Why Your Company Probably Runs Like C.RA.P.
The eight hour workday is just one of the hallmarks of the industrial revolution that still characterises the modern company.
Back then, most of us worked on assembly lines and in coal-mines.
We were moving widgets. Hours worked could be conflated with output, and presence could be conflated with productivity.
But the nature of work has in large part moved away from the packing of widgets into boxes, and towards knowledge work.
When it comes to knowledge work, what matters isn’t time but attention.
It turns out that we can actually get groundbreaking work done on just four hours of attention a day — as Charles Darwin did with his penning of the theory of evolution — four hours is in fact the upper limit for deep, focused work.
But most of us are lucky to get just one hour of focused work in.
And that’s because the companies we work for — or the companies we’ve built — run like C.R.A.P., and here’s why.
Instead of taking ownership for our decisions, and learning from and correcting any mistakes, we treat all decisions as greatly consequential and wind up seeking consensus for everything, right down to the color of a button on our homepage.
We call one-hour meetings, and invite several other people along, to discuss arbitrary matters when the best teacher would be to just ‘suck it and see’, or as the Japanese saying goes, “genchi gembutsu” — go and see for yourself.
As a result of our shying away from taking ownership and leaning into outsourcing accountability, we move slowly, we learn slowly, and we adapt slowly — something companies can ill afford in a fast-changing business world.
Not only that, but as championship-winning football coach, Paul Roos, says, “leaders don’t empower people to make decisions, bad behaviours will permeate, and the few decision-makers become bottlenecks”.
Less C.R.A.P: Instead of seeking consensus for inconsequential and/or easily reversible decisions, we must take ownership instead, or empower our people to be able to take ownership (more on that later).
Only 15 per cent of employees worldwide are engaged by their work — that is, only 15 per cent are emotionally invested towards delivering on their organisation’s mission.
Six out of seven people you see out on the city streets and in the workplace, are either not engaged or actively disengaged. This is why your company is ‘probably one of them’.
In large part, this has to do with the fact that the modern organisation inadvertently sabotages attention and its people’s potential by way of counterproductive practices and norms which treat educated and capable adults like children.
One of these norms is the expectation that employees will respond almost immediately to internal and external correspondence, leaving them glued to their inboxes and IMs at all hours of the day, never cultivating time to think and mentally apply themselves — something they were probably hired to do.
Less C.R.A.P: Rather than expecting real-time responses, cognizant of Pavlov’s dog, we should practice asynchronous communication.
The reality is that most things don’t require an immediate response. For most things, a one-way email or instant message should do the job, with the recipient responding when it suits them.
Download Chapter One of my forthcoming book on workplace productivity, Time Rich: Do Your Best Work, Live Your Best Life, below!
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The WorkFlow podcast is hosted by Steve Glaveski with a mission to help you unlock your potential to do more great work in far less time, whether you're working as part of a team or flying solo, and to set you up for a richer life.
To help you avoid stepping into these all too common pitfalls, we’ve reflected on our five years as an organization working on corporate innovation programs across the globe, and have prepared 100 DOs and DON’Ts.
