The Productivity Pro® Blog by Laura Stack - Time Management, Getting Things Done, How to Be More Productive

Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro(R) talks about how self-discipline affects our productivity. (C) 2011 Laura Stack, All Rights Reserved http://www.TheProductivityPro.com

Lessons in Retention for TM practitioners
By Carlos Botero, VP of HR, DIRECTV

From the September 8, 2011 meeting of the CO New Talent Management Network (www.contmn.com), at the DIRECTV facility at 161 Inverness Drive West in Englewood, as written by Laura Stack.

Under the leadership of Carlos Botero, who took over as VP of HR in July 2008, DIRECTV is on track for a 24% employee churn in 2011, down from a high of 110% in 2008. How was this accomplished? Here are my key take-aways from his presentation on employee retention.

1. “Great talent follows great talent.” Procedures can only take you to a certain percent of turnover, and then you rely on the hearts of your employees. If it’s a great place to work, their buddies ask them, “Hey, can you get me a job?”

2. “If you want stars to come work for you, they need to know you:
• Know your business;
• Are headed in the right place; and
• You will have to sell them a little bit.”

3. “If you want to keep good people, your organization has to be:
• An awesome place to work;
• Where everyone wants to stay; and
• Employees actually have to BE awesome to stay.”

4. “When do I give you the shoes? Should you walk 3 miles, and then I’ll give them to you? Or should I give you the shoes now and ask you to follow me 3 miles? At DIRECTV, we believe you should give the shoes up front. If you invest up front, you’ll get it back in commitment.” This involves:
• Competitive pay
• Health & retirement benefits (“We spend a lot on great healthcare. You want to know someone’s strategy? Ask them to show you their budget.”)
• Multimedia communication
• Employee engagement

5. “People don’t leave the company, they leave their bosses.” If boss not moving you forward, you start to resent it. So you must invest in your managers to become better managers. You must build a better work environment where people want to stay. We provide in-depth leadership training for our supervisors. We also have a High Potential program that includes:
• 360 feedback surveys
• Mentoring
• Personal Development
• Coursework

6. We pay our technicians per job. We know their productivity has increased. Since they are paid for production, they simply do more installations, and they earn more money. Our technicians make it a career. The harder they work, they more they are paid. If they can do 10 jobs, they earn more than if they do 5 jobs in that same timeframe, so they are not lazy. They get fast and can churn out work, peaking at about 19 months of employment. We make a long-term commitment to their growth.

I’m curious to know how often you check your email each day. Please vote in my poll: http://linkd.in/nTAJVK. Please comment; I’d love to hear your thoughts on the impact email has on your daily productivity.

Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro(R) gives tips on working with your to-do list. (C) 2011 Laura Stack, All Rights Reserved http://www.TheProductivityPro.com

“I’d try to keep a balance, as I try to do with my 24 hours now. So with one more hour, I’d work half an hour more, and spend the other 30 minutes working out, or reading, or having a drink with friends.” — Rosa Garriga Mora, poll respondent, Spain.

“Work out, read some books, take some dancing classes with my daughter… rest sometimes…one hour more per day would positively impact my life!” — Yurila Ramos, poll respondent, Venezuela

“Going on experience, I would spend it trying to solve annoying software bugs that are only happening because the computers are all out to get me.” — Tarot Atkinson, poll respondent, U.K.

What would you do with an extra hour a day?

That’s a question I posed in a LinkedIn poll this past July, and as with my earlier poll (in which I asked voters about the time of day they felt most productive), I found the responses to be rather fascinating. This poll attracted 137 votes by the time it closed, as well as 24 unique comments. The comments were a bit more numerous than before, probably because I asked the respondents who replied “Other” to leave their responses in the Comments section. Interestingly, only 13 of the 21 people who voted “Other” did leave a comment; eight of the remaining 11 commenters voted for other options, and three apparently didn’t vote at all, but wanted their voices to be heard. They bring the total number of poll respondents to 140.

Before we move on to the breakdown by response, let’s take a quick look at the demographics. A total of 118 voters (plus the three non-voters) provided their genders, while the other 19 voters (about 14% of the total this time) did not. This poll leaned a bit more heavily toward males than the last, with 71 men responding as opposed to 47 women. One of the non-voters was female, the other two male, so the gender breakdown is roughly 60% men to 40% women among those who provided the relevant data. Slightly over half the voters were business owners, managers, and high-level executives.

The age range was skewed a bit higher this time, with all the categories attracting approximately equal numbers: 22 respondents were aged 18-29, 21 fell into the 30-36 age range, 23 were aged 37-44, and 27 reported that they were over 45. The other 50 (including the non-voters) preferred not to say. Geographic information was available only for the commenters, but they were literally all over the globe. Ten were from the U.S.; four from the U.K.; two from India; and one each hailed from the Caribbean Nations, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, Spain, Switzerland, and Venezuela.

Of the five possible choices in the poll, the one that attracted the most votes was “Leisure, time with family and friends,” a choice I approve of most heartily. It took 40% of the vote (N = 55), almost twice as much as the second most common answer, “Work out, go to the gym” (22%, N=30), which I think is also a very good choice. “Sleep” and “Other” each pulled down 15% of the vote (N = 21 each), with only 10 people (7% of the total) opting for more work.

Men outnumbered women in all categories except working out, where women had a slight edge in absolute numbers (11 men vs. 14 women). However, a closer look at the percentages reveals that women were actually twice as likely as men to opt for working out: 15% for men vs. 30% for women. In fact, the only categories in which men outscored women percentage-wise were leisure time and working. Men were half again more likely to choose to rest (45% vs. 30%) and somewhat more likely to look for more work (10% vs. 6%).

The age breakdowns within individual categories were interesting. They were largely the same in the work, sleep, and other categories, though people in the low and high ranges (18-29, and 45+) were slightly more likely to choose sleep than those in other age ranges. Those groups (ages 30-36 and 37-44) were more likely to vote for working out, though. Older people were more likely to vote for leisure (N = 13 for the 45+ crowd). However, keep in mind that the total number of people in each category was quite small, and therefore the age range breakdowns might not be statistically significant.

As for seniority, non-managers voted to work out and sleep somewhat more than managers, owners, and C-suite execs, but again, the numbers in those categories were low enough that demographics could be swayed by just a few votes. Otherwise, the breakdown between managers and non-managers was roughly equal in the remaining categories, though there was some minor variation.

The “Other” category yielded some intriguing data. Of the 21 people who chose this answer in the poll, 18 provided their genders (10 men, eight women); so did the two non-voters who made their choices clear on this point (both male). A total of 15 of these individuals expanded on their answers in the Comments. Some said they preferred to maintain a balance of all the things they were already doing, spreading the extra hour over various categories, while others wanted to read more, write more, increase their volunteer efforts, take dancing and arts classes, learn a foreign language, go for walks, meditate, or otherwise unwind. Two preferred to code and debug software.

I’d like to thank all the participants in this poll for a truly revealing experience. While there were a few surprises, I was happy to see that most people would elect to take care of themselves more if they had just a little more time in the day. If you weren’t able to take part in this poll yourself, I’d still like to hear what you have to say. How would you spend an extra hour a day? Email me and let me know!

“If demand remains weak, there’s a danger that businesses may try to boost productivity by cutting jobs.” — Paul Dales, American economist, regarding the recent 2011 Q2 productivity drop.

“Nowadays, business is all about productivity—and our folks produce.” — Senator John Hoeven, former governor of North Dakota.

“[If] you don’t have a very motivated working class, it starts to affect the dynamics of the economy. If workers are disenchanted and disenfranchised, productivity losses will go along with that.” — James Sinegal, American businessman, founder and CEO of Costco.

From a business perspective, productivity is defined as the rate at which goods or services are produced per unit of labor. It’s an important measure of corporate success, and, on a wider scale, a primary metric of the overall economic health of a nation.

As a productivity expert, I’ve always been proud of the fact that we Americans are more productive today than we’ve ever been, despite having to face more distractions and, arguably, more difficulties than ever before. But we can’t lose sight of the fact that setbacks occasionally occur, and that they can be rather sobering when they do.

Case in point: according to a government report released on August 8, 2011, American business productivity has declined for two consecutive quarters, for the first time since the end of 2008. The good news is that the second-quarter decline is a bit less than expected: an annual adjusted rate of 0.3% rather than the anticipated 0.9%. The bad news is that 2011′s first-quarter productivity figure, which was originally estimated at 1.8% growth, was revised sharply downward to reflect a productivity drop of 0.6%.

As unsettling as this news may be, it’s not necessarily surprising to those of us paying close attention to the larger economic picture. No single metric exists in a vacuum, after all, and while there’s reason to be optimistic, the other standard measures have been mixed lately. Furthermore, the recent downgrading of the government’s credit rating, and the related debt ceiling issues that briefly paralyzed the Congress, are ample evidence that not everyone is sanguine about the American economy.

Granted, we’ve experienced a minor economic expansion in the past two years—but the positive effects have been mostly limited to businesses, with very little trickledown to individual workers. Indeed, as some observers have pointed out, many businesses were able to post productivity gains from early 2009 to late 2010 only because they had previously cut costs and made do with less. In the process they pared their workforces to the bone, requiring the workers they retained to work longer and harder, often for the same compensation. This growth might have been good for businesses, but it was built on unstable economic ground…and now we’re starting to see the cracks in the walls.

The easy answer to this problem would be to hire more people and redistribute the workload more equitably. Unfortunately, labor costs are sharply higher this year: 2.2% higher in the second quarter of 2011, on top of a 4.8% increase in the first quarter. Basically, workers cost more than ever before; that’s the cost per unit of labor in the productivity equation. Add in rising material costs and a fear that we may soon re-enter recession, and the ultimate result may be even less hiring, which would damage productivity even further. You can see the kind of downward spiral the economy could fall into, if we’re not very careful here.

An ideal solution is hard to spot, especially given that the current economic downturn is global in scale, and government stimulus efforts haven’t been particularly effective thus far. Productivity might experience an upswing if large employers are willing to bite the bullet, step forward, and expand their workforces, allowing overworked employees to recover while others take up the productivity slack. This assumes, of course, that labor costs can be contained—which isn’t necessarily a good thing for workers and their productivity, if it’s even possible.

One bright spot in the current situation is the fact that increased labor costs translate into increased spending power for those who do have jobs. Economists agree that increased consumer spending is necessary to jumpstart the economy. That’s all well and good; but even if it happens, will that be enough to stimulate businesses to increase their hiring?

It’s difficult to say at this point; but if it happens, we can hope that the hiring will feed back on itself, causing more spending, which will generate a need for more employees, and thus more hiring, and so forth. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. If all goes well, productivity would then rise, which might push labor costs down (the two metrics often correlate).

It will be interesting to see how employers react to the news of the productivity drop, because that will certainly affect which direction productivity will go in the next few quarters. You can be sure that I’ll be keeping a close eye on the productivity news—and I’ll just be one among many.