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by nlsoftworks | Nov 28, 2021 | Uncategorized | 3 comments
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The question of the day is, “when did it become a badge of honor to work 7 days a week 14 hours a day”? People keep talking about employee burnout and how to build resilience in the workplace, but we keep on expecting people to work an unbelievable number of hours. Question I have for leadership, is why are people judged by the number of hours they work and not according to the quality they produce? If this is what the workplace expects, then stop sending a false narrative you want your employees to have “work life balance”. Working 7 days a week, when your work week is supposed to be 5 days a week, is not going to get your employees to any kind of balance.
I started thinking about this because Sunday I was on a call with a friend and right in the middle of the call she said, “got to go, my boss is on the phone”. Really?
I’m certainly not against working hard, but I am against this working more than the required hours narrative which seems to be the norm.
Leadership if your people are working more than their required hours to get their job done, there is one or two reasons you might consider. 1)They have to much work to do and 2) They aren’t really efficient. If in fact they have too much work to do, then you as the leader need to assess the distribution of work within your organization. If they are not efficient, then possibly a constructive feedback session needs to take place.
It’s obvious to me, employees have bought into the idea that by working these bone crashing hours it will help them get ahead. And you now what; it works. Leadership looks at these employees as dedicated, hardworking, go to the mat kind of people. In other words employees, you have drunk the cool aid, so to speak. Burnout is at an all time high and yet this “work to you die” kind of mentality is still going on.
In stead of rewarding employees who work long hours, leaders you need to sit down with them and assess both their workload and efficiency.
In the assessments I do as part of my organizational culture transformation work, I look at what employees are saying about this type of culture. And the feedback isn’t good.
The so-called “great resignation” didn’t happen for no reason. Yes we can blame it on COVID (because we blame everything on COVID), but this process was going to happen at some point, COVID or no COVID.
Leaders take some time actually think about your people and the message you are sending when you reward them for working beyond the hours they should be working. You might be surprised at what you uncover.
Over the past several years, I have been training organizations on how to provide their customer’s with a great experience. They often come to me and ask, “how do we get our staff to treat our customers better”? Another issue they include is, “why don’t staff feel accountable for the work they do”. Before I got deeply involved in organizational transformation work, I would go in and conduct a thorough training on why it is important to provide customers with a great experience and how staff can do it. Now I think I’m a pretty good trainer, but sometime down the road, I get a message from the same organization asking me to do the training again. Now granted some of the reason for this is staff has changed. But I believe it isn’t the only factor driving the request. Now that I am immersed in organizational culture transformation, I make it a part of my job to work with them to get them to see much of the problems they are having are based on the culture of the organization. I will never say training is not important, but I do say it has to be coupled with a “deeper dive” into what are the underlying cultural issues impacting this problem. So usually we go from talking about just doing training, to comments like, “yes I know its a problem” (referring to culture). Then I get the opportunity to open the conversation to, “let’s fix this problem” by assessing your entire organizational culture and fixing what needs to be fixed so your customers can have the best possible experience when they come to you. So the cautionary tale is, you can keep on doing trainings over and over, but until you address what is built into the fabric of your organization your problem is not going to go away.