The Manager - Edition 94 - Are your people under-utilised?
THE MANAGER - BY ROB LAMBERT
Hi,
I hope you are doing well and staying safe.
This week I've spend a lot of the week schooling with the boys, so I've been learning about immigration, The Olympics, algebra and the Spanish language. Every day really is a school day at the moment.
I've also been thinking about the times I, and my teams, were at our best. It was always when we had lots to do, when we didn't have money to throw at a problem, when we were over-utilised. It seems counter intuitive to over-utilise our teams, and of course, there is a limit, but simply throwing people at problems creates a whole host of other problems.
By throwing people at problems you can often end up with overblown and oversized teams.
I’ve seen entire departments created to solve a problem a single person could do.
More people is the motto. More. More.
No.
In one organisation I worked in, you could sense the impending doom of redundancies purveying everything. They had thrown people at problems for years (due to poor hiring and an inability to manage poor performance) and now people were under-utilised.
People knew they were under utilised; they knew the company had more people than they needed.
As such the culture (sum of behaviours) became very territorial. People would guard their own work, collaboration was almost impossible to see in the business. Aggression and protective behaviour dominated every meeting.
Casting the light on others to avoid tough questions was common. Information was shared unevenly, unequally and scarcely. People protected their own self interest - a natural reaction to being under-utilised. After all, in hard times it pays to have your hands around something important to the business. "You can't let me go...I do X...."
People needed to appear more valuable than others. People wanted to show their value, no matter how little a piece of the actual work they owned.
It's no surprise to tell you that this organisation had a huge amount of under performing managers.
In this organisation the inevitable redundancies didn’t actually come for a long time (managers were unable to have hard conversations about performance). So the toxic behaviour got richer and deeper and more pervasive.
The leaders, in response to the lack of productivity, toxic culture and uneven sharing of information..........brought in more people.
More people to control others and dig out the information. More people to bring work together. More people to report on the work and more people to give the leaders an illusion of control.
If you are a manager, avoid this situation at all costs by only hiring when your team are obviously understaffed and over-utilised.
When we don't have too many people to throw at problems we must prioritise ruthlessly (this is good - a lot of work adds little value to the customer). We become creative and find novel ways to solve problems.
We don't create single points of failure, as people must work with each other to get work done. People need each other more when everyone is over-utilised - and this is a good thing. Information is shared, cooperation is prevalent, collaboration is forthcoming and co-ordination is essential.
When there is obviously more work than our people can do, we must look to hire carefully and thoughtfully. We need to watch for signs of frustration, we must guard against people working epic hours to get the work done (instead, prioritise and discard work), and we must spend a lot of time talking to our people.
We must look after our people, we must not stress them out with outlandish and unachievable results, but don't under-utilise them either. It's hard work being a manager. Study, observe, watch, listen, get to know them.....but don't take away their meaning and value at work by under-utilising them.
Trust me, people would rather be over-utilised than under. People would rather feel needed, wanted and in demand, than surplus to requirements. People would rather have a manager working closely with them and ensuring they are ok, than someone distant who is slowly diminishing their value by adding more people.
And if you have the sort of people who enjoy being under-utilised, who like to spend their day playing solitaire and wandering the offices trying to look busy - you have something very wrong indeed.
Rob..
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FOOD FOR YOUR MANAGEMENT BRAIN
1. Do you doomscroll? Checking your phone and reading the news, scanning social for updates about the current situation? It's pretty bad for your health - https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/06/doomscrolling-is-slowly-eroding-your-mental-health/
2. Demanding too much from your people? That will kill them - literally - https://psychcentral.com/news/2020/05/29/mental-health-mortality-linked-to-work-autonomy-cognitive-ability-to-meet-job-demands/156733.html
3. How to deal with an uncommunicative boss when you're working remotely. https://www.fastcompany.com/90515202/how-to-deal-with-an-uncommunicative-boss-when-youre-working-remotely
4. This is very comprehensive - how to ensure Black Lives really does matter to your organisations - and ensure it's not just platitudes - but behaviour and systemic based - https://www.quakelab.ca/blog/please-dont-check-on-your-black-employees?
5. I love ToDoist - I use it a lot, and this article from their CEO about how Doist (the company that make ToDoist) work is very insightful. But please don't assume that being flexible with work is how you retain your staff. It may be one element for some people and is important, but it's not the main reason. In the article he explains some main reasons - trust and meaning. Ignore the click bait title - some stuff to be learned if we read past the title - https://doist.com/blog/remote-teams-retention/ (Trust me, I've seen teams that are all remote and uber flexible, and people leave within weeks of joining.....)
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Thanks
Rob..