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PRODUCTIVITY
From small changes to huge gains In a technological world in which we’re expected to be online all the time, it can be easy for productivity to drop as interruptions become the norm. Amantha Imber outlines three small adjustments that can boost your team’s performance
EVERY MINUTE of every workday, there are many managers who are inadvertently killing their teams’ productivity. They are doing this by expecting their teams to be at their beck and call, responding to instant messages or emails within a few minutes. They do this by constantly interrupting their teams – because it’s OK for managers to interrupt people, isn’t it? And they spread out numerous meetings across the course of the week, many of which are not helping anyone make progress on their most important projects. Adobe’s Consumer Email Survey, conducted across 1,000 white-collar workers, showed that we spend two and a half hours in our inbox each day. Furthermore, research published in the MIT Sloan Management Review revealed that executives spend 23 hours a week in meetings – and their subordinates are probably not that far behind. Often, when we talk about improving
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productivity, common sense suggests that to achieve big gains, we need to make big changes. Yet what we know from fields such as cognitive psychology and behavioural economics is that small changes can actually lead to big leaps forward in performance. I call this microproductivity – tiny changes that can lead to huge improvements in the way we work. If you’re a manager, here are three simple microproductivity tactics you can try that will have a dramatic impact on your team’s performance.
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Ask your team members to work to their chronotype
Do you know which members of your team are morning versus evening people – which ones are firing on all cylinders in the morning and which ones come to life at night? If you don’t know this information,
then you need to get to know it, because this has huge implications for performance. Around 14% of people fit into the category of ‘larks,’ the types of people who are brighteyed and bushy-tailed at 6 am. Another 21% are ‘owls,’ who peak in the evening. And the rest of us are ‘middle birds,’ who fall somewhere in between. Once you know where individuals sit on this scale, encourage them to structure their day based on their chronotype. Let your larks start work as early as they like – but this means letting them leave early, too. And encourage your owls to do the opposite. Larks and middle birds are best suited to doing focused and analytical work in the mornings and less cognitively intense work in the afternoons. Owls’ days should be structured in the opposite manner. On my team at Inventium, I have a couple of larks who regularly start work between 4
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09/07/2021 10:28:01 am
