Nobody Can Waste Your Time But You

Have you seen the articles about the study that says bosses waste employees’ time? Did we really need a study by a Stanford professor to tell us that sometimes bosses do things that get in the way of real productivity? Of course not. Anyone who’s worked a day or two in corporate knows how easy it is to fall into traps of poor communications between bosses and workers. Nobody’s perfect. So what’s the solution?

(the professor) also encouraged leaders to draw a line between commands and random ideas or remarks. He recommends saying: “Please don’t do anything, I am just thinking out loud.”

Is that really the answer? For you to demean your own words for fear your associates will take them too literally and run off and do something you don’t really want them to do? And who actually talks like that in the regular hustle and bustle of daily work? And why put it all on the boss?

Don’t fall for it! The fact is there’s a lot every worker at every level can do to ensure he or she is spending time wisely and on the right things.

Let’s examine the 3 examples from the study and see what could be done to avoid the waste of time:

1. Assigning time-consuming tasks. The article implies that once the boss says “Go” the workers will begin work immediately, no matter what, and the next thing the boss will hear is “We’re done.” That’s just plain bad practice, and frankly I don’t know too many good corporate workers who do things that way. Instead, they get right to work — not on the details of the project itself, but preparing a rough scope of work, and they get that into the hands of the boss who requested it. That helps the boss clarify the goals underlying the request, and makes sure everybody’s on the same page before work begins in earnest. Here’s what it should include:

• A summary of how I heard it,
• What it means to me and the team who’ll work on this,
• The kind of work it will entail,
• The approximate resource requirements, expenses and rough time frames.
• The kind of deliverable we might reasonably expect to have at the end.
• How does that sound to you?

The next move is up to the boss to respond — hopefully after some good thinking provoked by this good staff work — and say “Good. Ok to move ahead” maybe adding a few suggested modifications.

2. Making off-hand remarks. The study says people sometimes hear something and then run with it, and gives an example of how an off-hand comment by the boss about blueberry muffins led to a subordinate ordering them for every meeting. The author recommends managers should “make sure casual remarks aren’t being misinterpreted as direct orders.”

Now how in the world is the boss supposed to do that? Include a caveat like “Please don’t run off and do something. I’m just thinking out loud here”?

A much better idea is for the worker, instead of going the lazy-victim route and putting in a standing order for blueberry muffins, saying something like “I got regular blueberry muffins for this week and I was thinking we’d switch that up with some assorted mini’s and fresh fruit over the next few meetings. How does that sound?”

3. Refusing to delegate. Everybody knows there’s a golden mean to be achieved between too much and too little delegation. And every manager wants to do it right, but it’s hard. While we’re waiting for every manager in every company to perfect her delegation skills, how about if the worker, instead of watching passively and helplessly when she sees the manager doing something she could (and should) be doing instead, makes an open offer of help to do all or a part of it. Suppose the worker says to the manager “I see you doing the expense reports every month. There’s gotta be a way to streamline this and take some work off you. Why not let me put together a spreadsheet that’ll make it easier.”

This time-wasting study seems to be the just another example of the “Bad Boss Lament” that seems to be infecting a lot of writing about the workplace these days — blaming the boss for everything that happens in the office, encouraging workers to take on the role of victims, pining away for the boss to have a some kind of epiphany or for a higher power to make everything better by replacing the Bad Boss with a Better Boss. 

Sure there’s a lot of time-wasting that goes on in every office. And there’s plenty of blame to go around. But why wait passively for salvation to magically appear? Whether you’re the top boss or someone in the chain, do what you can do right now to make things better and watch everyone else take note and start to do likewise.