Culture of busyness and how to fix it
Busyness ≠ Output — How do we change?
In my last posting, “Team Performance Improvement”, I addressed how leaders can help the team improve their output and become successful teams. This time, I want to address a pernicious cultural issue that can impact a leader’s effort to help the team improve: a culture of busyness.
Recently, a client of mine was bemoaning how full his calendar was. They felt that their bosses and others were putting meetings on their calendar that they could not decline and had to attend. And people felt they had to be informed and involved in every decision and meeting as otherwise they would be faulted. Their inbox was full with thousands of messages. This was not unique to my client, as most of the organization felt this way. He wanted to know if there was something, a magic bullet if you will, that could ease the problem. They had tried a number of them, though.
The good news: this client had set very firm boundaries on their personal time. They would leave on time to be able to attend a child’s athletic event or spend time with their spouse. The bad news, they felt the stress as others were working longer hours and my client’s inbox had thousands of unviewed emails. And the rest of the organization did not have these boundaries.
As we discussed the situation, I would suggest some action that could have helped. The response was along the lines of “we’ve tried that and it didn’t work.” I would suggest something else, and would get a similar response. When I asked how they went about it, they would indicate that they would meet, decide to change things, and start working on it. But the commitment did not last. Something else would come up that needed to be done preventing the change from succeeding. Soon enough they were back to the busyness behavior. What became obvious to me was that the organization valued busyness above effectiveness and output. That the busyness itself would impact the ability to stick to their commitments.
Adam Waytz, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and author of The Power of Human, has an interesting Harvard Business Review article addressing this situation and potential solutions. In his 2023 “Beware a Culture of Busyness: Organizations must stop conflating activity with achievement” article, he indicates that “busyness has become a status symbol.” People view and are viewed as successful for how busy they are. Whether they achieve their goals or not is secondary to how busy they are. But is this what is important to the organization? Waytz indicates that it should not be, and I agree with him. Results/outputs that are aligned with the organization’s mission are what are important.
How to solve this situation? Waytz suggests five actions to help the situation. While a good start, I think more will be needed. His actions, along with my thoughts about them:
- “Reward output, not just activity” — this is definitely the place to start. As long as people are rated for being on their seats and attending lots of meetings/generating lots of emails and presentations and not by their output, the behavior will continue. You get what is measured. If busyness is what’s measured, then that’s what you’ll get. If results is what is measured, you’ll get results.
- Generate deep work and eliminate low-value work — while a good idea, this one is hard to do. This “low-value work” was put in place by someone in the organization for some reason. It may have overstayed its welcome, but the individual/organization that put it in place values itself by these activities. Expense reports, time cards, etc. are examples. Trying to eliminate/change these is a tall order.
- “Force people off the clock” — If you pay by the hour, the individuals may try to get paid as much as possible by working as long as possible. Unfortunately, it is easier to measure time than to measure output. An hour is a fixed amount that it is easy to track. The value of a widget and its availability is harder to measure. Plus it may take a while for the widget to be generated. How do you value the effort in the meantime? Nonetheless, this is something that should be pursued.
Be aware that people will work even when not on the clock, such as checking email after work hours or while on vacation. He gives the example of how Daimler (Mercedes Benz) addressed the vacation situation by allowing employees to turn on a feature that would delete email messages they received while on vacation and send a reply to the sender indicating they were not available and to try someone else. This approach shows how Daimler supports employees time off, but it does create other challenges such as identifying who the sender should contact, the fear of missing out (FOMO) that employees may have, etc. - “Model the right behavior” — to me this action, along with the first one, is the one that is most valuable. Organizations can develop all sorts of policies but only those that the leaders follow will be the ones that the rest of the organization will follow.
- “Build slack into the system” — it is a well-known fact, although not commonly accepted, that a system (people) without slack is not flexible or responsive. If I’m too busy to respond to an emergency, I can always blame whatever activity I was told to do. If the organization values busyness, then I’ll be busy 100% of the time. Slack will result from the other factors listed above but should be a goal.
These are all excellent suggestions but more is needed. Organizations must empower individuals to know how to follow these actions. Resources such as Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and their associated programs are excellent tools for organizations to help their people be more effective. Other tools, such as OKRs described in many resources including Who Does What by How Much? can help individuals track their commitments and results. As leaders, we must empower our people to know how to be successful. We need to change the goals from busyness to output (outcomes), eliminate what prevents this change, and enable our people to know how to do it.
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