Don’t treat employees like children
Due to expansion, a company in my building recently moved to a larger office just down the hall. Their new office had two doors leading into it, both off the same corridor. Like all businesses in the building, they proudly placed their company sign on the entrance to their office. A few days later, I noticed that one of the signs had been removed and replaced with an A4 print out that read: “Door not in use, please use the other door.” I quizzed one of the more senior members there, who told me that the sign was erected to prevent those entering the office from distracting the the telesales workers. He claimed that staff entering via that door distracted the telesales workers by 10 minutes a day, costing the company 4 hours of lost time per person per month. “Do you time them going to the toilet too?” I joked. I never received a reply.
A few weeks later I was at a leaving party that a number of this firm’s telesales staff also attended. I asked them about the sign, and each one of them said that they had not been distracted by the door being in use. In fact what was happening was that the management were doing whatever they could to try to get the telesales staff making more calls per day.
The story above is a prime example of two things. Firstly, management using the wrong tools to measure productivity, and secondly, staff being treated like children. Anyone who has ever had to make a cold sales call, knows that telesales can at times be a tedious and mind-numbing job. Humans are not machines and there is a limit to the number of calls that one can make before requiring some sort of break. That’s exactly what staff at this firm were doing. Taking a break, taking time to re-focus, review and analyse the situation, but because they weren’t on the phone, management wasn’t happy.
What really caught my attention though, was that the firm in question worked in finance, in particular wealth management and investments. One would think that in this market, when cold calling potential investors, it’s the quality of the call that counts and ultimately the conversion or lead. Unfortunately the philosophy here was more calls, equals more sales, and that is a problem I have encountered encountered in many small businesses. I have worked in businesses where I have been required to record my bathroom breaks and misc activities on time-sheets, where management would get annoyed at people taking more than a minute or two to go and make a drink, and where Internet use was so locked down, I couldn’t even access sites required to do my job. This outdated approach that more is better, high volume is better than low volume, is all to do with employers measuring wrong outcomes.
In an interview with business magazine Inc. Jason Fried comments:
“I hate it when businesses treat their employees like children. They block Facebook or YouTube because they want their employees to work eight hours a day. But instead of getting more productivity, you’re getting frustration.”
Offices aren’t factories, and employees aren’t robots. As long as work gets done, why does it matter what people get up to all day? Nobody can work at a high level for 8 hours a day. It’s just impossible, the human body is not designed that way. Whether they admit of not, everyone goes through alternating periods of mental acuity, and as you can imagine, during periods of low acuity productivity, quality and creativity takes a hit. Working through these periods, is likely to lead to an increase in errors, and sub-standard output. Erin Falconer, editor of personal productivity and lifestyle blog ‘Pick the Brain‘, estimates that just 3-4 hours a day could be classified at productive.
Falconer criticises the 8 hour work day for its lack of distraction when required. As organisations, lock down internet use, frown upon window gazers and force employees to be ever present, the only option he says is ‘office purgatory’. “You can’t be highly productive because you’re mentally fatigued, but you can’t recharge because the 8 hour work day requires the appearance of constant productivity. The result is millions of unproductive workers trapped at their desks when they’d rather be doing something else.”
Many large employers with a background of employee welfare, such as Aviva, PWC, Red Bull, Microsoft etc.. in addition to internet giants such as Google, offer workplace gyms, games rooms, rest rooms etc.. But this only goes some way to solving the problem. Remote working is the best solution, but the real issue is that managers need to start trusting their staff, stop treating them like children, and accept that sometimes it’s actually more productive to be staring blankly out of the window, flirting with the cute girl in cubical 2D, or sending an SMS, than it is to be franticly bashing away at the keyboard. It’s about changing cultures and embracing a new way of working.
Related articles
- Why work doesn’t happen at Work (TEDtalk) (timragan.wordpress.com)
