How much is too much Performance?

The pursuit of efficiency is the gold standard of business and the holy grail of CEOs everywhere. It is the purest form of running a company and why not? An inefficient operation produces cost overruns, missed deadlines, kills the bottom line.  So, I’m not here to suggest that we ignore efficiency and opt for some mystical life that feels good but never produces results.  We all know that efficient production is the life blood of any company.  What I’m suggesting is that when you over focus on efficiency, and especially when you achieve ultimate efficiency, your company will suffer and in the end efficiency will wain and you will have to start the cycle over.

Let’s step back a few years to 2020.  The global COVID pandemic was a black swan event that caught every one-off guard.  Everyone had to adjust and adapt their personal lives and business too.  Depending on what industry you were in you either shut down temporarily, laid off staff, continued operations with extreme adjustments to work environments or started to shift to a work-from-home model.  Even the medical industry loosened remote medicine regulations to allow for this change. Most of the office jobs instituted some form of WFH.  Over time it was discovered that this allows for a focused work environment and many people achieved greater efficiency.  Clearly the distractions of offices and the commute time allowed staff to use their time wisely and get things done.

Ok, I’ll address the elephant in the room, some didn’t fare so well in the isolated often more distracting home “office”.  After all they were dealing with a global pandemic, schools closures, slow WIFI, endless ZOOM calls, and a vastly new world with no warning and no training.  These situations improved over time and some companies took advantage of the improvements in efficiency.  Other companies, those with a more rigid management style, had less success and started to force workers back to the office.  As you’ll see, return-to-office and hybrid work is not a bad thing overall but when instituted with the wrong motive it never realized the full benefit that it could.

Back to efficiency.  Those workers that experienced focused, uninterrupted time to do their work loved the productivity they achieved and so did their bosses.  But there is an underlying force that is at play here, momentum.  Offices workers that honed their skills were able to use those skills to maximize their time.  Over time this focused work starts to plateau. The same skill that produces efficient work wain from lack of learning new skills and refining existing skills. The focused time is also isolating and deteriorating to the co-worker relationships that bring additional meaning to the workday. Communications that normally happens organically, in the office, must be scheduled and the nuanced informal sharing is lost.

Eventually this isolation leads to indifference and the work becomes transactional.  The nature of the persons relationship to the company being transactional is driven now by how much they are paid.  As you can imagine this leads to more turnover as people will change jobs for a bump in pay and they are working from home so everyone in the country is now courting your staff. 

The point is that efficiency, although still the goal, it’s not enough.  Employees want to be happy.  they deserve to be happy, and your company can have happy employees.  You don’t have to buy ping-pong tables and go on expensive retreats.  It turns out employees need to be cared for and if you do, they will be more productive AND more loyal. 

It’s human nature to want to be a part of something bigger than us, something that matters in the world. People want to connect to the vision of the company and feel their work is not just a transaction but necessary for the vision to be realized.  People also want to grow.  They want to be great at what they do.  This might be a bit grandiose, but the point is they want to be working toward mastery of their career.  No one want’s to be stagnate which leads to apathy and a disinterest in their work and the company.  People also want some control over how they do their job.  While working from home gives them some of this autonomy most jobs are integrated in a bigger team and without any visibility or ability to speak into the other aspects of the process they are relegated to transactional thinking.  Unhappy employees are less productive and more likely to leave.  Employee turnover over is the biggest hindrance to efficiency.  The high cost and lost time can kill any perceived value from efficiency alone.

Whether working from home of full-time in the office happiness doesn’t happen automatically. It is critical that CEOs, managers and teams embrace the need to understand the happiness of their company and work toward maximizing it. 

The first step to understanding what allows people to be happy is self-awareness.  Let get real, everyone is different. Everyone likes to work differently, and everyone needs to be treated in a way that aligns with their style.  This starts at the top. The best leader is a self-aware leader.  When you know the style of work that brings you joy and spend most of your time there, you work smarter, harder, and get more done.

Every project has multiple steps that it goes through, and the steps are the same for every project.  There is the ideation stage, the activation stage and the implementation stage. Likewise, every person gets joy from some, but not all, stages of the work process.  The trick is to align the people with the stages of work that bring them joy and allow them to bring their best selves to the company, team, and project. You can only do this if you are aware of the style and stage that brings them joy. When they are aware of the style and stage of their peers, they will better understand how they work and what they bring to the team. 

Miss-understandings of peers can and will produce resentment when we assume that everyone thinks like we do.  Without any knowledge we default to thinking everyone is like us and behaves like us. So, when someone is not doing things the way we would it’s easy to assume they are last or dumb.  That is rarely the case. Understanding others’ style allows us to lean on them in areas we don’t get joy from and vice-versa.  This extends to teams in a unique way.  When you consider the collective styles of a team you can identify missing and overpopulated areas of work.  This is why some teams never seem to get things finished or get lots of task done without any new ideas or innovations. 

What do we do about it? There are many tools for identifying the personality traits of employees, like Meyers-Briggs, and these are good tools for self-awareness but understanding the work stages of your projects is essential to aligning people and teams in the right way.  A tool like “6 Working Geniuses’ helps you understand your work and your staff in way you would have to spend country hours discovering yourself.  Working with an outside consultant is the fastest way to identify the work stages and the staff styles to create the alignment that brings happiness to your company. 

Happiness is essential to long lasting efficiency and taking your company to the next level in productivity and growth.