Working 9 To 5 Is Not The Only Way To Make A Living

Throughout the world large companies are giving their employees the option of working when they like at a time when Gallup reports that 85% of people globally are disengaged or not engaged at work. Miserable workplace stress statistics are around the same. In Australia 46% of people find their workplace mentally unhealthy – 46%!!! When many of us spend about 50% of our waking hours for most of our adult lives this is terrible.  And tragic!.

Workplace stress and lack of engagement is contributed to by excessive workloads, people issues, conflicting demands between work and home and a real or perceived lack of autonomy. Having people work from home and/or choose the hours that they work is not going to take away the factors that are causing stress. To do that, whether we are working from home or from an office base, we need to change the way we approach getting things done. I want to share with you 4 Tips as a starting point to change your approach to work:

1. Step Away From Always Responding To Everything in Real-Time
2. Emails, instant messaging, Zoom meeting after Zoom meeting….many of these are to communicate information or for you to observe proceedings. When so much is happening in real-time, you have very little time available to think, to problem solve or to add value, to engage with your team. This is vital. Studies show that many of us switch screens once every 20 seconds….and that it takes about 23 minutes to get back into the swing of things and refocus. Notifications are the same as switching screens – so turn them off. Give your people permission to not respond to communications immediately and help them to stick with that approach by modelling that behaviour yourself. Not everything has to be done right now.
3. Emailing Everything Comes At A Cost To Productivity
4. Most of us spend around 3 hours per day in our inbox sorting through our emails, prioritising, sifting through and deleting emails. Having a clear inbox is NOT a real outcome for your business or your role. It is a time chewer. Paying constant attention to incoming emails means we are always switching our thinking and we struggle to get into the flow and complete some focused deep work. It means that we can be busy all day with little to show for it – the more time we spend immediately responding to emails, the more of our “real” workload piles up. Give yourself permission to get out of shallow thinking, turn your notifications off and get into the swing of an uninterrupted, productive, deep, and valuable work. Your productivity will soar.
5. Ask Yourself Whether You Need To Attend Every Single Meeting
6. There is no need to say yes to every single meeting invitation. I know people who spend more than 50% of their working week in meetings and who find themselves doing the real work late into the evening. Many meetings are unproductive and inefficient, and you may have been invited because someone who could see your calendar grabbed an available hour. Do what you can to move away from the “lets call a meeting” response by trying to use meetings as a last resort for communication, making them shorter and punchier, starting on time – regardless of who has arrived – and inviting only key people.
7. Make The Small Decisions And Save Consensus For Big Hairy Ones
8. To build autonomy you need to empower your team to adapt policies and processes to suit the circumstances – obviously without putting the business in harms way! To do this you need to be sure that they know they are trusted and are aligned to business values and mission. Encourage them to make the small decisions about things that are inexpensive, can be changed or even reversed if necessary and which will enable some learning to occur. These decisions can be made without endless meetings and emails which slow things down and take away autonomy. When you also model this behaviour yourself, it will give your teams even greater confidence. Those big hairy decisions that are expensive and irreversible are the only ones that need meetings for discussion, input and to seek consensus.

There are many different ways that you can work with me including my Mental Fitness program, one on one coaching packages and team coaching. Drop me a note if you would like more information. xx