Increase your productivity
Change of topic is the new LEAN
Far too much of our energy is being spent talking about poor leadership, fear of losing our jobs, political priorities making no sense to us, salary stagnation or the long dark winter!
All dialogue and contemplation consumes time and energy. Some of it, depending on our job-role works as productivity increasing and another part as counterproductive. Every time we think of a reoccurring worry or frustration like those just mentioned, we seem to slide right out of our job-roles. The energy is invested in the dialogue with a colleague and more colleagues join. You grab a cup of coffee while turning over the subject ones more, and you often end up agreeing about the injustice or annoyance in the situation – and that there is nothing you can do about it. This is an example of the counterproductive dialogue. Worry is paying interest on a problem that hasn’t occurred yet!
The other kind, the productivity increasing kind is the positive story that you share with a colleague, about an easier way to do things, a positive client experience, the story about how fortunate you are to have a job in this day and age, the great light that the snow provides by reflection in this otherwise dark season and so on. Other colleagues will join, you’ll grab a cup of coffee while you turn over the positive subject again – and before you know it, you’ll end up agreeing that life is good! Rejoicing is receiving interest of a fortunate incident that hasn’t occurred yet!
How much time do we spend on the productivity decreasing dialogue?
To be honest the dialogue often doesn’t last much longer than 10 minutes, but before you’re back in place and you’ve picked up your work where you left of – more time will pass. It’s been proven empirically that 10 minutes pass before you have reached the same momentum. If you had this dialogue with only two of your colleagues, the three of you would in other words have spent an entire man-hour discussing the weather! Round about two-thirds of all employees initiates a counterproductive conversation 2-3 times a day. Let me share this example with you.
Let’s take a look at an accounting department with 30 employees situated in an open office. The counterproductive dialogue will consume:
20 (two thirds of 30 pers.) x 2.5 (average of 2-3 times a day) x 2 (dialogue with at least one other colleague) x 20 minutes
The result being 2000 minutes per day. Now multiply that with 221 workdays (standard average number of workdays annually in western Europe)the time spent will amount to: 2000 x 221 = 442,000 minutes. These minutes amount to 982 workdays, or approximately 4.4 years of work, and the figures are conservative.
So what can you do about it?
You can stop all the negative talk and use the energy on subjects that add value and relevance. One thing you need to know in this case however is: you can’t boss it away!
Our contribution is insight, motivation and process facilitation that’ll help you reshape the counterproductive dialogues into productivity increasing ones. In doing so we’d like to share a relatively simple consideration that has already helped a number of departments and companies to succeed.
You can distinct between that which you can influence; we call it variables, and that which you can’t influence; premises.
Premises you can learn to accept and not focus on during your average workday. Just as soon as you succeed in doing so your despondency and anxiety of getting laid off, losing orders or facing cutbacks goes away. Of course is doesn’t vaporize completely but it’ll stop hindering you from having a brighter look to the future, and it won’t steal so much time from you. Focus on negative subjects and negativity is what you’ll attract – and vice versa.
The variables could be the customers that we are about to meet, campaigns making a huge difference, efforts adding to the success and survival of our organization, a positive attitude towards work and our workplace and faith in the fact that together we can succeed!
This is all achievable!
In the above paragraphs other considerable time consumers like: The loss of momentum stemming from colleagues that didn’t actually participate in the dialogue but merely overheard it, time spent on updating your private contacts via email, texting or social medias on what’s on your mind (neither business related nor productivity increasing).
Action!
We are a team with multiple competencies comprising famous musicians, senior communicators and military experts and organizational psychologists. Together we have learned how to work our way around crisis and hard times. We’d be happy to learn about the challenges you meet on your way to fulfil your ambitions. www.pro-found.dk
