Flexible Humans Are Productivity Monsters
I believe that drudgery and clock-watching are a terrible betrayal of that universal, inborn entrepreneurial spirit.
— Richard Branson1
IN THE LAST CHAPTER we started our journey decoupling time from human productivity, critical in our move toward greater flexibility in the workplace. We saw that people have productivity spikes and troughs, and the more we fulfill our human needs during the troughs, the more we refill our energy buckets, and the more impressive those spikes become.
This chapter builds on that theory of energy. In it we discuss further how the rigid workplace stifles true productivity, and how flexibility encourages it. We also cover two cool and effective concepts that I use to multiply results in my own work, and in the improvement projects I’ve led in various workplaces: Parkinson’s Law and the Pareto Principle.
With greater flexibility, and hence a greater ability to be human, we’re more able to see which activities are worthwhile, and we’re more able to do those worthwhile activities with focus and greatness. I’ll demonstrate this improvement with case studies of a seemingly radical type of flexibility: reduced hours with full pay – the five-hour day and the four-day week.
Parkinson’s Law
In his 1957 book Parkinson’s Law,2 British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson discusses the ways in which the number of civil servants employed in government tends to increase regardless of how much work needs to be done.
The underlying message of this book is as true now as it was over sixty years ago, maybe even truer in our age of limitless information: most work is unnecessary, bureaucratic rubbish, created to control and track people, and something with which to fill time and keep people busy. But the most important takeaway from the book is the famous opening line, which has since been called Parkinson’s Law:
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
You’ll know this law to be true if you’ve ever had an assignment at school. If you had two weeks to do the assignment, it would generally have taken two weeks to complete, even if it was something small or simple like a thousand-word essay. If that same assignment had a one-week deadline, that’s how long it would have taken to complete. If you had to do it in two days, you would have been able to get it done in two days. And so on and so forth, until you reach the amount of time it would actually take to write the essay if you were focused and committed.
Most deadlines are arbitrary and are based on how long a previous, similar task took. As soon as a deadline is given, it creates an expectation for how long the work needs to take, and then it takes that long.
In the traditional workplace, if someone has eight hours in which to get their daily work done, it will generally take eight hours to get said work done, even if it could have been done in one hour.
Is this true? Does a day off reduce workers’ results by 20 percent for the week? Usually no. They’ll get everything done in four days that would normally take five.
So either something miraculous is happening and workers are able to conjure up superpowers during the days when they’re working, or their work could actually be completed in a smaller window of time.
It’s the second one.
Why Rigidity Stifles
Most work can be completed in a fraction of the time it normally takes. But the traditional workplace stifles true productivity, and it does so for the following reasons:
Something mysterious happens to our minds when we’re given a timeframe in which to complete a task. The task will expand, like some alien blob from a 1940s horror movie, to completely fill the timeframe, like a gas expanding to fill a container.
If your teacher gave you a whole month to write the aforementioned thousand-word essay, a combination of things would happen.
First, you’d spend a lot of time thinking about doing it yet not actually doing it. “Thinking about,” thy name is procrastination.
Second, the process of structuring, writing, and editing the essay would be slow and relaxed (or neglected and then rushed the night before, if your school days were anything like mine). It wouldn’t be attacked with gusto and purpose from the moment you received the essay.
Last, the essay would end up being far more complex and intricate than it would need to be. At some point the law of diminishing returns would take over, and you would spend three out of the four weeks bumping your grade up from 95 percent to 96 percent (producing no difference in the result, as suggested by empirical tests regarding Parkinson’s Law.)3,4
In a rigid workplace, the standard time spent at work – eight or more hours per day, five days per week – is the arbitrary timeframe in which to get our work done. And we fill it up.
Energy Constraints
In our normal workplaces, we put in forty, fifty, or sixty hours a week, plus the hours spent commuting, regardless of our productivity level. We feel this drain of humanity and energy to our core.
We have a finite amount of mental and physical energy, and during our long workdays and workweeks we conserve it by plodding. Just as you can’t sprint a marathon, you can’t focus 100 percent on your tasks and get them done quickly and effectively for an entire eight hours a day, forty or more hours a week.
Our minds and bodies know, on a Monday morning, that we’re going to be at work for a long time, and that time won’t change according to our level of productivity, so we settle into the minimum effort required to get things done in that time. We pad the day by adding filler, welcoming and seeking distractions from coworkers, Facebook, and various “emergencies” that pop up.
We slog through the hours after lunch until we can finally leave, lying to ourselves about how hard we’re working, even though our energy buckets are empty and our productivity is close to zero by that point. As much as we can, we preserve our energy to survive another week.
No Real Incentive
In a traditional workplace there’s not a lot of incentive to do more than needs to be done, in the time given.
If we knock out our weekly tasks in the first few hours of a Monday morning, what then? What would we do for the remaining several hours before we’re allowed to go home?
We can’t just pack up and go to the cinema – that’s unspeakable. We can’t go home and hang out with friends – that’s unmentionable! We could find or create more work, I suppose, and knock that out of the park, but then what? And why? We may end up with a promotion, which is an incentive, but working at maximum intensity, day-in and day-out, even if it were possible, will more likely lead to a psychotic episode than a promotion.
The point is that in most workplaces there aren’t any truly valuable incentives to do more than the minimum. Cinema tickets or shout-outs at weekly meetings are throw-away incentives, and very few individuals at a company truly care about the yearly targets and profits for shareholders – that’s not why people work. People work to buy food, pay rent, and send their kids to school. People work to test themselves, to grow, to have a feeling of participation, to help others, to feel a sense of accomplishment, and to be respected.
They don’t care about their managers’ bonus checks. They care about what they get, the things that make an impact to their quality of life – more time with family, or less stress, or financial security. Those are real incentives, and rarely do workers get them.
Leaving at Four?
You’ve probably guessed what I’m going to suggest as a solution to this low productivity in rigid workplaces. Yes, flexibility combats this stifled productivity with the fervor and skill of a young Chuck Norris beating up a roomful of bad guys who kidnapped his girlfriend.
Let’s look at how a specific type of flexibility – reducing hours in a day while keeping pay the same – does this, and we’ll start small to warm up. Lasandra, an accountant, usually works from eight thirty to five. She gets in at about eight twenty and leaves at about the same time as everyone else at her company, ten or fifteen minutes after five, in order to not seem too clock-watchy and desperate to leave (even though, ironically, it takes a lot of clock watching to time this exit correctly).
She works these hours regardless of her productivity. If she has a good, productive day, she leaves at five ten; if she has a God-awful day where she didn’t manage to answer a single email or finish one calculation, and spent the entire day texting friends and trying to appear busy, she leaves at five-ten.
One day her boss announces that the company will soon be implementing an Early Minute Program: anyone who feels like they’ve finished their work for the day can go home as early as four.
They’re doing this because the CEO has been considering experimenting with flexibility to try to reverse the company’s low staff engagement levels and above-industry turnover rates, and he’s recently read about other businesses having success with reduced hours with full pay.
This will be their flexibility taste test.
At first, Lasandra is skeptical and wonders how anyone would be able to go home a whole hour early. There must be a reason we work eight hours a day, she thinks. Surely we’ll get behind on our work, and then they’ll just scrap the idea? I mean, I know I’m usually busy all day.
A few weeks later it begins. It’s a Monday morning. People joke with each other about the potential to leave early, and poor Mark, who consistently left at five on the dot in the old system, receives the predictable, “Oh, you’ll definitely be using it” from coworkers.
But the morning banter is a little shorter than usual. People move off to their desks with a touch more purpose than on previous Mondays.
Lasandra sets her coffee down on her desk and makes a list to organize her day. She doesn’t want to seem overeager to leave early, but she’s determined to get out by about four thirty to hopefully avoid the worst of the traffic.
Nothing major is due today. She needs to process some data for the monthly report that will be compiled at the end of the week, and several invoices from suppliers need to be checked and filed. And, as usual, she’ll receive random requests for work from various departments during the day.
With this knowledge, she sets to work. She blows through the supplier invoices before the first urgent (they’re all urgent) request for data from someone in manufacturing, which she finds and sends quickly. She starts on the numbers for the monthly report at eleven. Normally at this time of day she’d be checking the news and waiting for lunch. Normally she might chat with Richard. Not today. She’s imagining a smooth, fast drive home.
She processes the data with purpose. She enjoys going through the numbers and doing her own analyses (hence her choice of accountancy for a profession) and can often get lost in somewhat irrelevant, albeit interesting, Wikipedia pages (with some slight detours to Facebook to check the top posts). But she stays on task and finishes and sends the data for the presentation shortly after her lunch break.
Having finished everything on her list, she starts on some other work she wasn’t meaning to do until later in the week. She also gives short turnaround times for the various other urgent requests that pop up.
To Lasandra’s pleasant surprise, she has had an extremely productive day and could have left much earlier than four. Then four arrives, and no one leaves. Not straight away. No one wants to seem too eager.
At four ten, her boss, under orders from the CEO to lead by example, stands up and packs his things away. “Alright, I’m outta here, dudes and dudettes!” Everyone breathes a silent sigh of relief, and a few others prepare to leave as well, and get some ribbing from the biggest doubters of the program, the dedicated seat warmers.
Lasandra leaves at four fifteen. On her drive home, which, without the stop-and-start, bumper-to-bumper traffic, is twenty minutes quicker than usual, she wonders why they ever had to work till five in the first place. She wonders what she’s going to do with this extra time when she gets home. And she wonders if they could shorten the day even further.
What happened? Was it magic? Did everyone end up working an extra hour the following day to catch up on that missed hour? Highly doubtful. If we go back to the reasons the traditional workplace stifles productivity, we can see how flexibility reversed the situation:
1. The Parkinson Effect was reduced
Reducing the day by one hour reduced the arbitrary amount of time to get stuff done, so the opposite of the Parkinson Effect (known as Horstman’s corollary) took place: instead of work expanding to fill the time available, it shrank to fit the shorter time.
This doesn’t mean that the productive output diminished, it just means that it all fit into a smaller timeframe – the gas easily compressed into a smaller container. There was a little less distraction, a little more focus, et voilà!
2. Energy was increased
In the example, since this was only the first day of the program, there wouldn’t be much increase in energy. But in the following days and weeks, the extra hour a day would be used for more sleep, exercise, time with family, hobbies, etc., and this would help fill energy buckets and enable people to get stuff done during those shorter work hours, and to do it better.
But on that first day, the knowledge that they could leave early led people to waste less time with the news, Facebook, and other distractions. They felt less of a need to preserve energy, so they were able to work faster and with more purpose.
3. The incentive was real!
Being able to leave an hour early was a big and real incentive for people to get their work done. Lasandra’s opportunity to avoid rush-hour traffic was a huge benefit (do I need to say any more about traffic?). She ended up with more than an hour of extra free time because, along with leaving early, her journey was also quicker than usual (she normally gets home after six, today she got home at four forty).
A small increase in flexibility – reducing the workday by a single hour – reduced waste, increased human energy, gave the employees an extra hour per day to put toward other human needs, and increased productivity by over 12 percent.*
What if we follow Lasandra’s line of thought? What if we take it further?
“The Five-Hour Workday Is Here”
Like a gift from the heavens, this headline arrived on my news feed one morning while I was still in bed, while I was drafting this chapter. I clicked on it without high expectations. It would probably just be another political theorist trying to convince people that we don’t need to work as much as we do, which is accurate, but usually empty and hopeful rather than practical and evidence-based.
It was so much more.
A financial services firm in Tasmania, Australia, called Collins SBA had trialled a five-hour workday in its offices for eighteen months straight. I sat bolt upright in bed and read on:
After undergoing a lot of research – including examining similar models in countries like Sweden – the firm took a big risk and decided to undertake a three-month trial of a five-hour workday for all staff.
According to the firm’s operations director Claudia Parsons, the benefits were felt almost immediately. “Our staff produced the same workload, received the same pay, and had the same responsibilities. The idea was that if you could get all this done within a five-hour period, you were free to leave at 2:00.5
And it worked so well that they made the change permanent.
I LinkedIn-stalked the managing director of the firm and originator of the concept, Jonathan Elliot, straight away and messaged him for an interview before I’d had my morning coffee.
His wife had cancer. That’s how it began.
While Louise was receiving treatment, Jonathan needed to drop down to part-time hours and leave work by about one or two in the afternoon each day so that he could support her and help look after their baby daughter.
He noticed that his family life improved with more time together, and he had much greater interaction with his daughter; when he worked full time, he could only put her to bed.
But he also noticed something completely unexpected: even though he was working far fewer hours, he was doing the same amount of actual work. He was still able to run the business, meet clients, complete reports, and everything else he used to do in a full day. Somehow all his work fit into a much smaller timeframe. This triggered a big question: Could this apply to everyone else in the business?
After he announced that they were going to trial shorter days with full pay, staff members were either excited by the prospect or worried that they wouldn’t have enough time to get everything done. He even faced polite skeptics within his own ranks: “Well, I struggle to get my work done at the moment in eight hours. Great idea, Jonno, but it’s not going to work for me.”
But in the six weeks they had to prepare before the official three-month trial, employees experimented with their work and looked for ways to improve their efficiency. And they started to realize that it would be possible.
I asked Jonathan if he needed to bring in process-improvement consultants, or buy new equipment to streamline tasks, or make any other major changes to enable everyone to shrink their workday. The answer was no.
Everyone just worked with greater intensity. They frowned on anyone who interrupted their work for frivolous things. They reduced email waste, only sending messages when absolutely necessary. They took fewer breaks. And meetings were cut or reduced dramatically; staff became antsy when outsiders held meetings in the old-fashioned, meandering, and chit-chatty style.
Employees shared improvements they found with the rest of the team. Collaboration and teamwork grew organically out of everyone striving to achieve the same thing: to do their best work as quickly as possible so they could have more life! Process improvement was exciting – words never before uttered.
The business did eventually implement improvements based on what the workers found through searching for greater efficiencies, such as email management systems and faster ways to log into programs. But these weren’t rocket science.
The effect of shorter hours for the business? Well, they certainly didn’t lose three-eighths of their business by reducing their hours by that amount. They didn’t lose any business at all. When told about the change, clients were enthusiastic about working with a progressive business that cared for its people (and the free publicity gained by the trial brought more prospects). Staff were flexible (there’s that word) and available for urgent matters that came up when people were finished for the day.
The only thing the business lost, I kid you not, were employees who enjoyed working for eight hours and didn’t want to change their processes or improve their work. But it gained high-caliber employees who were attracted by the idea of working for a company that valued and rewarded results over time worked, the sort of people who, when let loose to do their best, can achieve amazing things.
And sick leave fell by an average of 12 percent across the business, a considerable savings given that the average cost of sick days in Australia per employee per year is $3,608 (and potentially higher for more senior or critical positions).6
Then there were the benefits to the people and their surrounding communities, seen in the personal stories from employees and managers:
• Staff not only avoided heavy afternoon rush-hour traffic by leaving early, but many went to work earlier in the morning (arriving by about eight) and hence missed out on the morning jams as well. This reduced the commute times and stress of employees (and made the roads in Hobart just a bit less crowded).
• One employee saved enormous amounts of leave for a holiday for her anniversary because she hadn’t had to use any during the year. She was living sustainably each day, so regular time off wasn’t even necessary.
• Jonathan had much more time with his daughter. The time at home with her decreased his wife’s burden and allowed greater connection with his family (see the benefits of gender equality described in Chapter 4).
• Other parents in the company said they were able to spend much more quality time with their kids, doing stuff they would normally only do on weekends.
• Staff reported partaking in more leisure activities and hobbies during the week, such as reading, playing sports, doing things outdoors, and cooking.
• No more TGIF! There was no longer a feeling of crossing the line on Friday afternoons at the company. The employees were living and working sustainably, so reaching the weekend wasn’t worthy of celebration; they no longer even have celebratory drinks on Fridays.
After fifty minutes on the phone with Jonathan, I could hear the courteous impatience in his answers. This was already much longer than the short meetings to which he was now accustomed.
I thanked him kindly for his time and let him go.
Another company, this time in New Zealand, blew up the internet in 2018 with its trial of a four-day workweek. The director of this company, a man by the name of Andrew Barnes, was sitting on a flight from New Zealand to the United Kingdom when he happened to read an article about worker productivity that said that office workers, on average, were only truly productive for two to three hours a day.
“This can’t be right,” he thought. “Why am I paying people to be unproductive for close to twenty-five hours a week?”
Similar to what happened to Jonathan, this sparked an idea to try something different, to step out of what’s normal and see what’s possible. And similar to Jonathan, he also happened to have a business that he could use as a guinea pig. The company is Perpetual Guardian, an “estate planning, philanthropy and investment advisory” business in New Zealand with a staff of 240. Andrew would reduce everyone’s week by one day while leaving pay unaffected, because he was “paying for productivity, not for time.”
Instead of just giving this four-day week a go and seeing what happened, Andrew took his trial a step further and enlisted researchers from the University of Auckland and Auckland University of Technology to rigorously study and report on the eight-week trial, to hold it up to scientific scrutiny, and thus make it useful for other companies around the world (and to convince any skeptics, polite or otherwise, of its merit).
I visited Auckland to hear Andrew speak about the trial, and to ask way too many questions about process improvement and the fulfillment of human needs.
The first thing I liked about the trial was that staff members were treated like adults. Andrew told everyone what he wanted to achieve, and why, and then left it to each team to figure out how they were going to fit five days of work into four.
They were “empowered” and “trusted” to make their own decisions about their work and productivity, and the leaders and managers took a “coaching and supportive role as opposed to being directive.”7
Before the trial, staff were encouraged to think about what productivity means, how they could ensure that their productivity wouldn’t fall, and how they could serve their customers as well or better.
It turned out (unsurprisingly) that productivity was highly individual and based on roles and responsibilities. The improvements that people came up with were similar to those at Collins SBA with the five-hour day: less time on Facebook, more purpose and intent (e.g., less tolerance for interruptions), and various other small things that accumulate to make a big difference.
Because it was a team-based trial – the entire team either had the fifth day off or not, based on the team’s productivity for the week, not the individual’s performance – people were inspired to do their best to make sure they didn’t let everyone else down. They collaborated heavily to find the best ways to work, together. As with Collins SBA, this wonderfully human trait of working together flourished with the new way of working and the lure of having more life outside of work.
The business itself still operated with the normal Monday-to-Friday structure. Each person took their day off in the way that best suited the team, to ensure that the employee benefited and the business could serve its customers fully.
If there were urgent requirements, staff were required to work the full five days, but they were happy to do so given the extra days off during other weeks. Also, no one would take their extra day off in a week that had a public holiday.
Researchers found the following:
Benefits to the business
• Profits increased: total revenue went up by 6 percent and profitability went up by 12.5 percent.8 The billable hours completed by employees in four days were more than they had completed in five.* (They received quite a bit of free publicity because of media excitement.)
• Team engagement levels increased significantly, shown by comparing staff survey results from the year before the trial (2017) and post-trial (2018), in the following areas:9
- Empowerment: 68 percent to 86 percent
- Leadership: 64 percent to 82 percent
- Work stimulation: 66 percent to 84 percent
- Organizational commitment: 68 percent to 88 percent
- Retention intention: 62 percent to 84 percent
- Absences (i.e., sick leave) decreased by 8 percent
- Service performance increased by 8.2 percent
- Creativity behaviors increased by 9.8 percent
Benefits to people (and broader society)
• Satisfaction levels changed in positive directions in the following areas (from pre-trial to post-trial scores):
- Work–life balance: 54 percent to 78 percent
- Stress: 45 percent to 38 percent
- Life (overall view of life satisfaction): 74 percent to 79 percent
- Health: 67 percent to 74 percent
- Leisure: 63 percent to 74 percent
- Community (how involved the employee feels with their local community): 66 percent to 73 percent
• A whole day less per week of commuting (20 percent reduction in driving for those who commute by car), with corresponding reductions in fuel use, emissions, stress, wasted time, etc.
• Anecdotally, employees spent more time with family during the week; they were also cooking, gardening, doing more housework (comment made by male employees), studying, completing projects around the home, swimming, running, and relaxing.
As with Collins SBA, the trial quickly became permanent practice after the results were determined. The employees and the managers have become more focused, not only on the personal and profit benefits, but on how this extra time and energy can be used to give back to the community (local and worldwide).
The thing that stood out to me during Andrew’s presentation was that the total workload during the shorter week felt smaller to employees, even though they were completing more actual work in those four days.
This, to me, is fascinating. The only way I can explain this is to relate it to the second reason that rigidity stifles productivity: the conservation of energy. Just being at work, regardless of whether it’s productive time or you’re simply trying to pass the time, burns energy and feels like work.
It takes effort to get through the day, even during those times of mindlessly browsing the internet or texting friends. These unproductive things were easily cut in the new structure at Perpetual Guardian; time spent on the four most popular non-work-related websites was reduced 35 percent.
With less time at work, employees burned less energy (or put less effort into conserving their energy), and then used that energy to great effect!
Doing an academic study of the four-day week has turned the concept into a global movement, with businesses and national governments interested in its implications.
So many people contacted two of the leaders of the campaign, Andrew and Charlotte Lockhart of Perpetual Guardian, to ask about the practicalities of implementing a four-day week that they formed a nonprofit community called 4 Day Week Global. Check it out at 4dayweek. com, where there’s a wealth of information and the original white paper.
Based on Perpetual’s success, Microsoft ran a trial of a four-day week in its Japan offices. Called Work Life Choice Challenge 2019 Summer, the project entailed Microsoft Japan closing its offices on all five Fridays in August 2019, with employee pay remaining unaffected.10
The goal of the project was to improve the work-life balance of staff in three areas: 1) Self-growth and learning, 2) Private life and family care, and 3) Social participation and community contribution. The company paid for any expenses associated with these activities.
Microsoft supported the reduction in working time in a couple of simple ways: promoting thirty-minute meetings and getting employees to use online communication and collaboration more, with the company’s own platform, Microsoft Teams, of course.
Again, incredible improvements were seen: staff productivity improved 40 percent compared to August of the previous year.
On top of the productivity gains, staff took 25 percent less time off during the trial, and electricity use was down 23 percent in the office. Employees also used 59 percent less paper, probably because of increased use of remote communication instead of paper. Unsurprisingly, 92 percent of the twenty-three hundred employees were satisfied with the shorter week.
Based on the success of this project, Microsoft again implemented a four-day week at the end of 2019, called the Work Life Challenge 2019 Winter, which focussed on rest, continued improvement of practices, and enjoyment of the challenge.
Flukes!
I know what some of you are thinking: these cases of reduced hours with full pay were flukes. The staff didn’t have enough work to do in the first place. They were lazy and this just made them finally get some stuff done. It sounds interesting, but, seriously, not for my business – we’ve got way too much to do.
Hold on, my politely skeptical friends. Several times a year we all see proof of our ability to do more in less time. Whenever you’ve had a day off, how often have you had to spend an extra eight hours at work the following week to catch up on everything you missed?
Never. (Or hardly ever.)
The entire workforce doesn’t automatically work eight hours more in the week following a public holiday. We don’t all go home at eight every day for a week after a public holiday. This is all the hard proof we need that Parkinson’s Law is indeed active in our work lives. This entire lost day is mysteriously absorbed by the surrounding days.
Think about what happens in those four days leading up to the public holiday. We get everything done in four days that we would normally do in five. We do that by working with a little more gusto. We do it by spending a little less time being distracted or distracting others. And the changes don’t increase stress; they’re barely perceptible.
It makes me laugh (with frustration) whenever the four-day workweek is discussed in the news. The concept is usually dismissed as insanity by opponents, who say that our economy will come crashing down or will drop by the corresponding loss in productive time, or by people who say that it wouldn’t work in their business because their business is different.
But does the economy drop by some significant amount every time we have a day off? It might if we were robots and our productivity was linear. But, alas, we’re not, and it’s not.
After seeing the results of these case studies, and thinking about why these results occurred, I hope you agree that our productivity would actually increase with an extra day off each week, or fewer hours at work during the day, because we’ll have extra time and energy to be humans, and humans are great for business.
If you’re in doubt, just go back over the three reasons why rigidity stifles productivity, and consider how having less time at work reverses these effects:
• Reduction of the Parkinson Effect: when you have less time to work, you get your work done in a smaller window.
• You need to conserve less energy in your bucket, so you spend less time with Facebook and texting and work with more intent.
• You have a real incentive to get everything done so that you can truly enjoy that extra day off.
The Pareto Principle
I could probably end the chapter there, but there’s another critical point about these cases that we need to delve into. When we talked about Lasandra, we made a massive assumption: all of her work is important. In our hypothetical example, Lasandra kept doing the same work she would normally do without examining the value or necessity of each task, and she found efficiencies just by working with more purpose and removing wasted time.
But what happens when she starts using that extra time and energy to question the importance, relevance, and methods of her work? She can improve it, or she can completely remove it!
And that’s the most exciting aspect of the real-life case studies of Collins SBA, Perpetual Guardian, and Microsoft: people questioned the hell out of their own work practices and tasks.
They hunted down value like hungry productivity monsters.
Unlike robots, humans can pick and choose what will provide the biggest value for our efforts. Rather than just finding incremental efficiencies, we can multiply our results if we scrap the pointless work, do more truly valuable things, and find better ways to do those valuable things.
The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 Rule, is a strangely universal phenomenon that states that not all things are equal. Or that things, for the most part, are very unequal.
In 1896, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto found that 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population. He carried out surveys in other countries and in other time periods and found similar 80/20 distributions. Since then, the 80/20 Rule has been used to great effect in a variety of other fields.11
Quality control in manufacturing makes use of the fact that 80 percent of defects usually stem from 20 percent of causes. So rather than putting resources into fixing all of the problems in a random manner, you can decrease defects by 80 percent by finding and targeting those few main problems.
Similarly, Microsoft found that by fixing 20 percent of the most-reported bugs, they could eliminate 80 percent of errors and crashes in their systems.
In healthcare, 20 percent of patients use 80 percent of the resources.
Twenty percent of criminals commit 80 percent of all crimes.
Twenty percent of motorists cause 80 percent of vehicle accidents.
When I was looking at my personal finances the other day, only a few of my items of spending (rent, fuel, and grocery shopping) accounted for nearly 80 percent of my total costs.
This unequal distribution isn’t always 80 percent and 20 percent – it can be 85/15, 90/10, 99/1, and so on. Nor does it need to add up to 100 percent; e.g., 1 percent of the U.S. population controls 40 percent of the wealth in the country.12 This principle of inequality holds true in almost any situation you could imagine: a few things will always be more important or significant than most of the others. A great definition comes from the author of The 80/20 Principle, by Richard Koch:
The 80/20 Principle states that there is an inbuilt imbalance between causes and results, inputs and outputs, and effort and reward. Typically, causes, inputs, or effort divide into two categories:
• The majority, that have little impact
• A small minority, that have a major, dominant impact
Is the workplace immune to this principle? Of course not. Much of what we do, in any industry, is at best unimportant, and at worst unnecessary noise that gets in the way of the few truly valuable things.
Figure 6.1. Illustration of the imbalance of the relative importance of causes/inputs/effort – i.e., 20 percent of the tasks (inputs) produce 80 percent of the overall results (outputs).
In my years as a process improvement specialist I’ve seen the same pattern, regardless of the industry or the type of work: there were critical processes, and there were the rest that needed to be thrown out or automated because it was sad and silly for humans to be spending any effort or time on them.
People waste time writing reports that no one reads (I’ve seen this countless times), fixing mistakes caused by others, moving things from one place to another and then back again, waiting around for other people to sign or complete something before they can start their own work, reading emails they don’t need to read, sitting in long meetings, and a million other things that add no value to a business.
A heartbreaking story of this waste of human life on pointless tasks came up in an improvement project I managed at an insurance company. Jennifer (not her real name) spent two full days, every month, preparing two boxes of documents (some sort of invoices or reminders for corporate clients), and then she would wheel these boxes on a trolley to the opposite side of a labyrinthian building to another department to be sent out.
During the course of the project we found out what happens to those documents when they reached the other department. The paper in one of the boxes was immediately discarded, literally dumped into the recycle bin. The rest of the forms were sent to clients, who rarely used them; they went straight into the bin after going on a scenic journey through the postal system.
All of the time and energy (and paper) used for this task was waste. It added no value to anyone in the universe except the company’s paper supplier. During the project, as we investigated these boxes of paper, Jennifer laughed in disbelief with the rest of us, but you could tell she was crying on the inside.
How much of her life had been spent needlessly sorting and stapling and folding and carting these redundant pieces of paper to the other side of the building? What else could she have been doing, either for her own life or to add value to the company?
That’s one of the more ridiculous cases I witnessed, but these pointless or low-value tasks are everywhere! You just have to dig a little to discover them. You just have to ask a few different questions to figure out if something is worthwhile. Why do we do that? Why do we do it that way? Does the customer really need this?
What’s worse is that this sort of no-value work is often created in rigid workplaces so that people have enough to do in the time that they’re there! It may not be on purpose; it may be a legacy task from a previous era; but it’s not right.
People often don’t see the pointlessness of tasks because they’re used to going through the motions, and they don’t have the incentive or energy to question what they’re doing.
Jonathan and Andrew, in the examples above, are doing the opposite. They’re finding and creating value and eliminating waste. This is what I used to be paid to find; these employees found it themselves.
The Magical Supercomputer
We revere successful businesspeople and entrepreneurs, such as Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk. They’re often called geniuses for coming up with successful products and services and making billions of dollars.
But, apart from being smart and driven, and probably having a bit of luck, these people are just normal humans. There’s nothing abnormally brilliant about them. To consider innovation and problem solving to be the domain of these and similar successful “geniuses” is to assume that only a few people can improve their work and the world around them.
But everyone is capable of innovation. It’s natural for us to question the status quo and to use our curiosity to find better ways of doing things.
The most average human being on the planet has, contained in their cranium, the most sophisticated piece of computing hardware (yet) in existence. With this average human brain, which should be thought of as a magical supercomputer, they’re capable of understanding language, the subtleties of behavior, economics, science and technology, and emotions. They can analyze and learn from the past and see into the distant future, and they can piece together patterns from disparate sources to come up with entirely new ideas.
The reason that we assume that most people can’t do amazingly innovative things with their own work is that their supercomputers are usually exhausted: their energy buckets are empty, and they have no incentive to look for improvements. Sadly, many of our brilliant minds are stifled by “drudgery and clock-watching,” as Richard Branson so keenly put it in the quote at the beginning of this chapter.
But the best ideas I saw in my projects didn’t come from managers or from me, the specialists who are expected to have all the answers. They came from the people who did the work every day, when they finally had the time and space to think, and finally they were heard. In fact, many of those ideas had been there for years, sitting in the filing cabinets in their brains labelled “I tried to bring this up ages ago, but no one listened, and then I was too tired to care.”
We can reverse this scenario. Well-rested and well-rounded people, who have the energy and incentive to use their magical supercomputers (and to care about using their magical supercomputers), are capable of astonishing things.
A Tiny Proviso
The four-day workweek, or five-hour workday, or any other fancy new length of week or day, are not the ultimate panaceas for work. These are just examples meant to challenge tradition, call our attention to the problems inherent in working too much, and show what’s possible with seemingly crazy ideas regarding the ways in which we work.
But, if you recall the Flex Scale in Chapter 2, these initiatives only make it up to Level 3: Good Program. They’re aspirational, but there’s still some rigidity in their application.
Coming to work four days a week for eight hours a day, while better than five days of the same, is still somewhat rigid; it still doesn’t take into account the natural and unpredictable fluctuations of human needs and productivity. And it still requires commuting to the office, and being in the office, every workday.
While people are hailing the four-day workweek as the next work revolution, we shouldn’t assume that this is the best that we can do, or that it’s the only way to get to higher levels of work-life balance and productivity. Let’s not forget that there are many forms of flexibility, and that something like remote work, for example, also has amazing benefits, as I’ll discuss in the next chapter.
Congratulations to Andrew and Jonathan and others who are helping to shift the needle in big ways. But it’s important to remember that, a hundred years ago, the five-day workweek was heralded as a new utopia. There is always a touch of randomness in declaring how long a day or week of work should be.
* This would result, at minimum, if everyone has produced the same in a thirty-five-hour week that they would in a forty-hour week; but this doesn’t take into account extra productivity enhancements from increased engagement, improved health, fulfilment of buckets, etc.
* As with Collins SBA, this company, like a law irm or business consultancy, has objective measures for how much truly valuable work is done and billed for clients; and these billable hours by Perpetual it easily into less overall time, thus spoiling arguments that reduced hours with full pay wouldn’t work for lawyers or other professionals who charge by time increments.
