Don’t be a Rip Van Winkle…On Corporate Time!

What’s a 19th century lazy bone work shirker got to to with modern day work? Maybe just the fact that he slept through the entire American Revolution only to wake up and find that the world around him and he himself, changed beyond recognition. So if you are planning sleeping through work today, maybe its a wake up call of sorts! Now, that analogy sucked :-(..

$37 billion — Amount spent on un- necessary meetings for US businesses. This is equal to about 33.5 days per year per worker (Gallup)

When it comes to modern day corporate hedonism, it is a proven statistic that on a daily basis we are productive only 40% of the time or less. Astonishing fact isn’t it? Not exactly. Let me simplify this for you. We are part of this mess we created. Here are some quick tips to spot me and my ilk..

The Sloths: Spotting them : Languid & easy going. The world moves at a pace we want it to move. A typical example is an employee who sends out an email to his /her co worker on a very critical issue and then reneges on the deadline because the other person failed to respond. You ask them what happened? Its a simple shrug and “I am waiting for them to respond”. Never mind, the mail was sent a week ago. Never mind the important deadline has become way past critical now. We don’t believe in action. Rather we are process exhorts. And the company pays for our process induced indolence.

The Peacocks: Spotting them : Actually you can’t. Because we are rarely in office. Employees who actively remain dis engaged at work, choosing not to respond to emails or calls, while impressing upon others, that we do so, because we are oh so so busy! Meetings, meetings and more meetings. Getting an open slot from us is like asking for the moon. You have to wait a full lunar calendar before you get a 30min slot! For us, creating an aura of being busy is actually more important than the actual work itself. You prod us and we respond “Yeah I was busy doing blah blah”..More corporate money down the drain to fund our self indulgent preen fest!

The Eager Beavers: Spotting them : We look the busiest in office. Constantly on calls, meetings and white boarding sessions. We mean well, but we are all over the place, literally. Typically you will find us calling absolutely un-necessary meetings everyday and spending infinite time, thread baring issues and driving consensus -based action.We are constantly enamored at the thought of being wanted. We probably get nowhere work-wise, but in the process of trying to getting somewhere, we genuinely believe we are achieving something. In return, the inaction causes the company to slip on deadlines. Plummet productivity. All hail the King of Sub optimal fecundity..!!

Or the over engineering Spiders: who slave away while the manager is looking for a not so intricate solution..

Then there are the Reverse Procrastinators i.e. folks who do the project so early on that they forget to submit it or indeed even remember what they did for the project. Can it get more Classic?

Our roles aren’t watertight. We keep swapping and switching animal behavior based on the lack of need of action, or urgency of inaction :-). Oxymoronic!

Globally 900 million employees are not engaged and 340 million actively disengaged workers (Gallup)

That is a lot of disengagement!

Lack of a common goal and vision for the organization. Lack of alignment within executives and management. Lack of strategic implementation and monitoring. Lack of a unified or effective leadership. Inefficient planning and weak organization structure. Lack of commonly understood targets. Managing a globally distributed workforce. There may be the reasons while we continue to lose billions in managing under utilized workforce.

It is hard to fathom the real impact of such inaction or impassivity! What are your thoughts? How do we raise the bar on the measly 40%?

How do we stop the snooze button on Rip Van Winkle?