Back in the 1980s, a boss of mine was sloppy about paying his bills and had developed a devious way of dealing with the dunning notices he'd receive. He'd let them pile up until the company seemed to truly be ready to refer him to a collections agency, then would send a check for all but, say, 63 cents of what he owed. The company would duly follow up, demanding its 63 cents -- at a cost that Marty figured at several dollars per letter. After letting several of those notices pile up, Marty would send a check for something like $1.50, knowing that the company would eventually refund his tiny overpayment and chuckling at the expense the company would incur.
Now, there aren't a lot of Martys in the world -- at least, I hope there aren't, for the sake of corporate efficiency -- but businesses trip themselves up in all sorts of ways that are even more damaging than hounding him about 63 cents, rather than treating the pennies as rounding error. There are the forms that really don't need to be filled out (by annoyed customers as well as annoyed employees), the meetings that don't need to be held, the processes that don't actually accomplish anything.
Yet we focus much more on the new -- what meetings, forms, processes, etc. should be added? -- and too seldom take time to think about what we should stop doing.
With the economic outlook uncertain, companies are searching for efficiencies wherever they can find them -- and a productivity push is a lot more palatable than layoffs. Companies also are in the middle of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine the contours of work as they establish some sort of hybrid of work from home and a return to the office.
So, now would be a great time to take a hard look and decide: What should we stop doing?
The topic pops to mind because of a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal that carried the subhed: "The time-consuming and pointless tasks companies can eliminate to boost our productivity… and save money." The main example is AT&T, which is in the middle of a multi-year program to cut $6 billion in costs. Part of the effort is Project Raindrops, "an initiative to save money and time by simplifying and eliminating business processes—from expense reporting to email communications to manager approvals—that slow down workers’ daily flow." An AT&T executive is quoted as saying, "'One mundane process may feel like a single raindrop, but when you have a multitude of that within the employee ecosystem, it creates a flood of extra work.'”
Among many other things, AT&T realized it was silly to make expense reports on retirement parties list each and every attendee. AT&T apparently throws lots of retirement parties: It figures the change in reporting saves 28,500 hours a year. The piece adds:
"AT&T has automated employee requests for access to some physical office spaces (savings: 23,333 hours), removed one of the two clicks necessary to connect to AT&T’s corporate computer network (savings: 300 million clicks a year) and simplified or eliminated the dozens of emails that go out every month to its fleet of drivers (savings: 41,310 hours)."
Frankly, the tabulation of clicks and the remarkably precise count of hours saved suggests that AT&T hasn't entirely shed the formidable bureaucracy I encountered when I covered the technology world from the WSJ's New York bureau in the 1980s and 1990s, but I applaud the intent.
Shopify took even a more direct route than AT&T. The provider of e-commerce tools for retailers simply deleted 12,000 events from the calendars of its 11,600 employees, which it figures frees up 322,000 hours this year.
On the other end of the spectrum, the article describes subtle, cultural changes that will take time and continual communication. The article talks about "'productivity theater,' or activities workers engage in primarily to look busy or be visible to managers and colleagues. Around 43% of workers say they spend more than 10 hours a week trying to look productive rather than on valuable tasks, according to a February survey of 1,000 full-time workers by the workplace analytics company Visier Inc.
"The firm found that the most common performative tasks include responding to emails from colleagues as quickly as possible even when a prompt answer isn’t required; attending meetings where one’s presence is superfluous; and completing unnecessary extra research for projects."
Those efforts sound worthwhile, too, even if they aren't quick fixes. One of the best things Lou Gerstner did when he took over as CEO at a flailing IBM in 1993 was to ban "foils" -- the term IBMers used for the sheets of cellophane prepared for use on overhead projectors. He knew IBMers spent months preparing for presentations to senior executives. The rule of thumb was that, for every foil you were going to display, you needed 10 backup foils, just in case someone asked a question. And for every backup foil, you needed 10 backups. Executives presenting to Gerstner actually didn't initially believe him when he said he'd banned foils. When he'd ask a question, they'd say, "Well, I have a foil here that shows the answer." But he wouldn't let the foil be displayed -- and the whole company eventually adapted to a new form of communication based on conversation and argument, not presentations, and on the radical idea that it was actually okay to say, "Let me get back to you with the answer."
We all know that the insurance industry has no shortage of forms and procedures that could be tightened up or even eliminated, and what I think of as "meeting creep" affects every organization. Intel's meeting rooms used to have posters on the walls that instructed the person holding the meeting to calculate what the meeting cost, based on the time spent and the salaries of each person in the room, and to cancel the meeting if it wouldn't drive at least that amount of revenue, but that was in the Andy Grove days in the 1990s, and few CEOs have ever been as relentless.
Some efficiencies will require time and money to produce. In particular, there is a frightful amount of rekeying of data, which not only soaks up employees' time but inevitably introduces errors. Eliminating that rekeying requires connecting one database to another, which is typically a messy process.
But there are loads of quicker fixes, and they're easy to find. All you have to do is ask.
Employees are more than happy to tell you what drives them nuts, while not producing any benefit for the company. So are customers -- or, at least, employees who deal with customers all the time.
Maybe 10 years ago, a fellow approached me about buying his consulting practice. He was pretty much a solo practitioner but had all kinds of great references about the productivity improvements he'd generated at clients, almost immediately after they engaged him.
His M.O.? He just surveyed employees to ask what the company should stop doing.
And it worked.
I'm now providing this same advice to you -- and I'm not even charging you for it. Ask employees and customers what hoops you're making them jump through that don't provide any value for them or for you.
If you can stop doing useless stuff, everybody wins.
Cheers,
Paul