Driving High Performance

Driving High Performance by Harold D. Stolovitch, Ph.D | Talent Management   Several precious workdays of not being very productive despite lots of activity left me in a foul mood. Dissatisfied with my poor performance, I decided to do some digging to determine if it was just me or, as I suspected, a more generalized issue.   Let me share with you the discoveries I made concerning what interferes with meeting our important performance goals and what we can do once enlightened. I began with Gaylan Nielson and Brent Peterson's book Fake Work: Why People Are Working Harder Than Ever Before but Accomplishing Less, and How to Fix the Problem. Having surveyed more than 100,000 employees in 300-plus organizations, they found that a whopping 90 percent reported being unsatisfied with their work results. Two-thirds disclosed that they often duplicated others' work due to lack of coordination.   They determined many causes. Among them were unclear, long-winded and vague organizational objectives that confuse employees about where to focus and what to do; meaningless meetings dwelling on past issues rather than future needs; pointless paperwork, from filling out senseless forms and writing unread reports to deciphering meaning from meandering memos that devour time better applied to useful ends.   Moving on, I encountered numerous attacks on e-mail. Designed to improve communication, e-mail often overwhelms workers - too frequent, too many, too long, too irrelevant. The general consensus is that while enthusiastic technophiles praise technology's potential, the humble worker is being buried under increasing avalanches of indigestible information.   Paradoxically, people at work also turn to technology for distraction and relief. Leslie Taylor, in a 2006 Inc.magazine article, reported that workers spend 1.86 hours per day on tasks unrelated to their jobs, the most frequent being surfing the Net for personal needs. In 2007, Tom Pisello of the National Association of Professional Organizers calculated that organizations lose about $1,250 per worker annually on reading and deleting spam and $1,800 on scanning and responding to unnecessary e-mails.   Now there is social media. In a 2009 survey of 1,460 office workers, British group Morse IT found that respondents self-reported spending 40 minutes per week during work on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the like for personal reasons. The same respondents estimated that their colleagues spent closer to 60 minutes. Morse IT concluded that U.K. organizations lose $225 billion annually on non-job-related social media use. RescueTime, a firm that analyzes computer habits, studied 40,000 computer workers and found they check e-mails more than 50 times a day and use instant messaging 77 times daily.   The more I delved into the writings and studies on this theme, the more the list of unproductive performance causes grew. Here is an abbreviated list: trivial but mandatory tasks that when examined contribute little to priority performance requirements; unnecessary training, often imposed without determining whether or not attendees will ever be able to use what is taught; oversocializing with co-workers; performing outside errands; poor written and oral communication that creates ambiguity, confusion or even fear; and work-related stresses caused by thoughtless management.   I was taken aback when I examined U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing how productivity had grown between 2007 and 2009 - more than 6 percent annually compared with 2.6 percent from 1995 to 2006. Were my complaints and those of others unfounded? However, probing further, I encountered Dennis Lockhart, CEO and president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, who explained in a June 2010 speech, "... Short-term productivity gains [have resulted from] squeezing more and more from a diminished ... workforce and may not be sustainable." Already this year, first quarter productivity declined to 2.8 percent; second quarter productivity actually decreased 1.8 percent. The dramatic effect of paid hours falling faster than output these past few years has ended. The need is for real productive performance.   In my case, unnecessary distractions, inefficient use of time, too much electronic communication and responding to low-priority demands have decreased my productive performance. I have learned a lot from this exercise. What about you?     [About the Author: Harold D. Stolovitch, Ph.D., CPT is a principal of HSA Learning & Performance Solutions LLC and is emeritus professor of instructional and performancetechnology at the Universite de Montreal.]