Executive Vice-President, SMACNA-WW
With the Seattle area looking at another upswing in activity, finding meaningful ways to improve productivity and efficiency in the workplace, particularly your office, should be a top priority. Anyone working in a group situation with a multi- tiered working environment and an office component can stand to take a page out of the manufacturing sector’s book and implement some basic lean principles. Leaning can be a complicated restructuring of key management functions and operational processes, but for the purpose of this column, we will focus on improving basic individual work habits so each person is as efficient and productive as possible, irrespective of the overall company functioning, by providing some cleaner, more streamlined operational focus.
First of all, beware of over-management and out of control bureaucratic systems in your overall process. Keep it relevant and simple and avoid chronic interruptions. The human brain needs an average 23 minutes and 15 seconds to delve deeply into a subject after an interruption, which means every time someone knocks or an email pings, an employee loses a great deal of potential productivity. Do the math on the three to 20 people who function in a typical office environment, and it is easy to see how work piles up, deadlines slip, and a sense of overwhelming pressure can take over and leave people feeling like they have no control over their jobs.
Meaningful change begins with small, but specific changes. Every employee must keep their workspace clean, organized, and in order. This means everything has a place and there are no superfluous items, like dead pens, scrap paper, or packaged condiments, taking up valuable space. Move employees away from cramming papers into file cabinets and overfilling drawers by providing visible and clearly labelled storage systems and by encouraging the elimination of useless items.
The same goes for email: studies say about 95% of email lurking in inboxes is irrelevant, which means removing it can provide a streamlined, direct connection to information and keep the productivity pathways open and flowing. One way to organize items is into active, reference, and archive sections, which can save around 35% of time spent looking for material.
When people are unable to focus or when they feel overwhelmed by an inefficient process, they tend to do a little of this, half of that, moving papers and projects around, but never really finishing any one thing. The overwhelm created by this pile of unfinished tasks is, well, overwhelming at best and can cause bottlenecks in the company process.
Step two in leaning your office space is refocusing people’s efforts on keeping the office processes moving but encouraging them to deal with each item they encounter – memos, conversations, emails, calls, or projects – by taking one of four actions: do it, delegate, designate specific time to it, or dump it. When applied diligently and with discipline, nothing goes half-completed and every individual contributes to the process moving forward. One study that implemented this strategy saw a 40% reduction in the amount of time spent working on the backlog and a 25% reduction in time spent managing email.
Most offices are places for collaboration and idea-sharing; it is rare that people work completely independently in this type of environment. How, then, can employees be expected to escape the interruption monster that threatens productivity? One lean implementation in New York City created “meeting corridors” in a busy office; that is, it created times each day or week that all employees were available for meetings or conversation. Employees identified their high-value tasks and prioritized them by scheduling them outside of meeting times. Tasks like answering and sending email can be blocked into specific time slots, rather than tended to all day and feeding the need for instantaneous replies. The leanest offices accept that single-tasking is far more effective than multi-tasking and can actually lead to a 35% savings in time lost to interruptions, and a 35% decrease in overtime.
Thirdly, once you get started on the leaning process, be mindful of how you deliver the message. Yes, the objective is to be more productive but if that translates into simply “working faster” mistakes will abound and the time it takes to correct them will negate the purpose of the exercise. Since getting it right the first time is best time-saver of all, promote a quality-first message and allow staff time to fix their mistakes and evaluate their processes. It never hurts to provide training exercises on practical and soft skills—this kind of investment in employees increases morale, improves productivity, and guarantees consistency.
Whatever you decide, you must take your time in deciding what will change, involving as many as possible in the decision- making process. Like all change, leaning your office will be most successful if born of collaboration and concensus. Once the new system is agreed upon, move quickly to implement it.
