Shifts Happen

A lot of the work I’ve been doing lately with organizations involves questioning the status-quo, challenging assumptions and looking at ‘things’ from different perpsectves.  Recently I was working with a leadership group and we were discussing employee engagement, commitment and loyalty.  I asked the group how they know an employee is really committed to working at their company.  Upon further inquiry, I asked if an employee really wants to impress their boss and demonstrate how productive they are, when do they show up to work?  When do they leave.  Without hesitation they responded “they show up before the boss and leave after”.  This particular point-of-view (POV) has its roots from a paradim that the more you work the more productive you are.  In today’s workplaces including virtual work environments or remote working, people create this same perception by sending/reading emails at all hours.  Haven’t you checked your email late at night or first thing in the morning only to notice when someone sent you a message and think to yourself, “…you gotta get a life!…”.  Some have figured out how to time delay sending their messages to appear that they were working until all hours of the night.  What if you adopted a POV that the less you do the more productive you are?  Parkinson’s Law is the adage that “work expands to fill the time available.”  That means if you have a 1/2 hour task and you have 3 hours to get it done, how long will it take?  Typically 3 hours or more.  You can see how easily this came to be from the industrial era when workers needed to ‘clock-in’, do their work, and then ‘clock-out’.  It wasn’t dependent on what got accomplished it was based on filling the time.  That’s where the concept 9-5 came from and where time wasters cam from standing around the water cooler or taking a coffee or cigaratte break.  Many companies are now focused on creating Results-Oriented Work Environments (ROWE) that focus on accomplishing results…it’s about time.