I've written a lot already about Personal Productivity Improvement (I've also called it Work Effectiveness Improvement),
a bottom-up, face-to-face, one-on-one approach to helping front-line
workers make better use of the knowledge, technology and learning
resources at their disposal. It's received quite a bit of traction in
business circles, especially among those struggling in Knowledge
Management functions, since it might help
solve the problem Peter Drucker identified as the greatest business
challenge of the 21st century -- improving the productivity of what he
calls 'knowledge workers' (i.e. anyone whose job requires processing a
lot of information and making appropriate decisions with it).
In doing some additional research, I've been looking at the root causes of 'personal unproductivity', and concluded there seem to be three:
- Poor worktools and resources
(inadequate, hard to use, hard to find what you need, over-engineered,
poorly filtered, poorly formatted, poorly indexed, poorly summarized,
poorly explained, poorly organized, and not adequately updated or
regularly cleaned out)
- Poor training:
It's not always possible to make the tools intuitive and simple, and
put the content out just when and where it's needed, so some training
is needed, and it should ideally be personalized training in the
context of how each individual worker employs the available tools and
resources
- Poor work habits:
Even with the best tools and the best training, some people are just
disorganized, sloppy, forgetful, uncommunicative, procrastinating, or
lazy
Being an optimist about people, I've always taken for granted that most
of the productivity problems in the workplace are 'process' problems
(stemming from doing inefficiently-designed work) or problems of
unawareness or inadequate training, rather than 'people' problems
(stemming from doing work inefficiently). Most of us do our best, and
given enough time, I've always thought, people will figure out the most
effective and efficient way to do something, regardless of the process
obstacles (management edicts, unnecessary but mandatory practices,
bureaucracy, dumb policies, bad 'standard operating procedures' etc.)
in their way. Things always happen the way they do for a reason.
Well, usually. I think people are usually pretty good at
finding 'work-arounds' for management-imposed foolishness. So when I
designed the methodology for Personal Productivity Improvement, it was
designed to do two things:
- Learn what problems each individual is having using the tools and resources available to them, in the context of how
they use these tools and resources (a function of both their job
description and their personal workstyle or 'information behaviour'),
and then immediately teach them specifically what they need to know to
use these resources more effectively (to address unproductivity cause
'b.' above), and
- Observe and aggregate the systemic problems with the tools, resources and standard procedures, that hurt the productivity of a lot of people, and take them back to senior management to be fixed (to address unproductivity cause 'a.' above).
My design, therefore, failed to consider that a lot of workplace
unproductivity may be the result of poor work habits, many of which the
individual worker may not even be aware he's trapped in.
Michael Seneadza a.k.a. Trader Mike pointed me to a book by David Allen called Getting Things Done, which attempts to help individual workers
improve their poor work habits, and hence address unproductivity cause
'c.' above. I have not yet read the book (I've ordered it), but the
author's website contains enough to get me started. Allen has developed
a whole toolkit of
personal work-habit improvement aids, which go well beyond the 'Time
Management 101' stuff we all learned early in our careers. One of the
tools is the workflow management process illustrated above (he invites
readers to make this chart their PC 'wallpaper').
On the one hand, I'm really intrigued by this. It could be the perfect
addition to my Personal Productivity Improvement service, because Allen
actually espouses teaching this one-on-one (his firm certifies Getting
Things Done 'coaches' for that purpose). So while you're helping the
individual employee learn how to use his or her technology, information
and learning resources more effectively, you could at the same time be
teaching them how to improve their personal work habits to 'get things
done'. Two doses of productivity improvement in one shot.
But, on the other hand, I'm a little perturbed about the degree to
which the various tools that map into each step of Allen's workflow
diagram seem to be fixed, 'one-size-fits-all' solutions, the proverbial
(and usually misnamed) 'best practice'. I use a tickler file,
for example, one of the tools referred to in the above chart, but it's
not at all like the one Allen suggests. For me, my way works just fine.
Likewise, I don't own a PDA and I don't use Outlook -- I find it more
convenient and faster to note appointments in a manual diary, and I
knowingly give up the electronic tie-in to my scheduling software, and
the ability to sync my appointments with others and allow others to
know when I'm not available.
This way just works best for me, it's part of my work style and fits my
'information behaviour'. So rather than prescribe a set of universal
tools to improve everyone's work habits, or even just roll out a
toolkit and let people pick and choose, I wonder if a better approach
is to learn the individual's personal information behaviour, their
preferred style of managing information and their proclivity to use
more complicated versus simpler tools, and use that behavioural profile
to design a customized set of
work-habit improvement tools and processes for each individual. More
involved and costly, of course, but in my experience there is never one
best answer.
OK, I've confessed I haven't read the book, so if you have, tell me if
I'm right or wrong in my concern about this. And while you're at it, do
you think it's possible to figure out quickly, after a bit of
experience, what work-habit improvement tools will (and won't) work for
each individual in a company? Are there other models and solution sets
for improving work habits I should study? What tools and techniques
work best for you, and why? And has anyone developed a schema (set) of
different 'information behaviour' styles that might make this process a
little more manageable? Or is it presumptuous to think we can improve
ingrained work habits after only a few minutes of observation anyway?
The stakes here, if we can find good answers to these questions, are
huge.
|
4:28:42 PM 
|
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
