Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 5/20/24

We’ve all heard about so-called “quiet quitting” and other strategies that employees are using to try to cope with less than ideal workplaces. There is plenty of literature out there on organizational culture and time management, so I thought I would share a couple of the most intriguing things I’ve come across in the last few weeks.

One concept has been referred to as “intentional inflexibility,” which seems to be a fancier way of saying that you protect the time you need to get your work done and to perform your best. This could mean that you decline meeting requests if they are for your most productive times of the day, or that you refuse to be constantly accessible via email, messaging, app, or text. Maybe it’s letting emails sit for a couple of hours until someone else replies to them, or maybe it’s only checking your email twice a day and hoping that churn has already occurred before it gets to you (viewing your emails as a conversation is particularly effective for this approach).

One has to be careful of company culture when applying this approach, however, because an employee “having good boundaries” might be interpreted as not being a team player.

A related article was about having a sense of false urgency at work. I’ve been in situations where people text you to find out why you haven’t responded to their Slack message, when the overarching reason is that you’ve been on three hours of back-to-back calls dealing with acute issues. I was once hounded by a member of the marketing team about “what is your favorite movie” since that was part of a project around getting to know the executive team. He had sent it on a Saturday, I hadn’t responded by Monday afternoon, and he was on a deadline. Expecting turnaround on an item like that in under one business day definitely falls under the banner of false urgency.

As a member of senior leadership, I was happy to have a conversation with the marketing leader about realistic deadlines and the need to coach the team about how to interact with other members of the C-suite. Of course, this kind of issue could also have been avoided by having a communication policy that addressed how to identify urgent requests versus non-urgent requests and how to know what an appropriate turnaround time is for different types of interactions. One company I worked for had a policy that if you needed an answer within 24 hours, you had to call the person with your request. It made people think twice about how urgent a request might actually be before making their move.

Another idea I’ve been reading about is that of organizational drag, which is when teams lose productivity due to policies and processes, whether formal or informal, that waste effort and decrease output. This includes being required to attend meetings that should have been emails and spending time reading emails that shouldn’t have been sent in the first place. It can also refer to wasteful processes, such as time and attendance tracking that could be completed in more simplified ways.

I’ll never forget when one organization I worked with migrated to a well-known project management and time tracking platform. The build was so much more complicated than it needed to be and added hours each week to the tracking requirements for consultants. Consultants make money when they’re billing clients and not when they’re manually keying extraneous data. Despite the immediate negative impacts, it took over a year to get the system optimized.

I’m also re-reading “Out of Office: Unlocking the Power and Potential of Hybrid Work.” I know I’ve mentioned this one before, but after working a couple of consulting gigs in in health systems across the US, some of the content is resonating differently than when I first read it. In one of the early chapters, the book addresses how “just in time” staffing became the norm in organizations today, even though in reality it means relative understaffing, since you don’t have any surplus capacity if you’re taking that approach. When you’re understaffed, people are reluctant to take time off or to use their time off to its maximum, especially when they fear that teammates will have extra work dumped on them, or that they’ll have to do a mammoth clean-up effort when they return to the office.

Having managed large teams during my career and especially having managed teams whose time is billable, it’s important to understand what overhead goes into just being an employee. These are the nonproductive parts of a job and may include items like corporate compliance training (HIPAA and fraud, waste, and abuse anyone?), maintaining proficiency and certification on different software platforms, managing professional licensure, and learning the tools that are needed to perform your job, especially when your employer decides to rip and replace those tools while you’re still expected to be productive.

Particularly in organizations that are trying to be intentional about company culture, you have to bake that time into capacity management as well. If you’re having multiple monthly all-hands meetings, socials, and mixers that you expect people to attend, you need to account for those. All too often, I still see management teams overlooking how initiatives like this directly impact workers, especially if they are on teams that are hanging on by a thread.

I worked on one team where the manager planned to have a holiday party with the theme of decorating miniature Christmas trees. First off, there was no recognition of the fact that not all employees celebrated that particular holiday, and that even if they did, that decorating trees was part of their tradition. Then there was the fact that this gathering was set for an entire half day during the end-of-year push that many healthcare organizations feel if their fiscal year follows the calendar year.

There was a lot of grumbling about the event and the organizer was frustrated by the low level of RSVPs. Several of us staged an intervention and convinced her to call off the event and instead to have a post-holiday party to blow off steam after the year-end close was done. Rather than a gift exchange, employees were invited to bring a ridiculous item to swap, either something that they received as a gift or just had around the house and didn’t need or want, with any leftover items being taken to a charity drop-off site.

We all got a laugh out of the unlikely items, especially when someone actually wanted them, and people who wanted to de-clutter were thrilled to get rid of things. Did it end up 180 degrees from where it started? Yes, but it was exponentially more well received.

What trends are you seeing as far as how employees are trying to navigate ever-changing workplace conditions? Leave a comment or email me.

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