So we are diving back into our series all about why your team is constantly busy. They have those overloaded calendars. They are constantly jumping from meeting to meeting. Whenever you ask them how their day is, they always respond with, Oh, I'm just drowning. I'm so busy. But when you really challenge yourself to look at not just the amount of work they're doing, the amount of hours that they are putting in, but truly the tangible impacts that your team is making towards your goals.
It's not aligning all of the work. All of the things. is not aligning with the impact you're wanting to see. And we're diving into why this concept is so prevalent within our corporate cultures and how we can make the shift to driving more impact. With less effort, because that's the dream, right? Is to be having a team that can drive more impact on your goals, more outcomes, more tangible things with less effort, with less hours.
So you and your team have more time, capacity, and brain space. To work on those, you know, deeper work items, those more strategic, more creative, more innovative work items. And more importantly, you have time to live a life outside of the office. That's the dream, right? It's not even the dream. That should just be reality.
That's, that's the baseline minimum. Okay. So that's what we are focusing on. And if you guys didn't listen to the first part of the series, where we talked about what productivity even means, I encourage you to stop, go back and listen to that episode, because let me tell you. We cannot increase productivity unless we truly understand what productivity means.
And productivity has been significantly warped, the idea of it in modern corporate culture. So if you haven't listened to that, go back and listen to that before continuing on here. Okay. So today we're diving in on the next concept in this series, which is all about productivity. What I call hidden productivity termites.
These are the things that are slowly, sneakily eating away at your team's productivity. So remember last week we talked about this concept that your team's time, energy, talent, capacity, those are your team's most valuable resources. And our job as leaders is to not only protect that resource. But also apply it to the work that's going to have the biggest impact, because when we do that, when we protect our team's time, energy, and capacity, and when we apply it to the tasks that are going to have the biggest impact on our goals, that's when we start seeing the results that we desire.
But right now, a lot of our team's time and capacity is getting eaten away at. There is a reason why so many people dreaded switching from work from home to going back into the office.
Getting work done in the office is almost impossible today. The office is a modern factory of constant distractions. There's pinging notifications, back to back meetings, like people see your calendars open as an invitation to fill it up. It is rare. For you to have spots in your calendar to actually do freakin work.
And even if you do have some spots in your calendar, oh, well those are already taken up too, with the never ending emails and the constant notifications and the endless drive bys. These are what I call distraction termites. These are the things that are eating away at your productivity. At your team's time, energy, and capacity.
But like I said, that's your team's most valuable resource. And it's our job as leaders to protect that at all costs. And we know that if we're able to protect it and apply it to that high impact work, again, we're going to see bigger results. So one of the number one ways we can do that. is by identifying these productivity termites.
and eradicating them. So I want you to put on your termite suit, suit up, because we are going after termites today. Today I'm going to be breaking down exactly what the top four most common productivity eaters are and how you can start taking, steps, simple steps towards eradicating those. Because every time we eradicate a productivity termite, we're giving your So the first termite we're going to talk about is going to be communication overload.
This is arguably one of the biggest eaters of your team's productivity. And the one that I like to get on a high horse and talk about the most. So I'm going to try and keep it short and sweet for y'all. But when I'm talking about communication overload is there is just an endless amount of noise of information of questions coming at you and your team day in and day out.
It's the emails, it's the slack or the teams messages. It's the quote urgent updates. It's the endless meetings that. Plague or entire calendar and all of this creates a culture of instant responsiveness There are so many reasons why this has become the case. One, it's just the amount of tools that we have been given in corporate culture today that just makes it almost too easy to get in contact with people.
I gave a good example of this in the last episode, around how it was almost hard to communicate with people. In corporate culture in previous years, and now there's almost endless avenues for how to reach you and your team. You can ping them, you can email them, you can schedule a meeting with them.
You can call them, you can text them, you can swing by their desk. So imagine. You, your team having to not only try and get work done, but also have to keep up with four to five different inputs and outputs of communication at any one time. This is why a lot of people in research argue that there's not more work to do in this day and age.
There's actually just more distractions, more information that is coming at us. At all times. And that is what's making our teams less productive. We also have just this expectation of immediate gratification in our culture today. So I can get on my phone right now and order my Starbucks that's going to be delivered to my house in like 15 minutes.
I don't have to get in my car, I don't have to put shoes on, I don't have to go up to a store, I don't have to put in my order, wait for somebody to make it, no. It just comes to my door, I go about my day, and suddenly it's magically there. The same thing happens for my groceries. I can get on, social media and post something.
And immediately get gratification through likes or comments. I don't have to go and call somebody up on the telephone. I don't have to go and meet somebody for a cup of coffee. We are just used to instant gratification. And because we've made it so easy to get that gratification, to get that answer, to get that response.
We use it without hesitation. I bet if you asked yourself how many times you have sent an email or pinged someone on Slacks or Teams with a question or a request for like, can you shoot me this deliverable or whatever it is, And you sent it and then you're like, wait, I don't actually need that. Like you could have gone and dug through your files or your emails and found that deliverable that they sent you a week or two ago, but it's just so much easier to ping them and ask them to send it for you.
You could take the time to, think through this problem or try to get this answer, but it's just so much easier to ping your team, to ping that stakeholder and ask them. But what we don't realize is the cost of that. There is a cost every time we add somebody to an email chain because, Oh. Jake would just love to be on this email train.
I'm just going to include him just in case. There's a cost every time we ping somebody asking for a deliverable that we probably could find ourselves asking a question that we probably don't even need to ask or don't need the answer to. There is 1, 000 percent a cost every time we schedule a meeting that could have been an email.
Every time that we add two or three extra participants that if we deep down ask ourselves if they really need to be included, the answer is probably no. There are costs associated with each of those items and that cost directly eats away at your team's productivity. So I want you to be thinking about the emails, the pings, the meetings as direct termites eating away at your team's productivity.
And I want you to think about right now, are your termites feasting away right now because they have endless meetings and emails and pings to eat away at. Or are we starving out those termites? Cause we have made those communication channels so sacred. So like you think twice, the expectation is you better think twice before adding somebody to an email chain before scheduling a meeting before every single person on that meeting, you are thinking critically around why they need to be there before pinging somebody.
You are critically thinking about, is this really worth the cost? Is this really worth distracting them when they're doing the deep work? When they're driving true productivity and impact on what actually matters? Now, there are a million different ways that we can tackle this specific, um, productivity eater.
So how we can tackle meetings versus emails versus, things like Slack or teams. And if you want to dive into those, you need to be in the new program that we are, driving. out for January. It does not even have a name yet, but I will link the link to it down below where we are talking about how to pinpoint the biggest barriers in your team and how to develop simple, small, actionable experiments to actually tackle those.
And part of that is I'm actually developing an entire bank of simple shifts. that you can use within your team to make improvements. And it is going to be so freaking good y'all. So I'll drop the link to that below. Um, and hopefully it will have a name by then. Okay. So like I mentioned, there are a lot of different ways you can go about tackling this, but the first thing that I want you to focus on And eradicating these specific types of productivity termites is simply making the cultural shift around that people's time and attention is a precious resource.
And that every single time you do send that email, that ping, that meeting, you are eating away at that resource. Now, of course, the best way to do this is by having a conversation with your team, because we are all about with them, not to them. When we bring our team into the solution process, the changes are significantly more likely to stick than us simply mandating something on them.
So how I like to go about this is bringing my team together. A simple 30 minute conversation will do if you can tack it onto the back of a team meeting. And just have the conversation, what are the biggest distractors in your day when it comes to getting your work done? Let them write them down. One idea per sticky note, have them work as individuals first, just give them two minutes, write down all your distractions, then have them stick them up on a whiteboard, looking for common themes, um, really figuring out.
Where are those like patterns, those groups of sticky notes where everyone's putting the same thing and then just have a conversation around it. Think about if we were to eradicate some of these, how much more time and energy we would have to put at other things and use it as a way to facilitate the conversation.
And the reason why I love this is because people are looking at each other, sticky notes and being like, holy crap. Every time I send that ping. It's significantly distracting people. In fact, another fun thing to do is have them write down the distractions and then write down how much time they estimate it takes up there, like in their day, like answering pings.
answering emails, things like that. The response is almost always shocking to everyone. And when they're able to see firsthand how much time the broader team is wasting on these things, it's much more likely that they're going to think twice. Before doing these things moving forward, so have them write out the distractions and then have the conversation around if we were to eradicate some of these, what could we do?
What could we spend our time on? What could we achieve? With all of this extra time, energy, and capacity. And so by having that conversation, we're bringing awareness to it. Another thing I like to do is after having this conversation, coming up and agreeing as a team to a few working agreements around questions we ask ourselves before sending an email, scheduling a meeting or pinging someone.
So some ideas is, is this urgent or can it wait? Super simple. Can this be resolved with a shared document? Love me some shared documents, some asynchronous working. We don't need to get in a meeting and all stare at a PowerPoint together. Let's just share the document and work on it asynchronously through comments.
Who really needs to be included in this conversation? Maybe even saying, making rules like we only include people who have a deciding vote in the meeting. People who simply need to be informed will be informed after the meeting via email. So that's a way to reduce the amount of people in meetings, but just coming up with three to five max, we don't need a list of 15 rules you need to follow just three to five max, some things, some questions to ask or some guiding principles for how we want to protect our team's time by reducing the communication.
Okay. So that is our first productivity eater. Our second productivity eater is going to be. Over collaboration. I feel like collaboration was so hyped up, especially with the introduction of the matrix structure a few years ago, we all got collaboration happy. Everyone needs to be included in everything.
The more perspectives, the better, but we didn't quite realize the negative impact of that. Meaning that more people in a room also equals more opinions, which means we spent a whole lot of time talking about, the work, how it's going to get done, who's doing what we love to have meetings that don't really have a purpose.
We love excessive brainstorming sessions. We love to just. Add people to the project simply because, well, we don't want them to feel left out. But here's the thing. There's so many issues that that creates. Nobody's really accountable for the work if everyone has a piece of it. Which significantly impacts our, team's ability to make an impact because they're spending a whole lot of wasted effort trying to figure out who's actually supposed to be doing what and who's supposed to be driving tasks across the finish line.
That's where we get a lot of finger pointing. Also, when you have more cooks in the kitchen, things are just going to take longer. It is a lot easier for two, maybe three people to come up with a plan for how to tackle a body of work to agree on a shared decision than it is for five, six, seven, eight, 10, 15, because a lot of us are sitting in meetings with 10 or 15 people.
If you have 10 or 15 people in a meeting, There's no way all of those people can have a productive conversation. It's just not possible. A lot of overcollaboration really stems from just the human need, the human experience of we're afraid to miss out. If I'm not in this meeting, I'm not going to get a piece of information.
I'm not going to be seen as important. I'm not going to be able to relay my opinion. So, I have to be in everything. But if we're in everything, then we're neglecting the things that only we can do. So, the simple improvement is really a mindset shift here. Is that there is joy in missing out. We want to celebrate.
Opting out of meetings, opting out of projects that aren't necessarily the best use of our team's time and talent, and trusting the roles and responsibilities of others. And trusting that if you're truly needed in the meeting, you'll get added. Trusting that if you need the information, it'll get shared with you.
Because here's the thing. Sitting in that meeting, passively listening to what's being said while you secretly type away and answer emails on your laptop. Yeah, you may make a tiny impact because you caught that one little tiny needle in a haystack of where you needed to have this information or be included, but a lot of the times your time.
And energy and brain power would have been better spent doing that deeper work, that more strategic work that only you could do. That is the mentality we want to bring forth on our team. There's joy in missing out. We love not being included in everything. We love getting less and less emails. We love when people aren't driving by our desk all day long because that means we have more time, energy, and capacity for what matters most.
Now I get it. It's not easy to just simply remove yourself from meetings. And trust that others are going to fill you in, that's going to take some work. So I want you to think about where are those low risk opportunities where you can celebrate the joy of missing out, where you know the risk of you missing something in this area is it's not going to make a significant harm to you or your team.
And let's go ahead and remove those distractions, those over collaborations, remove yourself from those projects, those initiatives, those meetings, those email chains, because that right there alone is going to create more capacity, more space, for you to focus on what matters most. And then it's a matter of looking at those ones where you're Like, most of these meetings are not super productive, or I'm not really needed on this initiative, but the risk is kind of high here.
And those are the areas where we're going to say, can we put some sort of working agreement or something in place to say, Hey, these are the things I need to be made aware of and put those in the hands of the right individual. To where that information gets relayed to you or in this project, these are the specific points where we need to get brought in.
You don't need to attend every, you know, weekly project meeting, but just let them know these are the points we need to get brought in and that's when you get brought in. So can we create some sort of working agreement there where we can create mutual trust of when you need to be put in? So that is how we need to reduce over collaboration.
Which is our second productivity termite. Now the last one I want to talk about is interruptions. These are much more prevalent when you are working inside the office. And this is what most of you guys would refer to as interruptions. Drive bys. The, hey, do you got a sec? Can I ask you a quick question?
Hey, can I run something by you? This is like, if you are sitting in your cube or your office, you have a constant, please come distract me sign on you at all. I know so many people who have to go hide somewhere when they're in the office if they want to get any work done. I know personally, I had flexibility in my job where I would come into the office for in person meetings, but deep work, I was 1000 percent going home to work at my personal desk.
Cause that is the only way I could get work done. The office is an endless amount of interruptions and it's not just the drive bys. It's the like, Oh, there's free food in the common area. Oh, you know, just like there's some sort of thing happening over here. Let's all go check that out. It's just constant things happening.
The person in the cube two, rows down having the most lively conversation that you can't even hear your own thoughts. Interruptions are so common in the office and they slowly eat away at your team's productivity. So we want to figure out how can we decrease these interruptions so they have more time to focus on deep work.
Because we know of a little thing called context switching, which is essentially the concept of every time your team has to switch their brain between different tasks. They lose productivity.
So it's you're sitting there plugged into deep into an Excel spreadsheet. And someone comes by with a question. You have to disconnect from the work you were doing. You have to apply your brain power to thinking through whatever question this is. And usually it's completely unrelated to what you're doing.
Completely different project, different bucket of work. So you have, your brain has to switch. Okay. Now we're thinking about this bucket of work. Now I need to process through solve this problem. You need to close that loop, answer that question for that individual. They walk off. That's great. Now you have to come back into your Excel sheet and You're not just going to like be able to jump back in and be like working just as smoothly as when you've started you have to then your brain has to go, okay, now we're back in this bucket of work.
Where were we? What were we doing? I need to switch from question answering mode to data processing mode. Okay, here we go. And now I'm in and we just lost. 10, 15 minutes between all of that. And that's assuming you only have one interruption, but we know that it's not just the drive bys, it's the emails, it's the pings, it's the meetings that are also happening.
So what we want to do is when we have that desk time and we are unable to move, you know, work from home or something like that, we want to protect that. So a few ways that I like to do this is. Office hours. This is not just for leaders. This is for everyone on my team. We love if possible, if we can agree on a common, area of our timeframe of office hours.
So office hours are every Tuesday and Thursday, nine to 11. This is a time where we're constantly, bugging each other. Getting help on things, all of that. So we love if we have common office hours. Now, I know that's not practical for every team calendars are constantly changing, things are chaotic.
So another option that I like to use as a little bit more flexible is just simple, deep work signs. So if you think about it like a Slack or a teams, you can put it on, do not disturb, which I highly encourage my team to use. You should not always be green. If you are doing deep work, you should change it to do not disturb.
So there's that. But you also need to have the same thing for your cube. And this is where we've seen like the silly pictures and things like that with people with signs on their back. Do not bother me But honestly, it's necessary. So how I do it is I just make Little signs for my team. I laminate them.
I make it really simple and it just says I'm currently in deep work until Blank time and that tends to be enough And the reason why we want to put a timeframe is because we don't want that other person losing productivity, constantly doing drive bys around your desk to see if you're free now. So we give a specific time.
Hey, I'm in deep work until. And that's their signal to come back by at one. And now we've saved two people productivity because the one person's able to stay in deep work. The other person knows, okay, one o'clock, I put a little note in my calendar to go swing back by. That's my time to get the question answered.
So As I'm going through these simple shifts, I know, I know in your head right now, you're saying Holly, that sounds so lovely. That won't work for us because my team is particularly crazy. Everything's on fire or my stakeholders would never respect that. Or whatever the excuse may be, but that's exactly what it is.
It's an excuse. While you may not be able to use the specific example that I gave, how can you use a smaller version of that? How can you change it to work for your team? It doesn't need to be, we need to completely eradicate all the productivity termites when it comes to communication. But if you can just make it 5 percent better, a 5 percent improvement, amplified over five team members, That's a crap ton of productivity you just got back.
And the reality is that when you get that productivity back and we learn from what's working, we're able to try more, we're able to push further. So yes, while each of the examples I gave might not work for your specific team, I want you to try and push what is one thing we can do to eat at these productivity termites.
Just pick one category and one little thing that you can try next week. And here's the other thing, is that a lot of the times, It's just around communication in order to overcome change resistance. So if you're like, Oh, I love the idea of office hours, but my stakeholders would never respect that.
Actually, you'd be surprised as long as you communicate it in the way that they're going to resonate with. Always lead with how the change will benefit them. If I tell you, Hey, so and so we are no longer, you're no longer going to have 24 seven access to my team to ask any question because my team is too busy and they need more time to sit at their desk and do work.
You, it just immediately puts you on the defense. Like, ah, They're not serving me. They're reducing the level of service that I'm used to getting. But if instead you say, Hey, we are working on, or we're piloting this thing called team office hours, you are going to have designated access to our team on these specific days during these times.
And this time is specific for our team to address your questions or your problems. And this also gives our team more capacity to continue to, I don't know, what's something specific that they really care about? Like there's reports that they love getting generated, but your team doesn't have time to generate those reports and pull insights because they're so distracted with drive bys and emails.
Then use that this is also going to give our team dedicated time to focus on getting you those, reports in a timely manner with detailed insights that will allow you to X, Y, and Z. Do you see how the communication around, Hey, this is what we're going to do. And here's how it's going to benefit you because they don't care how it's going to benefit your team.
They care about the changes to them. They're skimming that email saying, What do I need to know? What's in it for me? So put it up front and you'd be surprised by how many more people will be on board. You're always going to have the resistors. That's okay. But it's worth upsetting one or two resistors if it means that we're going to have more productivity, more deep work time to do the high impact work, which is going to benefit the large majority of those we serve.
Okay, so your takeaway for this week is to pinpoint where do you have termites eating away at your team's productivity? And what is one simple shift? You can take next week to start eradicating those termites and free back up your team's productivity. If you want to jump in on that new yet to be named, but freaking amazing offer that we are launching in January.
I'm going to link that for you below. That's going to be the go to place where we're going to be diagnosing. Exactly. Beyond productivity, what is impacting your team's ability to do their best work? This is for my leaders who are like, my team's totally in chaos. I have no idea where to start or my leaders who are like, my team is productive.
They're getting results, but I know they're not living up to their full potential. I'm going to teach you exactly how to pinpoint where you need to be focusing on, how to prioritize. What areas truly need your attention and how to create simple shifts.
true, simple shifts that are actually going to drive behavioral change in your team. I'm going to drop that for you guys down below. And as always go do the work and DM me and let me know how it's going. I want to hear from you.
