People of all ages, even those well into their seventies are working longer and proud of it. Having spare time has become a symbol of low value, while being always busy equates to high status.
So it’s no surprise that companies and individual bosses are taking advantage and always pushing people to increase productivity.
As countless studies have shown, this simply isn’t true. Productivity dramatically decreases with longer work hours, and completely drops off once people reach 55 hours of work a week, to the point that, on average, someone working 70 hours in a week achieves no more than a colleague working 15 fewer hours.
But that doesn’t stop various media from writing job shaming articles making fun of successful, well-known people working retail jobs.
Fans wondered why it was deemed newsworthy that a mother of two had taken a job in a different sector when her best-known role as an actor had wound down. (Soap stars, even on massive hits like EastEnders, do not earn early-retirement-level salaries.)
The fiasco echoed a similar attempt at job-shaming by another British tabloid last year, when the Daily Mail published photos of American actor Geoffrey Owens bagging groceries as a cashier at a Trader Joe’s, a retail chain known for its excellent job benefits. Fox News picked up the story in the US and both media outlets were ridiculed for it.
And, for a change, the trolls crawled quietly back under their rocks. Will wonders never cease.
McKinsey findings show that 48% of employed U.S. college grads are in jobs that require less than a four-year degree.
Geoffrey Owens summed it up best.
“There is no job that’s better than another job. It might pay better, it might have better benefits, it might look better on a resume and on paper. But actually, it’s not better. Every job is worthwhile and valuable,”
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Why is happy so often equated with fun, as in “if you’re having fun you’re happy.” What makes you happy? A beautiful sunset? Your kids/grandkids? A quiet walk? Time with loved ones? For most people, It takes more substance than fluff to make them happy.
It’s well-proven that happy employees are more productive, but creating happy requires substance.
The components of long-term happiness are things such as challenging work, continued learning, opportunities to grow, clear communications, fair bosses, etc.
All of these require more thought, effort and skill from managers than installing a few foosball tables or gamifying the project.
Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
I wrote this in 2012 and reposted it in 2015. The idea behind it is one the most important and viable concepts a manager (supervisor, team lead, executive) will (can, should) learn during their career. It is the difference between good and great.
As companies grow and managers build their organizations they frequently talk about “weeding out” low performing employees—Jack Welch was a ninja weeder.
If that thought has crossed your mind you might take a moment to think about James Russell Lowell’s comment, “A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.”
As with weeds, there are better ways to look at under-performing employees.
95% of the time it’s management failures that create weeds and those failures run the gamut from benign neglect to malicious abuse and everything in-between.
Weeds can come from outside your company, inter-departmental transfers and even from peers in your own backyard.
What is amazing is how quickly a weed will change with a little TLC.
“Weeds can grow quickly and flower early, producing vast numbers of genetically diverse seed.”
People grow quickly, too, and often produce innovative ideas just because someone listened instead of shutting them down.
And while trust that your attitude won’t change takes longer to build, the productivity benefits happen fairly rapidly.
So before you even think about weeding look in the mirror and be sure that the person looking back is a gardener and not a weed producer.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
This post dates from 2013. I think it’s a safe bet that the number of half-assed things being done now vs then have increased by several orders of magnitude. The year is nearly over, so this may be a good time to take a step back and ask yourself, “am I whole-assing my life or…”
LikeHack founder Jane Smorodnikova pointed me to an excellent video about productivity on a blog called Sparring Mind that is owned and written by Gregory Ciotti, the marketing director of a Boston startup called Help Scout.
Some of what’s included
Why worrying about having “more willpower” is a fool’s game
How world class experts stay productive… and what they do differently
The science behind why better energy management = a more productive you
Big pitfalls that lead to busywork and procrastination
I especially like Ciotti’s closing line, “Multitasking is your enemy: Treat it as such. Block out unwanted distractions and as Ron Swanson would say, “Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.”
Based on today’s love affair with multitasking, the number of half-assed things being done could fill the cloud.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
For all the promise of technology people are still people and they respond as such. Further, I doubt that’s going to change within the lifetime of anyone currently breathing.
(Note: Although the “Chat with Miki” box no longer exists, I typically reply to email within 24 hours.)
“Clint” used the ‘Chat with Miki” box in the right-hand frame to ask me this question.
Have you ever heard this? “People usually won’t change until the pain of NOT changing exceeds the pain of changing.”
Since this is a pretty common idea I thought I’d share my ideas with everybody.
I’ve heard this and many variations of it over the years, especially when applied to the workplace where it becomes a form of management by threat
For example, if your company or boss decides on a change and people’s jobs hinge on that change, they will change.
The problem is that they will also disengage at some level, maybe a little, but sometimes a lot. Not always obviously, but over time it will show in lower productivity, less creativity and, eventually, higher turnover.
Clint then asked if I thought that vested self-interest could be used instead of increasing the pain.
The answer is absolutely.
VSI is the perfect opposite to increased pain.
By rethinking a desired action, such as change, and presenting it in terms of its value to employees you can trip the VSI switch—but not if it’s a con.
As I’ve said a million times, people are not stupid; if the desired action is not really in their best interests there is nothing you can do that will convince them. VSI will still kick in, but the result will be resume polishing, lots of LinkedIn action and conversations with recruiters.
Clint decided that by using vested self-interest he could reduce the pain of changing. He plans to connect his organization’s goals to his people’s goals, which will effectively reduce the pain and increase the likelihood that they will do what he needs them to do—painlessly.
Handy little item my chat box. Try it, I’m usually here.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
For centuries ‘customers’ were the people who bought a company’s products or services. A few decades ago that started to change and not just. Governments started recognizing that taxpayers were, in fact, customers, as did schools and universities, with regards to their students. Hospitals and doctors embraced, or were forced to, the idea of patients as customers.
Through most of that time customer service was mostly a function of caveat emptor. Even before the web and social media made both complaining and complimenting easy ‘ before that, gossip and message boards spread the word. The change is most easily seen in the medical world where Medicare/Medicaid and insurance companies, paying based on outcome, as opposed to fee-for-service, have forced radical change in patient care.
It was during this period that management academics and gurus put forth the idea that workers were customers and customer service was the responsibility of their direct boss—not HR.
offering high-grade professional challenges to all your people and making sure that they have the resources and all the information necessary to achieve success;
fostering fairness so that people know they are evaluated on their merits and favoritism plays no part; and
always walking your talk and living up to your commitments.
What’s in it for you?
Better reviews, promotions and raises;
increased professional development;
less turnover and easier staffing; and
what goes around comes around—everything that you give your people will come back to you ten-fold!
Run a study, of course. What else would a consultant do first?
Millennials, they found, did not object to long hours outright. They were as committed to their work as older colleagues. But they were also more willing to question long-held assumptions about how that work should be done. Given the abundance of connectivity, why was it necessary to be in the same physical building for 15 hours (on a good day) to get a job done? Why couldn’t they work from home when a project allowed?
No surprise there; the surprise came from a different segment of the 44,000 strong global workforce.
But here was the real surprise: Non-millennial employees wanted exactly the same thing. Virtually identical percentages of millennial employees and non-millennial workers said they would prefer to be able to shift their work hours to schedules that could accommodate both their personal and professional obligations—heading home early for family dinner, for example, in exchange for an early start or signing back on once the kids were in bed.
The only difference was that millennials were willing to speak up about their dissatisfaction, and to opt out when problems couldn’t be resolved. Over and over again, the results of the survey made clear: work was important, but a personal life was, too.
Duh. That “surprise” isn’t exactly rocket science.
For a company that makes its living from its intelligent counsel and problem solving skills, they really blew it. Beyond that, they seemed to ignore others’ research.
Research has found that productivity drops significantly after about 50 hours per week of work. Long hours come at a cost to employee health (paywall), which in turn leads to absenteeism, loss of productivity, and higher insurance costs for employers. It’s a game no one wins.
Every list I’ve seen, since millennials started working, describing what they wanted in the workplace more or less duplicated what I’d heard from other candidates for more than 30 years.
Millennial workers were just the first generation to call the game out as bullshit, in numbers large enough to force the rules to change.
Big mouths and a willingness to walk got McKenzie management’s attention, but the difference between McKenzie and other companies with similar cultures is that McKenzie admitted the problem, found the cause, crafted solutions and followed-through implementing them.
There are plenty of others still in denial.
A recent Vanity Fair profile of Goldman Sachs’s president and probable next CEO David Solomon praised his commitment to “healthy work-life balance.” At Goldman this means working no more than 70 hours per week—so long as no pressing deals are in the works.
And forget law firms.
Industries that bill by the hour have no financial interest in adopting a leaner workweek. “Many people will say, ‘Diminished returns are better than no returns’.”
I think that, too, will change as Generation Z follows the Millennials with even more willingness to walk — if they even choose that path in the first place.
Is productivity important to you? Do you strive to do everything more efficiently? If so, you have a lot of company these days.
No matter where you turn you find hacks to improve your work skills, raise your kids, change your diet, lose weight, even improve your love life.
But in your drive for productivity, have you stopped and asked yourself if productivity is a good goal? In other words, are the benefits all they’re cracked up to be?
I’ve never believed they were.
It always seemed to me that constantly chasing a better way to do [whatever] in the name of efficiency meant expending great energy for a constantly shrinking return of higher productivity.
It’s not the improvement I have a problem with, it’s the relentlessness that turns me off. The feeling that if you aren’t constantly looking to improve you lose your value as a viable human being.
But no matter how long I live I doubt I’ll ever understand the fragility of egos that need to prove their value so badly they are willing to give up their lives to do it.
These explanations can be reduced to two basic kinds. The first kind implies that much of life is burdened by mental suffering—feelings of being overwhelmed and stressed—that can, through our own concerted efforts, be alleviated or at least coped with by finding the right productivity hacks. The second suggests that life is a “middle class epic” whose finale would depict a form of satisfaction following from the completion of the most challenging tasks at work. Call it Inbox Zero Integrity.
Yet neither the desire to lessen our everyday mental suffering nor the pursuit for short-term satisfaction ultimately explains our deep cultural obsession with productivity. What drives it instead, I’d argue, is a 200-year-old movement toward making work the center of our lives.
I’ve been saying for decades that work should be part of life, not vice versa.
It’s amazing to me, but looking back over nearly a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.
It’s that time of year again and and my best advice hasn’t changed since 1977 or as I wrote it in 2007. The only difference is that now it’s the same advice you can find in dozens of places. Done right (as described below) reviews are the greatest gift you can give your people. So give it to them, even if you don’t get the same from your boss. After all, it is said that it’s better to give than receive and, as I tell clients, you can control the former, not the latter.
I’ve written on and off about the importance of, and how to do, performance reviews and it’s that time of year again.So in yet another effort to convince you doubters out there that honesty is the best policy and your people really don’t want to hear feel-good fudging, prevarications or outright lies, especially around Christmas.
Social psychologist William B. Swann in a new study published in the Academy of Management Journal… People don’t like to be treated positively if they know it is not heartfelt. If people are coming across as inauthentic and forcing you to come across as inauthentic in return, that can be enormously stressful… His work has centered on an idea known as self-verification theory. All people carry around an image of themselves that tells them who they are, whether they are good-looking or average-looking, for example, or clever at math, or kind and thoughtful or largely self-centered. Inasmuch as people want to be recognized for the things they are good at, Swann’s work suggests many people also want honest acknowledgments of their flaws, and that when these flaws are minimized or wished away, people end up feeling worse rather than better.
Just remember, honest and authentic don’t mean abusive or destructive. Offering recognition of what the person does well and being candid about areas that need improvement are two hallmarks of a good review.
The third is no surprises, which means that you’ve been giving candid feedback throughout the year.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
I’ve written on and off about the importance of, and how to do, 
