Managers, Stop Distracting Your Employees - Nir And Far

Hello and welcome. We're reading nir's article Managers stop distracting your employees. Nir, you want to set it up and just say how we're doing this?

Absolutely. So I wrote this article titled Managers stop distracting your employees and we are going to read it together and then anyone on LinkedIn if you're tuning in live, feel free to ask questions, comments, concerns, and we'll get to those probably at the end of the article.

Yeah, it's going to be great. I will read it. NIR will come in at the breaks. Let's get started. It's no secret that companies spy on their staff. A recent New York Times article stated that eight of the 10 largest American companies surveil their employees with tracking software. According to the Washington Post, global demand for employee monitoring tools increased by 65% from 2019 to 2022. The rise of remote work has made corporate leaders paranoid, thinking they must monitor their employees every digital move. Employee productivity software often measures vanity metrics such as a productivity score for how many emails employees send, virtual meetings they attend, and how much time they spend typing. It doesn't track tasks away from the computer, disregarding time spent thinking, reading or writing on paper, for example, or measure accomplishments and outcomes. Not even the leaders of productivity software companies approve of this use case for their apps. Measuring productivity based on surface level activity like messages sent gives us an extraordinarily limited view into a person's contributions to their organization, brian Elliott, Slack senior vice president, told the Washington Post. Not only is it arbitrary, it's usually counterproductive. When employees know their performance is being measured by the rules of productivity software, they become motivated to prioritize emails and messages over their core work. This perpetuates a terrible cycle of responsiveness, as consultant turned professor Leslie Perlow wrote in her book Sleeping with your Smartphone. It's what happens when employees begin adjusting to these demands, adapting the technology they use, altering their daily schedules, the way they work, even the way they live their lives and interact with their families and friends to be better able to meet the increased demands on their time. While managers may not have a say in whether their company employs productivity software, they can examine whether their management style is sending a similar message. Ask yourself do you expect near immediate responses to emails? Do you ask for regular status updates or send Just wanted to make sure you saw my last email emails. Do you plan check ins around your schedule without considering your employees needs? Do you plan brainstorming sessions with no agenda? If your answer to any of the above questions is yes, you're Likely distracting your employees rather than encouraging their productivity. These four strategies can help you change your ways and build an indistractable workplace. Nir we're going to get into four things I think people can do, but I just wanted to check what was the reason that you wanted to write this article or what were you thinking about as the reasoning here?

All right. To be honest, I was thinking about how I had bosses who would do these things above, right? So one of my first jobs out of college, actually my first job out of college was at the Boston Consulting Group, which now has really changed their ways. It's interesting, in my book Indistractable, I use Boston Consulting Group as a case study to talk about a company that went from a highly distractible organization to now an indistractable organization. They made all kinds of changes. But when I was there back in 2001, it was a very high stress culture where we exhibited all these negative attributes that Leslie Perlow, who you mentioned earlier, who wrote this book sleeping with your smartphone and who teaches at the Harvard Business School. And like these four points, do you expect near immediate responses to emails? Oh my God. My boss constantly expected us to reply all the time, anytime, 24 7. Do you ask for regular status updates or send. Just want to make sure you saw my last email email. Do you plan check ins around your schedule without considering your employees needs? Do you plan brainstorming sessions with no agendas? So that's what I was thinking about when I wrote this article is I remember what that felt like and I remember getting physically ill when I worked in that type of culture. I was a young guy, I was right out of undergrad and I was constantly sick physically as well as what felt like mentally ill as well because of this high stress culture of, of always being on, always having this expectation of having to respond and that was really detrimental and I'm sure my work output suffered. Now that wasn't always the case. I remember my very first boss did none of these things. I had a wonderful boss and I remember working for him thinking man, I just want to make him look good. But then when the Case team changed and I had a different boss who didn't know how to stop distracting his employees, I didn't want to work for him anymore. And actually that was ultimately why I left that company. I didn't talk about that in the article, but that was kind of the inspiration.

Even reading your introduction, I was so nervous. I was like oh no, this is me with my team sometimes. So I want to get into these suggestions, and then I want to ask you how we balance that when we have employees okay with different types. Let's get into the four things. Number one Open a dialogue about Distractions A big problem with distraction at work is that we can't easily talk about it. Asking employees for feedback on the most significant work distractions or won't work if they fear reprisal for sharing their thoughts. To build a culture where employees do their best work, managers must foster what psychologists call psychological safety or the sense of security that comes from knowing there's no punishment for raising reasonable concerns. Only when people feel safe discussing their workplace problems will you be able to find solutions to fix them. Chances are, if your workplace can't talk about distraction and there are all kinds of other skeletons in the closet you can't discuss either, do you want to pause here and add some stuff?

This is the most important point of the article that as much as we blame our tech devices, all the pings, dings and rings, it's very easy to blame the devices and say, ah, that's why we're all distracted at work. That is a symptom, not the cause of the illness. The real cause of the illness is that we can't talk about the problem of distraction at work, right? If you can't raise your hand and say, hey, this isn't working for me, like the fact that I constantly feel like I need to check Slack or email every every 30 seconds, I can't get my work done. If you can't raise your hand and say, hey, this is a problem. Can we talk about this problem? That is the problem. And I guarantee you, if you can't talk about this problem of distraction at work, there's all kinds of other problems at work as well.

Number two Schedule sync with your employees. Many managers have little idea how their employees spend their time. Then when people take longer than expected to finish tasks and projects, you wonder if employees lack the capability or motivation to do their job well. But chances are this isn't the case. Likely, employees are distracted by constant interruptions, pointless meetings, and a never ending flow of emails, some of which you may have initiated. Schedule syncing helps you gain better insight into how people spend their time, which can be achieved in several ways. One option is to ask employees to share a time boxed case calendar of what they plan to do and when. For example, when they like to answer emails and messages, do focused work, or be available for calls and meetings. This gives you visibility into how they plan their day so you can avoid interruptions during their focused work or off hours or suggest reprioritization if necessary. You can also share your calendar so employees know when they can or can't interrupt you. Another schedule syncing tactic is to have your team designate specific distraction free periods each day. No messages, no calls, no emails, no meetings, and no quick in person check ins for anyone. Using schedule syncing tactics will help you gain better insight into how employees spend their time without micromanaging them. Well, that's a neat idea, Nir. I like that.

Yeah. So this, this timebox calendar idea we've talked about a lot on previous episodes and it's not something I came up with. It's been around for a very, very. Psychologists have a fancy name for it called planning implementation intention, which is just a fancy way of saying planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. But one of the benefits of that practice is now that you have a physical artifact right now that you can print out your weekly schedule or show it on a screen to your boss. You can do that. Schedule, sync and show. Look, here are the hours when I'm going to be doing focused work. Here are the times when I've scheduled for meetings. Here's the time when I'm going to be checking email. Here's when I'm available and have my door open when I. What you don't want is to not have that clarity with your manager so that they can feel they can interrupt you anytime they want. So just having that very quick conversation, it literally can take 10 minutes a week to say, hey boss, here's what I'm working on. Can we synchronize our schedule so that, you know what I'm busy doing? This has a few benefits. One, you minimize all those interruptions. And then two, you help them do the most important job that your manager has to do, which is to help you. You prioritize. That is your manager's most important job. So when you sit down with your manager and show them, hey, here's my schedule, here's what I plan to do this week. Now here's this list of things that I didn't find time for in this week ahead. But let me know what I should reprioritize, right? If you want me to work on this project as opposed to attending that meeting, let's discuss that now and I'll reprioritize as opposed to the week going by and saying, you know, why did you go to that meeting? That was a waste of your time. You should have been doing this instead of you can only get that kind of clarity by having that schedule sync.

That really resonated with me that one of the most important roles of a manager is to help prioritize that managers can see.

The larger picture that sometimes the employees cannot.

Yeah, that is the only job of a manager is to help prioritize. The problem is so many managers, they don't do that. Right. And they fear doing that because they're worried about micromanaging. And so that's why I think that employees should manage their managers. They should do what we call managing up by saying, no, no, boss, I want to sit down with you and get clarity around what's most important right now. And it's only through that check in process that you can do that. And so that actually helps you minimize burnout. We know that burnout and symptoms of mental health degradation at work are caused when there's the confluence of these two symptoms. Those two, these two conditions are environments with high expectations and low control. That is literally the formula for burnout. High expectations and low control. And so when you sit down with your manager, you're level setting those expectations and you're, you have more agency, more control over your schedule by clarifying it with your boss as opposed to what most people do. They just kind of, they keep these very high expectations which are sometimes ill defined and they don't have any control over their time. And that is a recipe for burnout.

That's helpful to remember that, that burnout thing. I. There's a great article where you talked about this. Do you happen to remember the name of this? Where it was the, where it was the high expectations but the low thing. I'm drawing a blank. Yeah, yeah.

I don't remember the name of the article, but I've discussed it. I've mentioned it's in indistractable, of course, but it's. I also mentioned it on my blog. So if you type it, the. The study was done by two researchers by the name of Stansfield and Candy. I think they were out of Oxford, if I'm not mistaken.

Moving on to number three. Number three, don't hold meetings without an agenda. Think of how many meetings you attended in the past week. Now ask yourself how many of those meetings were a waste of time and likely could have been an email. Next, recall how many meetings you attended had an agenda circulated by the organizer. I'm guessing very few agendas were invented for a reason. And although it's a practice adhered to by high school student council groups, people somehow Forget it. When they get to the corporate world, too often people schedule a meeting to avoid having to put in the effort of solving a problem themselves. Collaboration can be a powerful problem solving tool, but people shouldn't use meetings as a distraction from the hard work of thinking. Requiring an agenda keeps everyone on track and cuts down on unnecessary meetings by adding a bit of effort on the part of the organizer before calling 1. Does this happen to you still today or does it still happen a lot near?

It does, but it happens a lot less ever since I wrote about this. So, you know, it's, it's. And this, this used to bug me so much because I would see it all the time in the corporate world and I still occasionally see it where people call a meeting because they don't want to do the hard work of thinking for themselves.

Right?

This happens all the time, as you know. I don't want to sit down and actually think this through. I'm going to call a meeting. I want to get input. I want to get everybody's thoughts together in one place. And we know actually that the optimal size for a brainstorm, the optimal size, and studies have found this, the optimal size for a brainstorming group is two people or less. Two people or less people think, oh, we want to get everybody in the room and get their thoughts. No, that actually is terrible for brainstorming. That. What tends to happen when you get a bunch of people in a room for a brainstorm is that the highest, highest paid, the most dominant and the most male acting person tends to dominate the entire conversation and we don't get everybody's thoughts. So the best thing to do if you want to brainstorm is to give the stakeholder who wants to call the meeting to say, hey, I'm responsible for this project. I'd like to get your thoughts. Here's the question. Can you spend 30 minutes this week thinking about this and then send me your ideas? And then that person who is in charge of that project takes that input and, and then digests it and comes up with a recommendation because the point of a meeting. Many people don't realize this. There's only one reason for a business meeting. One reason, right? There's not. It's not a social engagement. That's a different animal. It's not for brainstorming. We just talked about why meetings are not good for brainstorming. Those should be done on your own or with one other person, maximum. The purpose of a meeting is to gain consensus. That is the only purpose of a business meeting, to gain Consensus, right? And so to do that, you have to have an agenda. Why are we going to meet if we don't know what to do, what the point of the meeting is, and what we are supposed to gain consensus around?

Funny to have a meeting to do the work of the meeting. It's a meeting. To have a meeting, it's why, right?

Or to schedule the next meeting.

Moving on. Number four, Number four, set an example. Company culture, like water, flows downhill. People turn to their managers to know what's expected of them. You can't demand that your staff work without distraction if you're constantly looking at your phone in the middle of meetings and sending emails at midnight. So make time for focused work yourself. Let people know when you're available and don't interrupt others during their focused work or off hours. The most critical step to building an indistractable workplace is being an indistractable boss. While leaders may suspect the source of employee distraction is Facebook, TikTok or Netflix, in truth, it's more likely to be how we work. The above strategies discussing the problem of distraction at work, adopting schedule syncing, cutting down on superfluous agenda, free meetings, and modeling what it means to be indistractable can help you improve employee well being and productivity by getting to the root causes of distraction at work.

Absolutely. So this is the real crux of the article, is that instead of just blaming the technology, just blaming the tools in our hands, we really want to ask ourselves, what's our role in perpetuating this culture of distraction in the workplace? And it comes down to, I think these, these four strategies. And just to reemphasize that fourth and final point around setting an example, I can't tell you how many times I'm called in to help a company with this problem of distraction. And the boss calls me and says, hey, we really need your help. Come over here and teach us how to be indistractable. And I get into the conference room and I'm going to give my presentation and guess who it is in the back of the room that's sitting there on their phone because they're so important they have to reply to all their emails right there. It's not the young people, right? It's not the people who are so called addicted to TikTok. It's the big boss. It's always the big boss because. And then I know exactly what the problem is that you know, as I wrote in the article, culture flows downhill. It's like water, it flows downhill. So people look at what the expectations of the boss are. So if you're not indistractable, your employees won't be either. This applies to parents as well. I talk to parents all the time. It says, oh, my kid's always on Fortnite. It won't get off TikTok. And then as they're telling me this, they're checking Facebook. Right. So you can't be a hypocrite. You have to set the example yourself for your employees, for your family as well. While we're here, Nick, maybe we'll just answer one question here from Vivian. Posted a quick question. Is that all right?

Yeah, let's do it.

Yeah. Vivian, thank you so much for being here. And Vivian asks, how do you tell the nice, good customer PMs who aren't addressing unintentional distractions? So I think that there is a certain level of competency that is actually pretty low, that there's no such thing as a good or bad manager. There's just one that hasn't been trained or is not skilled in this particular way of thinking. And I think many of us now have to evolve the way we work for an environment that has many more potential distractions. Now, you could argue that these distractions have always been here. They've just changed form. So now that many of us have these devices where you're able to work outside the office more, and so we're kind of able to be distracted all day long. But even if you're working in the office environment, in a physical office, you still have some, you know, a manager tapping on the shoulder and say, hey, I need that TPS report. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but we need to talk. And that can be very distracting unless you do these practices. So I don't think it's a matter of a good or bad manager. It's more a matter of making sure that all of us use these tactics and then it becomes socially acceptable as well. I think that's. That's where company culture really comes in. It needs to be socially acceptable to talk about this problem of distraction. And that's psychological. This theory of psychological safety is something that we need no matter what the problems we are addressing in the workplace. Again, if you can't talk about the problem of distraction at work, you probably have all kinds of other problems you can't talk about either. So this becomes a cultural practice where it becomes all right to say, you know what, I need to log off for a bit. Okay, I'm not going to be able to check Slack and email every 30 seconds because this is my time in my day where I am indistractable. So it's about educating our workforce with these new skills.

You're listening to near and Far, Business Behavior and the Brain. We do these podcasts where we read Near's latest articles and then here and only here you get the behind the scenes of why near wrote it and things that he's also thinking about the current and latest logic. Near is the best selling author of Hooked how to build habit forming products and also of Indistractable how to control your attention and choose your life. He blogs@nearandfar.com that's N I R and FAR F A R and there's a weekly newsletter. You've heard me talk about this. If you're not subscribed yet, what are you doing? It's a weekly newsletter filled with science backed strategies for designing healthy habits your customers will love. I'm a subscriber to the newsletter and I appreciate that. Each week near sends three actionable tactical articles that you can use in your professional life to get smarter and better thinking about really these ideas. Those science backed strategies to design healthy habits that your customers will love. It's not just for that though. It's also user experience, design, behavioral economics, and even neuroscience. Sign up today for the free newsletter@www.nearandfar.com. we will catch you next week. Thank you everybody for tuning in. Have a great week.