Working Smarter

We all learn the skills of our trade, but few of us ever learn how to work in the most productive way with those talents, based on what the research actually says. Most of the time the way we work isn’t based on anything at all, other than reacting to others and devices all day. That fuels a lot of bad habits, since reacting before we think drives the stress response, overwhelm, and short-circuiting minds crazy.

There is a way to get out of retaliatory mode and put the thinking in charge, employee training. It’s not just what you do, but how you do it that makes for effective performance. Development programs can extract minds from triage mode with the best solutions from the science.

OUTSIDE INTERVENTION

This is the mission of the training programs I do, from work-life balance to employee engagement and stress management. Skip the torment and go straight to working smarter. The right self-management practices are the difference between a sustainably performing team and one that is imploding. It takes outside intervention to put bad habits to rest and create good ones whose benefits can last a lifetime.

The research shows that employee training can pay big dividends. Stress management training programs have been found to increase performance 21% and cut absenteeism 24% (Munz, Kohler, Greenberg), while teams who acquire work-life balance skills work 21% harder than those without them (Corporate Executive Board). Productivity jumped 17% for companies who had employee training programs (Bartel).

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Beyond the powerful stats, there’s also something else that happens in employee trainings. When organizations set aside time to stop, reflect, imagine, and troubleshoot, communication is facilitated that otherwise wouldn’t happen, and it leads directly to a more engaged team, higher morale and participation.

Everyone is busy, maxed to the tips of their hair. It leaves no time to flag the practices that aren’t working, share ideas, plan ahead, seek advice, and make the tweaks that keep people engaged and off the burnout track. Everyone races downriver in their separate barrels headed for a long drop over the falls. Open up the conversation in the training setting, though, and the conversations and insights come forward.

SELF-INFLICTED DEADLINES

A manager from a global firm in one of my productivity programs shared with his team that he was surprised at how often his staff will set themselves up for heartburn by promising overly ambitious turnaround times. His comment surfaced an issue that was driving overload and burnout at this firm (as well as at most I work with): overpromising without regard to the realities of time and physiological capacity.

The debate that followed was animated, as the group discussed how this reflex habit drove frenzy, crisis mentality, and poor work-life balance. Then we moved to zero in on criteria that could be used to estimate turnaround time more accurately. Lack of detail on assignments was a problem. We developed a form that could flesh out the particulars and approximate time estimates for key tasks, cutting down on excess messaging in the process.

As is the human wont, everyone thinks they are the only person on the planet who is experiencing a given problem. When the subject gets an airing, there is relief and recognition, and plenty of others wrestling with the issue. Better yet, there are individuals who have suggestions and sometimes solutions for the challenge. Trainings bring out the best in teamwork.

UNLEASHING INVOLVEMENT

Participation is the key to employee engagement, and development programs unleash involvement that makes everyone feel they are part of the solution. At a training for a federal government agency, one woman shared how she had gotten the IT department to help her turn off visual notifications on her computer monitor. Without the constant flood of notifications, she was getting more done and focusing better.

At a follow-up training for a tech firm, a supervisor detailed how she was using the stress management processes she had learned in our earlier meeting to get to the bottom of each stress incident. What was the false story? The most likely? Where was the emergency? There wasn’t any. She turned the danger signal off, giving colleagues a point-by-point description of how they could do the same.

Whether the challenge is meetings, carving out family time, or how to navigate customer expectations on service, a good employee training not only provides learning opportunities from the trainer but also crowdsources the successes of colleagues and brainstorms workarounds. Out of the process come tighter teams, a roadmap to smarter norms, and an inspired crew armed with ways to manage demands, instead of the other way around.

Work-life balance, stress management, and productivity management are all proactive affairs. They don’t happen on their own. The default button of reflex will keep teams and organizations behind the eight-ball of retaliatory mode. Employee training programs have to be initiated to bring the tools and forum to change the status quo, to spark employees’ own built-in need for improvement and challenge.

Surveys tell us that the most important factor in job satisfaction is a sense of progress. Employee trainings gratify that need by improving not just skills, but rapport and teamwork, which in turn satisfies another powerful need, the social animal’s need for connection with others. Let's get going!

If you would like more information on our employee training programs and how they could help your organization, please click the button below for details.

New Year’s resolutions are like any other new behavior. We are of two minds about them. The spirit may be willing, but the flesh/discipline is weak. Part of our brain, the higher floors, is gung-ho. Yes! Let’s do it. Eat healthier. Get more exercise. Be more productive at work.

The second mind, located in the lower rungs of the brain, has other ideas. The fear hub of the amygdala, constantly on the alert for danger and risks to life, ego, and pride, says, “Why bother?” “Too hard.” “Would look foolish.”

NOVELTY VS. FEAR

It’s a titanic struggle that goes on throughout our lives between the forces of growth and progress versus the lizard brain’s fear of venturing outside the comfort zone. We know who usually wins that battle. The default button is to do nothing. Doing something requires proaction, and that requires self-regulation, or discipline.

The science shows that the effort is worth it, because we satisfy our higher aspirations when we go beyond the autopilot. This is the best time of the year to make a new course happen, when receptivity is at its highest and we are willing to exert ourselves to try a new direction.

Embarking on a new path is no less than a physiological and psychological imperative. The research of brain scientist Gregory Berns has shown that the two key factors in life fulfillment are novelty and challenge. Both require us to move off status quo, or face the consequences—boredom, cynicism, life unlived.

Humans are programmed to seek out the new. It’s what got our hunter-gatherer forebears to venture beyond the next ridge to find new food sources. The need for novelty is so strong that even the anticipation of something new, before we have even experienced it, sets off the brain’s party drug, dopamine, which makes us feel good and encourages us to take on more new things.

BRAIN NEURONS DON'T LIKE RERUNS

Our brains seek out new data so insistently that when our neurons get the same information over and over, they literally stop noticing it. This is why you can drive to work without remembering passing the last five exits. Your brain neurons have been there, done that. They’re not paying attention anymore.

We all have certain core psychological needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—that also depend on us engaging with the new. We satisfy these needs through acts of initiative and challenge, by going beyond our normal routines.

With so much in our biology nudging us to try a new course and feel the satisfaction from doing so, you would think it would be a little less like pulling teeth to get us to take on a new resolution—and stick with it. But that doesn’t take into account the other mind, the security-fixated default that holds you back. It doesn’t want to change anything. It might be risky, hard. You might fail. Isn’t there an easier option?

We have to overcome that static and take the very first step in the new direction. Then the next. Otherwise, we wind up doing more than we do well at work and not managing the demands coming at us. On the life side, we get locked into stale routines. Our brains were made for participation, not vegetation.

GETTING OUT OF OUR OWN WAY

The battle between our two minds happens by rote, outside consciousness, so bringing awareness forward on the importance of trying new things is a great place to start. Change is not something to be feared. It is the fuel of fulfillment. Our autonomy and competence needs demand that we stretch, go the extra mile.

At work, this is the definition of employee engagement, bringing extra discretionary effort to the table. Employees are willing to do that (increasing productivity 28% in the process, according to the Conference Board) when they are able to demonstrate initiative and involvement in how they do their work.

The need to grow and take on challenges is what makes training and development such a key lever in employee engagement. Surveys show employee training in the top tier of factors that drive engagement, along with mentoring and managers who have open door policies. When people get skills and strategies to be more effective and manage demands better, they respond with greater engagement.

RESOLUTION: TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT IN 2016

We can satisfy the personal growth mandate of our brain neurons as well as organizational change and process improvements with a New Year’s resolution for employee training. Change becomes, not something to fear, but a part of the innate drive we all have for self-improvement and competence. When employees get tools to work smarter, manage interruptions, eliminate overwhelm, and control stress, as they do in my Work-Life Balance, Stress Management, Information Management, and Managing Crazy Busy Work trainings, there’s an immediate reward in energy and initiative, as people feel they have strategies and support to do their jobs.

As I mentioned in my last post, “The Three Things We Don’t Know We Need to Be Happy,” the most potent motivation is self-generated through what is known as intrinsic motivation. That comes when we act for internal reasons, not for an external payoff. Key intrinsic goals include learning and challenge, exactly what employee training brings to the table. As one study reported, “employees who are intrinsically motivated are continuously interested in the work that they are doing” (Elliott, Harackiewicz).

This new year, seize the opportunity to grow and increase productivity by initiating an employee training or development program, wherever you are on the organizations chart. On the life side, find the one thing that can make your life more fulfilling, and take the next step to make it happen.

Let the higher brain win in 2016. The glow of satisfaction from taking on a challenge will tell you that you made the right choice.

If you would like to get the year off on the right start with a training or development program, click the button below for more details.

Everybody hates a nag, and that especially goes for the one inside our heads that keeps bugging us about all the to-do’s that have to be tackled NOW. The unfinished items swirl around and around, like a cloud of flies orbiting the cranium, interrupting focus and helping to fuel a belief that we are overwhelmed.

Productivity is a function of how much attention we have on a single task at a time, so any time our thoughts are straying to other projects or hurry-worry to get to the next task, we’re not paying full attention, and that undermines performance. The human brain was designed to do one thing at a time, to use our brains as processing centers, not storage devices.

THOUGHT LIMITS

One of the keys to getting anything done is working memory. Also known as short-term memory, working memory is a temporary holding pen for ideas/thought “chunks” that we are actively using to complete an action at any given time. It has very limited storage capacity over a very brief period of time, thought to be a matter of seconds. It was once thought that we could keep seven thought “chunks” in the brain at one time for working memory use, but researchers now believe the real capacity is three to five items, a core known as the central working memory faculty.

In a study examining how much subjects could retain in short-term memory in a visual test of shapes and squares, researchers J. Scott Saults and Nelson Cowan (2007) found that subjects could hang on to no more than four items at a time. It’s important to point out that we are not talking about the capacity to do four separate actions at one time, as in multitasking, which is impossible for mortals, but merely to hold that many thought elements in mind while at work on a task.

Researchers aren’t sure why working memories are so limited, but theorize that it was too expensive, in both energy and time, to have excess information getting in the way of processing and action. Evolution appears to have selected out the reverse of information overload—focused selection—as a survival instinct.

Of course, just about everything these days is conspiring against focus, from information overload to stress, which can seriously reduce working memory performance by sidetracking your immediate attention to a perceived emergency.

THE INCOMPLETE LOOP

With working memory so constrained, it’s easy to see how the to-do nag can interfere with the task at hand as it interrupts short-term memory and plays havoc with recall of our primary task. Productivity guru David Allen noticed that “incompletes,” as he calls them, were a big drag on performance, and it led to the central principle of his “Getting Things Done” organizing system. He observed that unfinished tasks will harass in a constant loop unless the item is finished—or the brain is persuaded that you are on the way to completion.

It was the inspiration for his concept of the “next action.” The best way to keep to-do nagging at bay, he argues, is to let the mind know you’re on the case by jotting down the next physical action for each item on your list, breaking tasks down into a series of specific steps. That stops the loop and the brain lets go.

In recent years Allen’s gut instinct was confirmed by science. Florida State University researchers E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that unfinished goals interfere with the ability to complete tasks and that writing down plans to finish a task released subjects so they could do their jobs undistracted by to-do nags.

Improving time management has a lot to do with how we manage short-term memory, that brief period of focus within which we get stuff done. That means sealing it off as much as possible, not just from our own incompletes, but also from the siege of electronic intrusions and interruptions, which studies show fracture working memory, and, therefore, productivity.

Interruptions blow up the tenuous hold we have on the three to five items in working memory. We forget thought associations we had before the interruption, or where we were going.

AVOIDING DISRUPTIONS

This is known as a ‘disruption,” when performance plummets because it takes longer to complete the task as you try to piece together the vanished items that were in short-term memory. Think how many disruptions you go through in a day and the downtime and mistakes that result when you try to piece together again what you were doing. 

If you have to take an interruption, finish the task or thought you are on first, and make a note about where you are going with the thought train. That prevents disruptions and helps you get back to where you were without a long backtrack.

Other keys to retaining working memory and avoiding overwhelm are setting the terms of engagement with devices—checking manually at set times, turning off noisemakers and notifications—as well as keeping distractions, such as that bowl of Haagen Dazs or the conflict you had with someone out of your precious few-second realm of working memory. 

When we break away from distractions and intrusions through better planning, organizing and prioritizing and dive deep into the absorption of the moment, we find a realm of focus far from the frazzle of overwhelm and self-badgering where we can be on the same page with, well, ourselves.

If your company would like to avoid the frenzy and frazzle of overwhelm and work less harried and more effectively, click here for more on our productivity trainings and a smarter way to work.