Time is precious so stop wasting it at work

When time matters, respect it

Time is precious and business users attempting to navigate their course through the changing world of work show technology without strategy is not enough. To innovate in remote collaboration, it’s necessary to identify goals and make good plans.

Please think more

We’ve always known that technology alone is seldom an answer.

We already know management should speak with front line staff to ensure they solutions they deploy are fit for purpose. That’s because poorly chosen solutions, applications that damage employee trust or dent the employee experience, or chaotically selected systems that don’t integrate can create more problems than they solve.

To get a sense of these challenges, consider a recent report from Wrike. (Wrike is a work management platform). The company looked at what business did as the pandemic struck. It found they introduced an average of nine new work apps in response to the pandemic.

A frequently quoted McKinsey & Co report told us that most businesses expected a move to remote working would take 15 months before COVID-19 struck. As it transpired, when it did the average time to adopt remote was just 10.5 days.

As they moved so quickly, it’s understandable that to protect what could be protected, businesses adopted a rushed ad hoc approach to putting new processes in place. All the analysis shows almost every digital transformation effort accelerated as a result, and (Wrike says), as many as 77% of businesses would have gone to the wall without these efforts.

Complexity + confusion = burnout

The problem is and was that the addition of so many solutions introduced additional layers of complexity. Wrike claims 65% of knowledge workers feel stressed because the tasks they must perform are growing more complex; for creatives, the number is 76%. It also seems that in many cases (77%) the communication and collaboration tools weren’t quite good enough to support full time remote/hybrid work at scale.

What should be happening now is major investment in developing skills and tools to enable hybrid teams to communicate, collaborate and do business together. Apple is looking at these with tools like Freeform and Continuity Camera, for instance. Solutions like these and others are mandatory, because 84% of business leaders see the move to hybrid working as irreversible, while 75% of knowledge workers say they’ll “never go back” to the old ways.

But the initial roll out of applications to enable these new ways of working meant 70% of employees found they needed to work with multiple incompatible apps and systems to get their work done.

If you think about it, even the need to juggle all these apps and systems means mistakes become more likely to occur. Managers know this but haven’t yet found the tools to replace or improve what they have already put in place, or (more likely) the time to identify the need. The report also confirms that too many companies now run their business with too many meetings. Workers are spending over 18 working days each year in meetings, the report said. More time gone.

Ultimately, Steve Jobs had this sussed, when he explained: “You cannot mandate productivity; you must provide the tools to let people become their best.”

What a waste of time

No one is happy.

Employees are resigning, employers are attempting to force them back to infectious spaces, and even management are feeling burnt out. 43% of desk workers are feeling burned out right now, according to Future Forum. But employees that have retained flexibility at work are far less stressed than those who don’t.

Not only this, but employees who have full schedule flexibility report 29% higher productivity than workers who can’t shift schedules. (There continues to be a huge disconnect between what employers think and employees know).

Future Forum tells us flexibility ranks second only to compensation when it comes to workplace satisfaction (with device choice an incredibly important consideration).

And 57% of employees are looking for new jobs in the next year because they aren’t getting the flex they need – all of these challenges demand focus on improving employee experience.

What does this mean?

It means management must think far more deeply about how to manage flexible workforces and should audit their existing technologies to ensure they are helping employees get their work done, rather than getting in the way.

It also means some managers must improve organizational and communication skills. This is a change in what is required from managers, presenteeism is out, clear, concise communication and clarity of purpose are essential to build productivity in an asynch, flexible age. We can tell, because all the surveys suggest, that the best employees will work for the companies that provide the best employee experiences.

Time is precious. Recruiting great talent takes time. So why waste that talent’s time once you’ve got them working for you? They won’t thank you and will move on to employment that offers them better flexibility and superior employee experiences. When they do, they’ll take out your time too, as you seek to recruit replacements.

As Steve Jobs once said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

In the end, it’s not just employee time poor management is wasting. It’s your own. It’s time to see time as a business asset and application friction as the time-stealer it truly is. It’s time to think like Apple and simplify the business user experience.

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