In work, your place can always be filled. But no one can fill your place at home. Give the job your meaningful contribution, but don’t spend all your time on it. Work efficiently, not excessively. I’ve complained that for years. Once I realized that these are my problems, not the company’s, the management’s or the […]
In work, your place can always be filled. But no one can fill your place at home. Give the job your meaningful contribution, but don’t spend all your time on it. Work efficiently, not excessively.
I’ve complained that for years. Once I realized that these are my problems, not the company’s, the management’s or the team’s problems, that’s when I started managing my life.” – DM
While working with targeting protocols, we perform one-to-one coaching with many employees and managers. The thing we hear most is “complaining about how busy the work is”. When we hear a complaint, we immediately ask; so whose responsibility is it that the work is this busy? Have you ever thought about what others might be perceiving about you when you are constantly saying you are so busy?
Work Efficiently, Not Excessively
Being at work day and night and always appearing to be busy is not an indicator of hard work, talent or high performance, contrary to what some employees and bosses may think. In fact, leaders who value efficiency and effective teams do not appreciate such an approach. On the contrary, such a state of being may even raise some questions about you in the minds of leaders.
Individual questions are;
- Do they have clear goals for what they should focus on?
- Could they be taking on work that they could delegate instead?
- Could they be reluctant to offer or seek help, and are they burdened with unnecessary work?
- Can’t they develop methods and systems which would make their job faster?
- Are they resistant to learning and development?
- Could there be time management issues?
Regarding the functioning of the team;
- Is there a fair distribution of work within the team?
- Does the team communicate adequately and help each other?
- Are regular, meaningful and short meetings held?
Some questions which come to mind about leadership;
- Are the goals clear?
- Are the goal in order of importance and priority?
- Are employee contributions clearly stated?
- Are there unnecessary tasks which waste time and effort because of unclear goals?
- Is unnecessary manpower used for repetitive tasks that could be automated with technology?
- If unnecessary time and energy on the operation is used, are there any planned attempts to eliminate it?
The list goes on like this. Inevitably, everyone who hears your complaints will start to question these aspects. Now, what would change if you took a few steps back and questioned yourself about these issues first?
Some of these are in our domain. For example, let’s suppose your goals are not clear. Then what can you do to make them clear? Or if you are constantly working in the same way, with the same methods, have you researched “what different ways, methods, technologies are available so I can do this job more simply and faster”? As a solution, if you focus on solving things in the domain first, you start to take control of your life. You can write yourself an OKR and announce it to the whole team.
Objective: To reduce my overtimes to zero that, my operational works does not take my family’s time.
Key Result 1: I will reduce the time I have to spend on the customer engagement process from 1 day to 2 hours in Q2.
Key Result 2: By the end of the month, I will clarify my goals with my manager and submit my priority plan for approval.
Key Result 3: I will search for technology-based solutions which will eliminate the distraction of an average of 27 phone calls per day, and I will present at least three solution suggestions at the end of Q1.
Key Result 4: I will reduce my overtime from 20 hours per week to 0 hours at the end of Q2.
You will feel better when you take the first step by determining your daily and weekly actions based on a set of goals that you take responsibility for.
There are two primary focuses for the 360 degrees of well-being in life. One is your level of job satisfaction. The other is ensuring you can spare enough time for yourself and your loved ones in your personal life.
At this point, if you have drawn your own boundaries and taken the responsibility, but others do not, no one can blame you when you join the great resignation movement ;))
