Management in the industrial age meant having to see a person physically present, and being or “looking” productive. Measuring productivity was rather archaic. But employee time management has changed a lot with the post-pandemic blended working environment. As business owners and leaders, we'll have to do a better job at managing employees remotely, focusing less on standardization, and encouraging employee autonomy.
If you do a simple Google search, you’ll find a whole lot of content about productivity. With working from home, homeschooling, household responsibilities, and balancing everything in between, productivity can get really hampered. So what can we do to actually get our time back, and do the things we want to do?
Employers and managers now need to allow employees to manage their own time as an entrepreneur would, to whatever degree is realistic. In managing employees remotely, since managers don't necessarily see employees, it's easy to fall into a tendency to micromanage. But micromanaging is a HUGE waste of energy and time for both managers and employees.
People are trying to transition into this post-pandemic working environment by mirroring their office environment at home. But what we REALLY should be doing is moving to managing by outcomes. We need to make sure that both manager and employee are really clear on the parameters - the WHAT, the WHY, the WHEN - but give the employee the FREEDOM to figure out the HOW.
Over-standardizing and over-prescribing your processes is unnecessary. When we tell people how to do things, we inhibit their ability to come up with new, innovative, different and, sometimes, even better ways to accomplish your goal.
When it comes to managing employees remotely, simply guiding employee time management while still allowing space for employee autonomy will be a lot better in the long run than micromanaging.
Hi, I’m Peter Boolkah, business coach, keynote speaker and winner of over 32 major coaching awards. I know how difficult running a business can be and how overwhelming it can feel when things aren’t going right.
One thing I tell my clients is never stop believing in yo
-------------------- ABOUT PETER BOOLKAH --------------------
Peter Boolkah (AKA The Transition Guy) is the World’s #1 Business Transition Coach whose main passion in life is to work with talented and high performing business owners who are in the process of creating exciting, high growth businesses.
Peter helps you to navigate and transition through the crucial growth pains that all growing businesses experience making it as painless and exciting as possible.
It is important to remember that businesses do not just grow and develop on their own, it is up to us and our teams to make this happen by making every day purposeful.
As businesses grow some parts of the journey will be easier than others and most owners do not have all the answers. Starting a business is one of the most exciting things we get to do and we all have aspirations of achieving great things. In fact Peter is yet to meet someone who started a business with the intention of failing.
Peter’s ultimate life goal is to inspire and empower over 100,000 Entrepreneurs to create long term thriving businesses resulting in the creation of 1,000,000 jobs.
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(upbeat music)- Hi, Peter Boolkah here and welcome to today's edition of "The Transition Guy". Now joining me today's episode is Dr. Brooke Smith and she is what we would call a time freedom coach. Welcome Brooke.- Thank you, Peter, I'm so happy to be here.- So time freedom coach, it's not very often you hear that. What does a time freedom coach actually mean?- A time freedom coach is someone who helps you with your time management, but not in a way that keeps you glued to your desk all day, in a way that actually helps you free up the time and energy to do the things you really wanna do.- That's interesting 'cause I mean, it's been so much out there around productivity and we've probably been conditioned for 30 years of working in a specific way when it comes to productivity. And one of the things that, I mean, it was literally born out of the fact of industrial age thinking and very often for people to be productive, they tended to have to be watched over like the supervisor would have to see that person physically there and looking busy to be productive, and that was their measurement. But then came the pandemic and the rules around sort of how we work, how we lead and how we manage has drastically changed. On top of that, that most of the workforce has been totally displaced by having to work remotely in situations that are probably very what I would call unnatural for them. So how's that affected productivity and what can we do to actually get time back?'Cause I can imagine with homeschooling and so parents being at home and all the distractions, and can you do the washing? Can you do this? I'm thinking while you're at home, so you're at home, even though you're at work, that could have a really negative impact on productivity and time management.- Absolutely so to the leaders, I would say the, the biggest thing to keep in mind to help your employees to be productive is to give them the freedom to manage their time like an entrepreneur, to whatever degree that's realistic given their role and the mission of the business and the contributions that they need to be making to the business in terms of work and value, give them the freedom to manage their time, to manage their day, to manage their effort and attention in the way that's optimal for them. Because, you know, despite this sort of culture of industrial age thinking and essentially supervising and really hands on micromanaging our workforce, micromanaging is a huge waste of energy for both the manager and the employees. The manager ends up spending a ton of time and energy, trying to see what other people are doing, understand all of the details of it and get really into it. And meanwhile, the employees end up spending all of their time, responding to the manager, managing the manager, if you will, and not getting done the things that are really important. So one of the biggest opportunities that this change of circumstance is affording us is the ability to allow our employees to take more ownership of how they're getting things done so that they can achieve more in the way that's optimal for them and meet all of those additional demands that families are starting to feel now, the distractions, the homeschooling.- And this is really interesting to me because I've always said for many years, I don't think managers have been able to properly manage people in terms of, they're not really looking at outcomes, they're just looking at activity.- Exactly.- How are people transitioning during this period?- So the way that people are transitioning for a lot of businesses, they're trying to just replicate what they had been doing in the office in a different environment. That doesn't work.- I was about to say, how does that even work?- Right. But what we should be doing and what companies who are more forward-looking are doing is moving to managing by outcomes. By making sure that both the manager and employee are really clear on the, what needs to happen, the parameters, the what, the why, the when, the expectations and giving the employee freedom to figure out the how.- That's interesting because for many years, people have been really prescriptive on how someone should do something when to be honest with you, Google's probably got a much better answer and a much better way of doing stuff because it was always progressing.- Exactly and even as a sort of a systems person, one of my previous roles was I was a lean six Sigma black belt in Corporate Trainer. So I love processes, I love standardization, but I also see the harm that is done by getting too into processes, too into SOPs, over standardizing and over prescribing because really the best process is a minimum effective dose. It's how much structure is necessary to enable people to get the desired outcome.- I think the challenge we've heard Brooke, and I don't know what your take on this is, is for the last five years I mean, when you talk about innovation and we've seen innovation come on leaps and bounds in terms of technology, software and all those all wonderful areas. I do think that industrial age management has been a blocker to innovation.- 100%. And part of it comes from that, focusing on the how. When we continually tell people how to do things, we are both consciously and unconsciously limiting their ability to come up with new, innovative, different, and sometimes better ways to do that.- I suppose, it's making sure that you still stick to the objectives that company wants, right?- I wanna say yes, but I think even this is an opportunity to take a step back because it's not just objectives, it's values and mission. And if the objectives line up with the values and mission, then yes, important to stick with the objectives. But if they don't, it's important to discuss the objectives. There's a classic article and I can't remember the author, but it's on the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B. And that's essentially either, you know managing behaviors when it's not leading to the outcome you want, but it can also be rewarding an outcome that's different from the outcome we really want.- Which is quite interesting, you talk about managing behaviors there, just a quick question on managing behaviors, how have you found people's ability to manage behaviors remotely?- So I have found a lot of examples of people whose teams are getting a lot of really good work done, and that does not come from trying to manage their behaviors.- Right.- How do you think people are able to sort of keep the culture together when they're so literally dispersed?- Yeah it always comes back to the values, the mission and communication. It's making sure that everyone is swimming in the same direction, people are feeling appreciated, people are getting recognized and rewarding for getting those outcomes and also that you mentioned innovation, if innovation is desired, then reward innovation also. Rewarding innovation sometimes means rewarding failure. Sometimes rewarding innovation means recognizing people for trying something new, even if it didn't get quite the desired result and then looking at it as a learning opportunity to see how else we can innovate in the future. And I think that's something that's really a different paradigm for some leaders.- So our leaders listening in today, tuned into today's episode and they're thinking, okay, well, where do I start with this? Because I'm still stuck in an industrial age mindset. What advice would you give them?- Talk to your employees, talk with your employees, make sure that you and your employees are on the same page, are clear about the outcomes that you need them to be producing for your business. And then also ask them if they have any ideas for how they could do this more effectively. And it's such a simple question, you know, is there anything that would enable you to achieve this outcome better, faster, right the first time, with a bigger impact?- Right. Okay. Would you have any other words of wisdom?- So for everyone, this is employees and leaders alike, be mindful of distractions. Sometimes distractions really are emergencies and sometimes the sort of the cost of ignoring a distraction is actually so high that we need to drop what we're doing and tend to it. But something that everyone is struggling right now with, right now leaders and employees alike is we are just being bombarded with things all the time and part of that is that creep of work-life into home and home life into work, and many people all under the same roof all day, all with different schedules and needs. Make sure to carve out time for your deep work, prioritize that deep creative time and defend it. So what that means for a lot of people is really keeping essentially two lists, if you will, there's the deep work, the stuff that we schedule time for and we defend that time no matter what. And then there's the other stuff and that's the stuff that you can circle back to later maybe it's a couple minutes, it's a quick phone call. and if you get distracted during that time, it's not a big deal, you pick up where you left off and those are also the tasks that you can sneak in when you have an unexpected free moment, you know, you're waiting for your kid to do something and you find yourself with 10 minutes that you didn't know about, here's a quick task you can knock out in 10 minutes. But differentiating between those two kinds of work can make a huge difference in how much we get done and how we feel about what we're getting done. Because there are a few things as frustrating as trying to do deep work when people are constantly interrupting.- Yeah I can see how that would be difficult.- Yup and not knowing if you should respond to the interruptions or not. So defend your deep work time, fit in your other work, you know, in whatever way is best and know that most distractions can wait.- Could that even include working non-conventional hours?- If it works for you. So I'm a big fan of working non-conventional hours because it allows me to do my deep work when I have the most energy and it allows me to circle back and do some of the work that doesn't require my full creative attention late in the day, sometimes in the evening when I don't have as much energy and then during the day I can go outside, I can go see people, I can actually enjoy the full experience of being alive- It's quite interesting because that term seems to be coming up a lot more, the whole term deep work.- Yeah. So I mean, as entrepreneurs, as leaders, we all have some amount of deep work that we need to do because we're either visionaries or we're strategists, or we are making big decisions that impact other people. And even as employees, you know, a lot of us are, people are knowledge workers and knowledge workers do deep work too. You know, we might spend a lot of time looking at a spreadsheet, doing something fairly mundane, but then there's also problem solving, and there's figuring out if there's a better way to do it, there's analysis and learning and communicating, creating communication materials. All of that knowledge work requires focus and getting distracted and having to find your place again is frustrating and it costs so much time and energy over the long run.- And money.- Yeah.- And money as well. And it's interesting, I mean, you bring it up that now, so the whole knowledge worker age,, and that's what we're in right now. We are in the knowledge worker age, the industrial age finished circa 2002. And it's interesting how long it's taken us to actually catch up with the next, I would say probably the next hundred years will be the knowledge worker age.' Cause everything's tends to be a hundred years, industrial age, about a hundred years, agriculture age, about a hundred years, approximately a hundred years with any given kind of period. So this is looking like a hundred year period, but for some reason this time round, we've been quite slow in adopting that, it's like we've been holding onto industrial age way too long. And maybe it's the fact that a lot of the leaderships that are out there, happens to be out industrial age leadership in a knowledge worker age, which probably hasn't helped the situation.- Yeah well, and even the way that management and leadership are traditionally taught is still holdovers from industrial age. So even though we are now in this knowledge age, people who are formally studying business are still learning a lot of industrial age practices.- That's crazy, right?- Yeah.- So if people want more information about you and actually look at the work that you do in terms of sort of the whole time freedom methodology, where do they go?- To my website, Dr.Brookesmith.com or Instagram @Dr.BrookeSmith.- Fantastic. And again, I mean, today's guest, you've shared some wonderful insights and hopefully our audience will take some good takeaways that they can put into practice. Now, if anything has resonated with you today and you want a bit more information, head over to boolkah.com and get in touch. If you love today's episode, please make sure you subscribe. So you don't miss out on future episodes, please like it and share it with others so they can also benefit. And once again, Brooke, thank you so much for joining us today.- Thank you, Peter, it was a pleasure.- And everyone remember, failing to learn is learning to fail so please stay safe, thank you.(soft music)