The majority of companies we have worked with are completely preoccupied with work to the extent that they unknowingly trample on those factors that lead to development, growth and the attainment of the organizational vision.
The parochial perspective and illusion most executives operate under is that the means of achieving profits, customer retention and even employee satisfaction is through an unending cascade of activity that has to keep everyone churning day after day, indefinitely.
The reality is that doing work for the sake of, work, creates a sterile work environment where real progress cannot thrive.
Thwarts Innovation
Giving employees an unending stream of tasks to perform, simply because those tasks have seemed to provide the organization a certain level of success, is what causes creativity to flounder. Constant work leads to a mundane environment where the order of the day is to clock in, check the box, check out, day after day until the weekend arrives just to come back at the beginning of the week and start the process all over again.
Dissipates Focus
Work that is pushed to employees, like a conveyor belt moving through the factory floor, will certainly keep people busy and preoccupied with what is right in front of them, but it will not create the conditions for focus. The kind of focus I am referring to is that which is active and involves critical thinking, the type of concentration that requires out of the box thinking which yields solutions to the systemic issues plaguing the organization.
Keeping employees constantly busy, day in and day out, without 1) respite and the ability to take a breath of fresh air and evaluate what it is their doing, and 2) the ability to ask why and how that work might be modified to attack the real detractors to progress the organization is facing, leads to a lackadaisical approach to everyday spent in the office.
Creates fatigue
Without the reenergizing effects of taking strategic pauses of work, the everyday activity bears down on employees’ energy. What logically follows is that everyone in the organization becomes weary of the constant, mundane set of tasks they need to complete and the static expectations of their supervisors for how and when those tasks are accomplished.
Causes Employee Turnover
The ultimate and common consequence of expecting employees to work without end is turnover as they seek to find refuge for their boredom in the office space, factory floor or remove work environment of yet another employer in the hope they will attain the work satisfaction they cannot get from their current situation.
It is not surprising that employees jump ship to other organizations as soon as they are promised better, more exciting work where they can focus on what’s truly important, partner with leadership to solve complex organizational problems and are allowed to stop and reflect what it is they are doing on a routine basis.
More importantly, employees will leave when they sense that working for another company will provide them the ability to have a say in the manner and methods they can accomplish their work.
I watched a drove of the best and brightest project leads leave the organizations I worked for to find greener pastures elsewhere…anywhere. The need to find a company that offered a “better work life balance” was the unanimous, singular reason.
In a recent study conducted by the Hartford, a quarter of all employees that indicated they planned to leave their current employer said they were doing so in an effort to find employers that offered increased flexibility. This is a dead giveaway on how to solve the seemingly cryptic reasons employees leave.
Questions to Consider
Are you providing your workforce with periodic, strategic pauses so they can regenerate?
Do your employees feel like they have the freedom to evaluate their work and have a say in how to improve it?
Do you solicit feedback from employees on what organizational issues they see as pervasive and how they would alter their work to help remedy them?
How much turnover are experiencing as a direct result of stagnating work conditions and employee fatigue?