From The Organization To The Individual

By asking, ‘What do you need to do your best work this week?’ or ‘How can I help you be more productive with your time?’, we may be surprised at how often we can help. How do you pull all of these conversations together into a cohesive whole? How do you ensure everyone has the same understanding of this, not multiple variations on a theme? Let’s touch specifically on meetings – after all, we invest so much of our working time in meetings. These can be hugely productive, energizing interactions, and essential to people’s learning and development. Equally, they can be the bane of our working lives and the number one drain on our productive working time. Invest in systematic training for conducting efficient meetings. Be highly selective about organizing a meeting. What are other ways in which you could achieve this purpose? Ensure everyone participates. Relying on people speaking up favours majority groups and extroverts. Call on individuals by name, acknowledge everyone’s input and call out repeat interrupters. Ask people to write down their position at the start of the meeting. Invite people to share this in turn, then start the discussion, for a richer use of the diversity and knowledge represented. At the start and end of the meeting, ask everyone to say just one word that describes how they are feeling.

I'm Still Waiting

Don’t discuss these or ask for elaboration. These help everyone to tune into the human/social dynamics as well as the task. We have looked at how to manage time more thoughtfully across teams and the organization as a whole. What about the individual? Well, we’re all responsible for developing our own time awareness, speaking up and doing what we can to shape a healthier time culture wherever we work. We do need to understand how to create a time culture that enables individuals to flourish at work and fulfil their potential. We will also discover the specific solutions that enhance people’s work lives and careers, their wellbeing and their productivity. The changing ‘time deal’ What do employees today want from their employer in return for the hours they invest in their jobs? What do employers need to offer to attract and retain employees with desirable skills? Here are five ways in which the ‘time deal’ between employer and employee is changing. Employers are finally appreciating that their employees have different ambitions, needs and circumstances. To help every individual to give their best at work, they are seeking to personalize the ‘employee experience’ through more tailored working arrangements, career paths and benefits. Demand from both employers and employees for learning and development is rocketing. Employers are now more involved in supporting people’s wellbeing outside of the workplace. For example, the law firm Linklaters launched new support measures for any employees experiencing domestic abuse.

Mental Pain Is Less Dramatic Than Physical Pain

Some 43% of employees want their employer to offer relationship support.4 And when furloughed employees were unable to work during the pandemic, leading employers focused on supporting people’s financial, emotional and physical wellbeing. Overall, do people care more about time or money? The answer is interesting. How much we value time likely changes by life and/or career stage too. We often forget to look across the whole year, yet reduced hours can be applied on an annual basis. In consulting firms, people on 80% hours often take the 20% off between projects, for example. Another approach is to agree to focus on one aspect of the role for three to six months, then a different aspect for the next three to six months. This may work better for the individual while allowing the employer to respond to demand variation across the year. Roles tend to expand over time, business priorities change and the employee’s situation may also change in terms of life stage, health, development or ability to travel. So career committed organizations refresh the job design regularly – at least annually – and collaboratively with the incumbent. When advertising roles internally and externally, leading employers use the #happytotalkflexibleworking strapline7 in all their advertising. They use behavioural science to ‘nudge’ diversity when hiring,8 by focusing on the goals rather than the years of experience required and by including prompts that encourage greater candidate diversity.

Further On Up The Road

Once you’ve prioritized your collective time investments as an organization, what then? How do you translate these priorities into meaningful goals for individuals and evaluate their performance? This may require you to shift away from using billable hours as your primary performance metric. It is feasible and it’s happening already – for example, one international law firm sets no billable hours targets for lawyers, focusing instead on the quality of client service. This strengthens their ‘one firm’ culture rather than a culture of individualism and internal competition. In one professional services firm, every employee has a ‘continuity’ manager who attends all performance reviews with the line manager and employee, and takes a holistic view of the individual’s progress and aspirations beyond their current role. They include behavioural goals that exemplify the values and culture to which their organization aspires, and formally recognize time spent on diversity and inclusion activities and mentoring colleagues. This blending of ‘what’ and ‘how’ is mirrored in audit functions – for example, where auditors are increasingly looking to audit in different ways with much greater focus on staff and management behaviours. This has been proven to stimulate productivity and reduce procrastination. The annual review then becomes an opportunity to forward plan rather than go through a year’s worth of feedback. One banking group has rebranded performance management as ‘progression’ management, and uses the annual review to identify specific ways to close skills gaps over the coming year. By comparing appraisal outcomes across different groups of flexible workers as well as minority groups, we can spot unwanted patterns and take action where it’s needed. They are focusing on more timely recognition of contributions and achievements, greater personalization and choice, and a strong regard for fairness, regardless of how different employees spend their working time. Here’s how they are doing this. They are paying for achievement – for the tasks completed, not the time spent on them. Some organizations are going as far as scrapping their annual pay review and instead awarding spot bonuses for specific tasks or projects.