Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro(R) shares time management skills: tips on getting to those unpleasant tasks we’ve put off. (C) 2011 Laura Stack, All Rights Reserved http://www.TheProductivityPro.com
“I don’t check my e-mail, it checks me to see if I’m still there.” — Ian Pattison, poll respondent, Canada
“I never switch it off, and I also have a self-imposed policy of responding immediately if I’m sitting at my desk, however busy I am. ” — Wayne Andrews, poll respondent, United Arab Emirates
“I like getting email. It is a diversion from a tough job or from a boring task. Stopping every now and then to answer email is like taking a break. If one appears to be a time waster, it gets postponed for later. ” — Lester Stephenson, poll respondent, USA
As a productivity consultant, one of my chief concerns is what most of us mistakenly call “time management.” Obviously, time comes in preset amounts for everyone and we use it up whether we like it or not, so we can’t truly manage or conserve it as we can more tangible resources. Therefore, time management actually boils down to self management. The savvy worker finds ways to use time efficiently, refusing to waste it or allow external factors to monopolize it to the detriment of workplace productivity.
In all my productivity training talks and courses, I emphasize a measured response to email and other electronic disruptions as an essential time management technique. Among other things, I teach my clients to check their email just a few times a day. It seemed natural, then, to ask my LinkedIn colleagues how often they check their email, and I did just that in a poll that ended on September 30, 2011. I received 212 formal responses; in addition, 15 people left comments, including two who didn’t vote but made their choices clear. So in all, the poll logged 214 responses.
“All Day, Every Day. I Never Turn It Off” was far and away the most common choice (N = 135), beating the runner-up, “Every Hour” (N = 29), by more than one hundred votes! It garnered a full 63% of the responses, while “Every Hour” got just 13.6%. Two other options, “2-4 Times Daily” and “5-7 Times Daily,” got 22 and 24 votes (10.3% and 11.2% of the total). “Once” came in dead last with 4 votes (1.9%).
I would love to say that these results surprise me…but they don’t, really. I’ve long been aware of the obsessive allure of email, and how it has become one of the true timewasters of the modern office. Somehow, we find it almost impossible to mitigate our Pavlovian response to incoming messages. As a result, many of us are slaves to our inboxes, afraid we might miss something important if we don’t stay connected. Most of the time, this does nothing but shoot holes in our productivity.
That said, I do recognize the fact that email represents the lifeblood of many modern businesses. They not only get most of their orders via email, they also handle customer service through the same medium. Indeed, several commenters made it clear that their job requirements determine their email habits.
This time, the seniority of the respondents split right down the middle for all voting slots, with managers, owners, and C-Suite execs responding in numbers essentially equal to the “All Others” category. Similarly, the age breakdown yielded similar statistics for all four ranges (18-29, 30-36, 37-44, and 45+), with only the “Every Hour” and “5-7 Time Daily” results displaying notable variances. People 37 or older were more than twice as likely to check email hourly as their younger colleagues, while those 30-36 led the pack in checking 5-7 times a day. But I must point out that relatively few people voted for either choice.
The gender results proved interesting as well; the only choices with significant differences were “2-4 Times Daily” (13 men vs. 4 women, or a 76%-24% split) and “All Day” (56 men vs. 46 women, or 55% and 45%). Only 160 of the 214 responders provided their genders, with a breakdown of 90 men and 70 women—a ratio of about 56% to 44%.
LinkedIn provides nationalities only for commenters, since you can link directly back to their personal pages; everyone else remains anonymous. Now, I hesitate to peg Americans as the world leaders in over-checking email, since only 15 people commented and LinkedIn remains a mostly American phenomenon…but of those 15 commenters, nine (60%) hailed from the USA. Canada provided two of the other six, with the U.K., India, Brazil, and the United Arab Emirates rounding out the total.
These poll results demonstrate clearly that over-checking email remains a huge problem. At first glance, it may not seem like such a big deal to spend a minute here and there responding to email, but numerous studies (and my own 20 years of experience) have proven that constant connectivity stifles employee productivity. It’s one thing if you have to keep your email client open all day in order to do your job; but if you don’t, then you’re just damaging your productive potential by checking, checking, and rechecking hour after hour.
As always, thanks to everyone who participated in this poll. If you didn’t get a chance to vote, I’d love to hear what you have to say…by email, ironically!
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.
Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro(R), shares the Six Keys to Perform at Your Productive Best at the GROW 2011 conference in Dayton, OH.
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” — Traditional saying.
“The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try. I would never promote to a top-level job a man who was not making mistakes… otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.” — Peter Drucker, Austrian management consultant and social ecologist.
“Remember, you only have to succeed the last time.” — Brian Tracy, Canadian self-help guru.
In the modern business world, failure is often made out to be something glorious, a virtue that almost inevitably leads to success in the long run. Oft-cited examples include Edison’s 1,000+ unsuccessful attempts to invent the light bulb before hitting on the right solution, and Bill Gates’ unsuccessful first computer business. We’re told, again and again, to fail forward, to fail as fast as possible, to dare to fail, because it makes us smarter and better in the long run.
So it was rather disconcerting—and oddly refreshing—to run across a recent working paper from Harvard Business School that takes the opposite tack: “Performance Persistence in Entrepreneurship,” by Paul Gompers, Anna Kovner, Josh Lerner, and David Sharfstein. The authors scrutinized a large sample of venture capital-backed IPOs, and discovered that brand new entrepreneurs succeeded about as often as those who’d tried before and failed (18% vs. 20%, respectively). The most successful entrepreneurs were those who had already succeeded: serial entrepreneurs, as they called them. But even serial entrepreneurs succeeded only about 30% of the time.
At the risk of oversimplification, Gompers et al. basically pointed out that statistically, failure does not necessarily result in eventual success—a rather common-sense “no duh” conclusion, frankly. Furthermore, the authors admitted that they looked at a relatively narrow business segment, and that they failed to control for a number of factors which might skew the results. So normally, I’d take something like this with a grain of salt.
However, the HBS working paper is noteworthy for the fact that it actually tests the assumption that failure is positive in the long run. Commentators who have written about the paper are quick to point out that there’s no real scholarly work that proves that failure is good for the entrepreneurial soul; we just assume that it is. On the other hand, now there’s research that suggests that failure isn’t necessarily helpful in the long run.
Still, I’m not convinced that this means a whole lot. While I do believe that you should focus on things that you’re good at, I also believe that failure can be helpful in defining the things that you’re bad at, and that you should never do again—so that you don’t waste time on such things. In general, then, I would argue that the concept that failure can help you in the long run is in fact a truism, something which doesn’t really require scholarly proof.
Now, a true scientist would howl at the very idea that anecdotal evidence could ever prove a point, but let’s be honest here: the anecdotal evidence that failure can contribute to success further down the road is simply overwhelming. Notice the qualifier in there: failure can help you succeed. It won’t do so automatically. Failure does not anoint you with the oil of future success. I feel that some of my colleagues have gone a little too far in suggesting that it does…or in outright saying so.
There’s nothing special about failure itself; it’s what you do with failure that matters. The real message here is that you’ve got to be willing to risk failure. Don’t be afraid of it. It’s just another opportunity to learn, and in most cases, it’s not permanent. Learning a lesson from what you’ve done wrong allows you to rise phoenix-like from the ashes, to take another grab at the brass ring. Maybe you’ll get it this time; maybe you won’t. But if not, don’t take the failure itself too personally, because that kills your confidence and destroys your chances to learn. You must make every effort to take something instructive away from your failure, or you’ve just wasted your time.
So to answer the question posed by this blog’s title—of course you should learn from failure! The working paper by Gompers et al. is interesting, but while their sample was substantial, the scope of the study was limited—and I don’t think the results apply to most real world situations. The truth is, as long as you can survive a failure, there’s almost always some tidbit to be pulled from the wreckage and taken to heart. There even may be a few intact bricks—e.g., successful aspects or ideas within the broader failure—that can be used to build a new edifice. At the very least, failure can teach you some emotional lesson that you can move forward with, once you’ve put the failure itself behind you.
I’m not going to tell you that there’s no such thing as a failure; of course there is. But you shouldn’t ignore failure, refusing to learn anything, and hope to luck into success. Failure to learn from failure will inevitably lead to more failure, in a vicious downward spiral. Refuse to allow that to happen to you!
