Managers meet 30 minutes after that, followed by directors, VPs, and finally the executive team. The next huddle, consisting of supervisors, follows 30 minutes later. The first huddle, consisting of front-line workers, begins at the start of the workday. Many highly productive organizations have instituted a system of tiered daily huddles, with a clear escalation sequence for all problems. Here are four countermeasures that will help: Tier your huddles. Personal solutions can be useful, but the most effective antidote to low productivity and inefficiency must be implemented at the system level, not the individual level.
I would argue that most productivity improvements belong there as well. Edwards Deming argued in his book Out of the Crisis, 94% of most problems and possibilities for improvement belong to the system, not the individual. Similarly, your personal urgent/important Eisenhower categories fall apart when the CEO asks you to do stop what you’re doing and handle something right away.Īs legendary statistician and management consultant W. You can be an email ninja, but with the explosion of email (not to mention instant messages, Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, and countless other communication tools), you’ll never be fast enough to deal with all the incoming communication. They work in complex organizations defined by interdependencies among people - and it’s often these interdependencies that have the greatest effect on personal productivity. It’s that they fail to account for the simple fact that most people don’t work in isolation. The problem isn’t with the intrinsic logic of any of these approaches. Given that people are still overwhelmed by work, buried in email, and unable to focus on critical priorities, it’s safe to say that these productivity hacks just don’t hack it. Those classes cover the pros and cons of Inbox Zero, the Pomodoro technique, the Eisenhower matrix, Getting Things Done, and countless other approaches that tantalize us with promises of peak productivity. All too often, that quest goes no further than time management training provided by the HR department. Leaders are always seeking to improve employee productivity (including their own).