Spreading Employees Too Thin

How limiting focus creates a constant battle.

“I shouldn’t be doing this.”“This isn’t in my job description.” Phrases I often hear. While I truly believe in going the extra mile, there’s something wrong with adding tedious and unrelated tasks on top of key responsibilities. It not only creates employee frustration, but also a bottleneck that does not allow the company to hit sales goals or exceed expectations. I have narrowed down it down to a few scenarios that I have run into in the past few years that seem to be the most obvious causes of dissipating employee focus due to spreading them too thin.

Someone told me to do it.

I find it all too common that tasks are given to the wrong employees due to the lack of research and questioning the decision makers perform. Typically, a few names are tossed around and the employee often chosen is one who the person or team trusts or currently has a number of tasks that he or she successfully completes. Not only is the employee chosen often wrong, but so is the department responsible for this new task. Sometimes, there just isn’t an employee who is suited to perform this task, so someone becomes the lucky winner.

The problem is that by doing this, the employee now has to take a percentage of focus from one or all of the tasks he or she is already crushing and focus on this new task that seems to be unrelated. Therefore, the other responsibilities will suffer. Their days could consist of the main responsibilities, then some that don’t relate — creating too many focus shifts. Focus shifting, or what most consider multitasking, is detrimental and proven to be an ineffective strategy. I would ask many questions before assigning this task: was the correct person or department chosen, is this task really needed, could this new task be automated. This last question leads the next common scenario, lack of automation.

Automation is non-existent.

I believe that everything that can be automated, should be. This eliminates tedious and repetitive tasks right off of every employee’s plate.

Here are some common tedious tasks I have seen that can be automated to allow employees focus on top level responsibilities.

• Financial, KPI, inventory and customer purchase reporting
• FAQ’s / Real-time Q&A
• Product data creation and management
• Billings
• Lead generation and delegation

Although it may cost something to create an automated process, always consider the return on time, focus and growth. Some of the most successful companies are automating as much as possible and relocating employees into more effective roles. I see this being the norm in 5–10 years.

Inadequate hiring.

This scenario is touchy, but the most frustrating if it’s something a company can do. I understand completely that some companies cannot hire a new employee every time there is a new process put in place, and I am not saying anyone should do that automatically. However, where this becomes detrimental is when employees have so many responsibilities that it creates a constant battle between performing those tasks to keep the company in business versus focusing on growth initiatives or the reason why they wanted to work at that company in the first place.

Similar to assigning a new task someone because there really is no correct person, assigning too many due to the fact a company doesn’t want to hire should trigger a number of questions. Does this person really need another responsibility? How will this effect his or her growth goals for this year? Will this add stress (or more stress) to the employee? Ultimately, you need to ask yourself — what are we losing in giving this person an additional responsibility. I can say, from personal experience, that hiring another employee to alleviate the number of responsibilities not only results in less stress, but allows teams to focus on growth, improve processes and build more meaning relationships with business partners.

Overall

Spreading employees too thin can hurt a company in many ways. I keep this at the forefront of my mind when thinking how I will run my own business in the future. The ROI of adding responsibilities can be difficult to measure, but simply asking for a team’s or employee’s opinion could be the difference between receiving a resignation letter due to stress or giving a congratulations on closing the biggest deal in your company’s history.