Close
Enter your
text here

Performance

Should You Close the Office on Black Friday?
 Should You Close the Office on Black Friday? 1080 720 Jason Lauritsen
0

It’s Thanksgiving week. That means that we will all be asked at some point this week, “Are you working on Friday?” And the answers will be mixed.

Black Friday is one of those dates that seemingly presents a dilemma for organizations and HR departments everywhere. Should the office be open on Friday or should it be closed?

There’s a simple answer. Unless you are in an organization where you can’t be closed (hospital, police station, etc.) or black Friday is a critical day for your business (retail, restaurant, etc.), then you should be closed. I’m not talking about an optional day or a floating holiday; I’m talking closed for business. Everyone gets the day off without using a vacation day closed.

Here are a few reasons why.

  1. This issue will come up during family Thanksgiving day meals and celebrations. When your employee is the only one in the room who has to work on Friday, you look like you don’t care about your employee. At the very least, the employee is going to feel like they getting cheated.
  2. Productivity on Friday is going to be garbage anyway. If you are one of the few who has to go to work on Friday, it’s almost a sport to see how little work you can do. There’s shopping, football games, and many distractions going on that day. Asking your employees to grind out a day of work while it feels like everyone else is enjoying a fun day off is a bad idea. You get nothing except a resentful employee.
  3. There’s a huge difference between having a Thursday off and having a four-day weekend. A four-day weekend means I can travel to spend time with family. A Thursday off may mean I’m eating a frozen dinner at home alone making phone calls to talk to the people I wish I could be with (if only my company gave us the Friday off).
  4. Making me use a vacation day on Friday when so many other companies just close down feels like a slap in the face. That’s one less vacation day I have for summer vacation or a trip to Europe or to paint my house next summer. And for a day when I’m not going to be productive anyway.
  5. No one is looking to do business on Friday.  If your customers are working, they wish they were off too and they aren’t going to be looking to do anything of substance that day.
  6. Some customers might judge you poorly for not giving your employees the day off when it’s so easy to do so.

There may be a good reason for keeping the office open the day after Thanksgiving in the United States, but I can’ think of it.  Unless you have to be open for the reasons I already mentioned, doing so will put at least a small dent in employee engagement. And for what?

If you haven’t landed on the right side of this decision yet, it’s not too late. Shut it down on Friday. Your employees will love you for it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

If you’d like more content like this to arrive in your email box weekly, you can subscribe to this blog by clicking here.

Sign up for our free video series Igniting Employee Engagement. Make impact in your organization with fresh insights from more than 25 thought leaders and experts that you won’t hear anywhere else.

 

Reading Between the Lines on the 4-Day Work Week
 Reading Between the Lines on the 4-Day Work Week 1024 512 Jason Lauritsen
1

Last week, Quartz published a piece about a New Zealand company that has implemented a 4-day work week policy.

This company offered the shortened work week without any reduction in pay or other benefits. They tested it and then implemented it broadly when they found that it didn’t cause any decrease in overall performance for the organization.

The owner of the company, Andrew Barnes, is bullish about these results and wants every company to try it. But, he offers some words of caution not to talk about this effort in terms of employee well-being. Instead, he advised that you talk about it in terms of productivity.

Here’s a quote from Barnes about how they rolled this out:

“We sat down with each team and we said, ‘Right, let’s agree what is the base of productivity that you’re delivering now,’” he says. “And then the deal was, provided you delivered on the productivity goals, you would be gifted a day off a week.”

This is a cool story. It highlights what is possible when organizations think differently about work.

Is this really about a 4-day work week?

While I think it’s awesome that this company is proving that some of our assumptions about work (i.e. the 5-day work week) are limiting, I think the article is misleading for anyone who might want to pursue something similar in their own organization.

The 4-day work week is the kind of gimmicky silver-bullet we love to read about and debate. The gimmick is a distraction.

If you read between the lines, here’s what you find echoed in this article.

  • This company found that employees could produce the same amount of output in 4 days that they had been producing in 5.
  • When given this challenge (or opportunity) to work more effectively, employees stepped up. When surveying employees before and after the 4-day week trial, they “found that 78% of staff felt able to manage work and other commitments after the trial, compared to 54% before.”
  • The policy is less about a 4-day week than it is about autonomy and flexibility. The leaders essentially told employees that if they can get their work done in less hours, they could have those extra hours back.
  • And please don’t say this effort is about employee well-being if you want to be taken seriously because nobody (particularly leaders) cares about that. (Forgive my sarcasm, but this seems to be what they chose to lead with.)
  • The key to making this transition happen swiftly is an owner or CEO who gets it or has a eureka moment.

My take on the 4-day work week

Conversations about a shortened work week are colored by how we think about work. It highlights a fundamental conflict in management philosophy. The practice of management was born during the industrial revolution where the objective was primarily to maximize the productivity of employees per hour. A majority of organizations today are still rooted in this belief.

The objective of work processes is to motivate and/or coerce the maximum amount of productivity out of each hour the employee works. 

In this model, the number of hours the employee spends working is viewed as vital to achieving performance expectations. Your role as an employee is less about achieving specific outputs as it is about seeing how much you can contribute. The manager’s role is to get the maximum amount of value out of the employee.

This way of thinking is prevalent among leaders. It’s this way of thinking that makes the “discretionary effort” model of employee engagement so attractive. It’s oriented towards getting more and more out of the same investment in people–to maximize productivity for the benefit of the organization.

An alternative way of thinking about work is that employees are hired to fulfill specific roles with clear expectations for the value they contribute to the organization’s success. This role clarity drives compensation, management evaluation, and other work processes. This way of thinking about work might be summarized this way:

The objective of work processes is to ensure that employees are clear about the expectations of their role and that they have everything they need to succeed.  

In this way of thinking, a manager’s role isn’t to get the maximum amount of productivity out of each employee. Instead, it’s about ensuring that each employee is crystal clear about what is expected of them and then supporting them in achieving those goals successfully.

If an employee can complete their work in less than 40 hours per week, good for her. She’s met her expectations, so what she does with those extra hours is up to her. If she’s able to do her work in 25 hours/week, then that likely means she’s either due for a more challenging role or the role she’s in is poorly designed. Or, maybe she’s just super efficient at her job and everyone’s happy.

These two very different ways of thinking about work are really what the discussion about the 4-day work week is truly about. If your leaders believe that their mandate is to create a workplace that extracts the maximum amount of productivity from employees, then you are dead in the water before you start.

I suspect that’s why the article led with the insight to talk about this effort as “productivity” and not well-being. The implication seems to be that perhaps you can trick your leaders into the 4-day work week. But, if you don’t address the underlying belief that the goal is to maximize employee output, how long do you think it will take before your leaders realize that if employees can be 20% more productive in four days a week, imagine the productivity if they get back that fifth day?

Instead of trying to trick your leaders into this experiment, focus instead on building a better system of performance management that clearly defines expectations and creates systems of measurement and feedback to help managers effectively manage to those expectations. Once your organization and its leaders are more clearly oriented around thinking of roles in terms of defined performance expectations, the conversation about greater autonomy and flexibility will become much easier.

P.S. This has everything to do with employee well-being, even if your leaders aren’t ready to invest in it yet.

 

If you’d like more content like this to arrive in your email box weekly, you can subscribe to this blog by clicking here.

Sign up for our free video series Igniting Employee Engagement. Make impact in your organization with fresh insights from more than 25 thought leaders and experts that you won’t hear anywhere else.

Performance Appraisals Must Die
 Performance Appraisals Must Die 150 150 Jason Lauritsen
0

As every other HR department has done before and will likely do again, my team is working on answering the question, “What should we do about our performance appraisals?”  So, I’ve been thinking a lot about the topic lately.  That means I’ve had my radar up for information and solutions about performance management.  It seems to me that the performance appraisal is a perfect example of how Paul Hebert explains that HR is caught in the monkey trap.  Letting go would set us free, but we just can’t seem to do it.  I think that’s a mistake and here’s why.  

This is what I have found to be almost universally true when you talk to people about performance appraisals.
  1. Managers hate writing them.  Even the best managers hate them, regardless of the form you use.  Too much work for what they get out of it.  
  2. Employee hate receiving them.  Regardless of how great of a manager you have, the process of the once a year sit down is riddled with anxiety and angst.  
  3. HR hates administering them.  It’s an enormous black hole of time and energy, and no one loves you for doing it.  
  4. There is no evidence that traditional performance appraisals have any impact on performance, good or bad.  At least I’ve not found anyone who has any data either way.  
  5. Despite what some HR folks may argue, having annual performance appraisals usually makes it HARDER to terminate a low performer because most managers generally resist addressing performance issues within the appraisal itself. 
If these five things are true, it would seem that the solution would be to stop the insanity and pull the plug on performance appraisals.  Here’s what should happen if you do.  Managers and employees both love you more.  Your HR team gets back some time that can be invested in work that matters.  Organizational performance won’t change and you’ll be better able to swiftly address employee performance issues.  Where’s the down side?  
Pick a Target
 Pick a Target 150 150 Jason Lauritsen
0

My youngest son Colton turned one year old a few weeks ago.  As with most one year olds, he’s learning to walk.  It’s an amazing process to behold as a parent.  It’s also a truly magnificent example of how learning and achievement works.

As probably most parents do, the “training” we’ve been doing to teach Colton to walk involves my wife and I sitting on the floor about 6-8 feet apart and having him walk back and forth between  us.  He has no problem walking that distance when we are on the floor with him.  When he starts his trek back and forth, I noticed that he sets his eyes on whoever he’s walking to and he takes off without abandon to make it to his target.    We then reward him with hugs and kisses.  And we repeat the process.

What I noticed a few days ago, is that while he seems to have no problem making it 6-8 feet back and forth between mommy and daddy, he doesn’t seem to walk more than a couple steps any other time of the day.  He’s hesitant when he tries to walk on his own and he usually ends up dropping to his knees and crawling to his next destination.  As I watched this, it occurred to me that the difference between the two situations was that when he’s walking between the two of us, he’s setting a target and walking to his target.  The rest of the time, he may be just trying to walk without too much thought about where he’s going.  And his results are quite different.

It struck me that this was a stark and powerful example of the importance of having purpose and goals in our lives.  It remains true for me to this day that when I have a target, my progress towards that target is intentional and steady.  When I lack a target, I flounder.  Having a purpose or goal or target or objective can make all the difference.