Busyness Culture

“Busyness is not a virtue, and it is long past time that organizations stopped lionizing it,”

	How can we fix this?
	->	evaluating employees on output, 
	->	conducting audits aimed at eliminating low-value tasks, 
	->	discouraging after-hours email, 
	->	and asking leaders to model better behaviors. By Adam Waytz - Kellogg professor 

In today’s world everyone feels busy and [[ _notes/Random/Time Poverty ]] and stress are causing burnout and productivity dip. Busyness has become a status symbol and considered to be “morally admirable” regardless of their output. Corporate world generally links busyness to hard work and high contribution, and evaluates employees performance accordingly.

How to fix it

• Reward output, not just activity

  • Shifting to performance-based pay can enhance worker productivity but comes with its own risks.
  • The economist Edward Lazear found that when the automobile-glass-repair company Safe lite switched from hourly pay to pay based on number of windshields installed, average worker productivity rose 44.
  • Of course, employees should not be rewarded solely for output, as that can encourage overwork and burnout if people get too wrapped up in chasing rewards.
  • Incentives focused just on output can also impede innovation, which often requires inefficient misfires and failures.
  • Ideally, compensation programs will combine incentives based on both input to encourage risk-taking and innovation and output to maximize overall productivity.
  • Meanwhile, rewarding workers at least in part for the quality of their results will communicate the message that you don’t value busyness alone.
  • Assess whether your organization is generating deep work and eliminating low-value work.
  • The computer scientist Cal Newport has detailed how important it is for companies to enable what he calls deep work, or sustained attention to cognitively demanding tasks.
  • Unfortunately, many workplaces bombard employees with shallow work data entry, nonessential meetings, filing expense reports, and so on, interfering with their ability to do deep work.
  • Indeed, a large body of research shows that multitasking reduces productivity by as much as 40.
  • Because multitasking feels more productive than doing just one thing, its easy to overlook the accumulation of switching costs shifting between tasks.

• Force people off the clock

  • Just as managers erroneously worried that employees would take advantage of working remotely during the pandemic, many companies fear that employees will abuse generous leave policies.
  • When I gave a lecture to business leaders about the motivational benefits of time off and mentioned that some companies offer unlimited vacation days, one executive said that if his company did that, people would take a holiday and never come back.
  • In reality, the most generous companies and the people who have worked for them know that employees who have unlimited vacation often end up taking less time off.
  • Surveys repeatedly show that more than half of American workers dont use all their paid vacation days, and most work on vacation.
  • Studies also show that significant majorities of employees check work email during off-hours, spurring governments in France, Spain, and Portugal to pass laws requiring organizations to allow employees to disconnect from work communications after hours.
  • Such policies should not fall to governments, however, and thankfully some companies have realized the upside of forcing their employees off the clock or at least nudging them to work less.
  • Several organizations, including the pet-wellness company Honest Paws, the photobook company Chatbooks, and the airline marketing strategy firm SimpliFlying, have successfully implemented compulsory-paid-time-off policies.
  • Others, like the software company FullContact, incentivize true time off by paying people to take vacations and stipulating that if employees open a work email, they must return their vacation stipend.

• Model the right behavior

  • The message that companies value well-being over busyness will resonate with employees only if they see their bosses take time off too.
  • The boldest leaders aren’t those who burn the midnight oil they’re the individuals who set the norm by taking a pause.
  • Indeed, when managers demonstrate that their own busyness is not a prerequisite for success being careful of course not to just dump their workloads on subordinates when they clock out employees are more likely to believe it.
  • Norms around CEO behavior are changing.
  • Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, decided to take two months of paternity leave while running Meta.
  • Todd McKinnon, the CEO of the software company Okta, set an example by not only asking his employees to share their vacation plans but telling them of his own upcoming vacation in Napa Valley.

• Build slack into the system

  The major causes of busyness are constraints on time and resources, such as hospital systems facing budgetary cuts, acute events like the Covid-19 pandemic, and supply chains disrupted. To address these issues, systems with slack are more resilient, including enhanced resources, reallocation of existing resources, margins of maneuver, and human redundancy. Slack is essential when managing a crisis and even when trying to keep everyone’s day-to-day workload manageable. Building up resources can be expensive, but losing good employees or loyal customers due to a burdensome, overly busy work environment or slow service will ultimately be more costly.