based mid-size companies, only 37% of senior executives categorized their companies as very good or excellent at executing strategy. When we scratched deeper below the surface, we found that more than 50% of employees were disengaged with their company's strategy, and that 31% recognized they didn't have the necessary measures in place to ensure effective execution of their strategies to reach required business results for success.

Flying Blind

76.8% of the companies admitted to flying blind (perception based), without the necessary performance measurements to determine if their strategies were successful or not. The same figure of 23% blamed the current economy as the cause that limits their capacity to grow.

With numbers that evident, you can only cringe at the wasted productive capacity, and it's no wonder that companies are in the troubles they are in today. Imagine +76% of the planes in the sky flying around with no radar for day.. would you get on a plane that day? This is shear madness, yet having worked across 5 continents over the past 26 years, I can confirm this isn't unique to Iberia, it's just more severe here.

Flying with Radar

What are you currently doing to measure the performance & productivity of your team?

You don't have to go immediately overboard and jump straight into a full fledged Human Performance Technology Program. You should start out slow.. take baby steps with a Productivity Management tool like WorkMeter. Easy to implement & even easier to use, it engages your employees in discovering how to transform learning into more productive habits. Unlike other "performance monitoring" tools, WorkMeter is an educative "performance analysis" tool, and the best one I've used to date that helps me quickly experience increased results. It's employee friendly nature fosters internal healthy competitive growth & development without management having to step in. Once you set the strategy, your team does the work & the learning themselves.

Eliminate the Gap

Don't hold your finger to the wind to figure out if a storm is coming! Plan purposefully with concrete data & facts that will have you better predict the future of your organization based on historical trends. Join the new era of empowered organizations that confidently determine their own future success based on solid metrics. The execution of an idea is always more important than the brilliance of the thought, so stop dreaming about being more productive and get down to measuring it so you can manage it.

The growth of an organization is simply the accumulated growth of the individual relationships that constitute it, and it now rests on your shoulders to eliminate the gap created by perception by empowering your employees with metrics (measurements) they can learn, develop & grow from.

Internet usage & Productivity; Compliment or bitter rivalry?

Can you recall before the advent of the internet, and this is still true today in many public service locations, how you could walk into a workplace & spot at least 1/2 of the employees reading a newspaper or standing by the water-cooler in idle chatter?

Yes folks, before the internet came to be, companies already had productivity issues! All the internet did, as with every other positive aspect it also brought about, was accelerate what was already right or worng about our organizations.

The great debate is on.. and every man and his dog has an opinion, so let me share with you my own. The internet, like anything else in life, is only a distraction in the workplace if your organization lacks the disciplined effort to engage it's key-stakeholders in the activities required for both employee & employer to succeed. The fact is that the internet is a significant & key enabler of innovation, including finding new ways to become more productive by sharing best practices. But don't take just my word for it, let's explore the messaging that's prevelant out there today.

Surprise: Internet monitoring reduces Internet use

And if you declare a police state, putting armed officers on every street corner you'll reduce crime. But is that what you really wanted? What's your objective? To have people use the internet less or for them to be more produce more work that drives desirable results? If the latter is your choice, then focus on getting your team on-board with a sound game-plan for achieving success. Give them the skills, knowhow, resources & effective communication strategies that will keep them highly engaged, motivated & productive. The internet isn't the real issue.. it's more than likely that you're just not doing a great job of motivating people to do the right things at the right time required to achieve success.

Social networking at work leads to productivity loss

So I guess when I last connected to someone on LinkedIn, which in turn resulted in a transaction where I was engaged to perform a key (remunerated) project, that wasn't productive? Or when I tweeted a question about what best product / service to use in order to execute on a particular task.. and I received valuable feedback that reduced the chance of my wasting time on a product that someone else had already deemed poor.. I wasn't really being productive? Social networking at work can only lead to productivity loss if your people aren't focused & engaged, or don't have the skill set / knowhow to leverage social networking to their benefit.

To Lee Fayer, and others alike who make claims that "social networking costs 14 billion pounds a year in lost work time", I would say that you're just looking for excuses to cover up ineffective people management & engagement. For the record, let me say that if your people are spending more than 1h per day on the likes of Facebook when "they should be working" (and this phrase is key), then you've got a management, motivation and or engagement issue.. and not an internet usage issue.

Why Your Employees Are More Productive When They Facebook at Work

The sciences of biology & psychiatry prove that human beings need recovery breaks intermingled with intense work segments in order to maximize their effectiveness & productivity. It's a proven fact that when you allow people to perform completely unrelated tasks in-between work-tasks, they increase their focus and output as a consequence of reaching a higher state of concentration & throughput immediately following their break.

Dr. Brent Coker's work entitled "Freedom to surf: workers more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure" is more than just common sense, it can also be proven by the practical nature of the following factual diagram brought to us by our friends at WorkMeter.

Because you can't manage what you can't measure

As this graph shows, when a control element is introduced there is a natural tendency for reduced activity. Yet when the appropriate effective management tools, engagement principles & strategic initiative motivate a workforce, what you begin to witness is true productivity (driving company results) which can actually supersede previous levels of "activity".

What are you focusing on these days? Activity which might not be directly contributing to desired results, or productivity by using the right empowerment & engagement principles that guarantee your team get's on-board with your strategic plan?

 

Guest Blog by JC Duarte; The Strategy Guy

Quick Win Productivity Tip-of-the-Day; Digitalize

This morning's bank experience... I'm not naturally organized when it comes to finical matters. That said, it doesn't mean I can't be great at it, it's just going to take me extra effort, energy, a framework & discipline until it becomes a newly engrained habit. That's how life works!

So when I went to my bank this morning to establish additional accounts (buckets) for segmenting & putting funds aside for my various obligations & plans, my digitalization strategy.. which I put into effect some years ago.. came into very productive use!

The Challenge

For whatever reason, my identity details in the bank records had expired, and without the physical documentation I would have had to come back another day.. wait in another line to be attended to.. and start explaining my needs all over again.

The Solution

Fortunately I've digitalized my life, so with the stroke of a few keys on my smartphone, tablet pc or Laptop (in this case laptop) I accessed my Dropbox account & promptly handed (emailed) over my previously scanned legal identity.

The Reward

What turned out to be a 1h exercise, which I initially estimated at 45m, could have been double or triple (including more inconvenient trips to the bank) had I not had all my relevant information at the (extended) tips of my fingers.

I don't do back-ups anymore.. my working files (directories) in my laptop are permanently & instantly synced with Dropbox, which means anywhere in the world, from any device, I can access my information. I share files (or directories) with clients for immediate productivity. No longer do I need time-consuming file transfers or deal with e-mail limitations. This morning's practical example is only one.. Dropbox & digitalization (virtualization) of a significant part of my life has given me more time for me to do the things that really matter to me.. providing me a significant increase in work-life balance.

How are you virtualizing? How are you digitalizing? If you're not, then how are you still getting stuck in your traditional off-line world / frameworks? How are they empowering or limiting you?

Guest Blog by JC Duarte; The Strategy Guy

How to STOP E-mail from killing your productive day

You wake up with the perfect plan for the perfect day. This is the day you're going to catch-up & relieve yourself of the terrible stress of coming home each day overwhelmed that you haven't gotten all of your work done.

Fast-forward to the end of the day; you're driving home utterly dejected at the thought of yet another day of endless e-mail. Another day in which everything you wanted to get done, everything that was important to YOU, was still left to do as the night sky fell on your day.

Sound familiar? How often do you wish you hadn't opened up your e-mail? This past Friday, amongst a series of quick tips on productivity, I also wrote about NOT starting your day with e-mail, but rather one significant task that you need to complete.

Let's face it, after many years of trying, no matter how good you get at providing alternative means for people to communicate, you just can't seem to get away from the tsunami that e-mail often represents to what should have been a perfectly productive day. What makes it worse, is that you are NOT an innocent bystander. By having consciously chosen to open your e-mail first thing in the morning, you have opened up Pandora's Box.

And yet again your day will be planned out for you by others, instead of you having minimal control.

The other day I heard a phrase that stated; "you'll never be promoted for being an excellent e-mail, but you'll surly be fired for not delivering on required goals". So why have you become so addicted to e-mail?

Turn push & alerts off - Be purposeful in your activities

If a squeaky wheel is consistently in your ear, you're going to stop what you're doing to oil it. Be purposeful & retrieve your e-mails when you're ready to deal with them, especially until you have built up your new e-mail behavior.

Plan your e-mail breaks

Just like any other part of the day that you want to be in control of, get used to planning your e-mail breaks. That's right, let's call them e-mail "breaks". When you first wake-up, instead of opening your e-mail or checking your Blackberry, kiss the wife, go have a cup of coffee, breakfast, spend time with the kids, & make sure they're set for their new day.

If you took my previous tip, you reviewed your past day last night & structured the respective new day to be a better one. When you first walk into the office get right down to business & knock-out that first significant task. Today, just for today, schedule yourself no more than 2 x 1 hour breaks to read e-mail.. somewhere around 10am & 4pm.

E-mail as a file folder

And guess what, if in order to access that work-file you need to access your e-mail, then approach your e-mail like a file folder on your hard drive. Go in & extract ONLY what you need, instead of giving-in to the temptation of reading your e-mails.

Filter your e-mail

Apply filters so that e-mail from important people, your boss, clients, etc.. automatically goes into separate folders for you to address when you're ready. Avoid going into an unstructured general "Inbox".

Hunt & peck your e-mail

Don't read your e-mail from top/bottom. Be purposeful & scan the "from" & "subject". Open ONLY those e-mails that are relevant to the work you're performing at-the-moment, or things you know you need to address now.

Leave casual reading & other distractions that will take you off in a tangent for the coffee, lunch or evening break.

Action your e-mail

Even if that means re-marking it as "unread" and assigning a task for yourself to complete something more significant. If you can address an e-mail within 1-2 minutes, do it immediately, otherwise trash-it, schedule it for later casual reading or action.

Just try it

I can hear all of the reasons why none of this will work.. I've heard them all before.

Can I just ask you to try it for one day? If it seems to work, try it a 2nd day? And if someone gets upset that you took too long to answer their urgent e-mail, was really that urgent? Was it really urgent to YOUR job & deliverables that you had to complete? If so, teach your colleagues to come see you, or ring you when they've got something REALLY urgent.

Guest Blog by JC Duarte; The Strategy Guy