Human Stupidity

Friedrich Nietzsche | Defining Clarity in Expectations | Elsewhere | Factoids

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Quote of the Moment

The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place.

| Friedrich Nietzsche

That’s applicable to the next section, I think.

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Declining Clarity in Expectations

Gallup released a Workplace Report in January that has some disturbing insights. Gallup is hawkish in covering employee engagement and states that things aren’t great in that department:

Compared with 2020, employees still feel more detached from -- and less satisfied with -- their organizations and are less likely to connect to the companies’ mission and purpose or to feel someone cares about them as a person. The latter sentiment is an issue particularly for fully on-site employees whose jobs can be done remotely.

What really caught my attention (and others’) was the decline in ‘role clarity’, or more colloquially, employees losing sight of what is expected of them at work.

The pandemic seems to have been the beginning of this decline, described in this way:

The most fundamental engagement element is knowing what is expected of you. Gallup’s meta-analysis across 112,312 teams and business units finds strong linkages between this element and many important organizational outcomes, including productivity, employee retention, safety, customer engagement, and employee wellbeing.

Organizational leaders are at a distinct disadvantage in getting work done and meeting customer needs if expectations are not clear. Gallup’s research finds the vulnerability posed by unclear expectations exists across all types of employees in the new workforce. But that vulnerability is particularly acute among hybrid and fully remote workers who have experienced double the decline in knowing what’s expected of them compared with on-site workers whose jobs could be done remotely.

As a kneejerk response, you might attribute this lack of clarity to something that hybrid/remote workers are failing to do. But when you dig into additional findings it seems more likely that managers are the ones failing:

Gallup finds that a manager having one meaningful conversation per week with each team member develops high-performance relationships more than any other leadership activity. Gallup analytics have found managers can be quickly upskilled to have these ongoing strengths-based conversations that bring purpose and clear expectations to work, which is now deteriorating in U.S. organizations.

In this new hybrid and remote workplace, the clarity of what each of us is doing has never been more important. And the role of manager has never been more challenging. Whether they are managing remote or on-site employees, managers need their jobs to be streamlined to fulfill their most important responsibilities, which should be much more heavily weighted toward people management and coaching -- including those weekly conversations -- than filling out administrative forms.

And how do people learn what their role is? How about defining what their goals are?

Only 27% strongly agree, ‘my manager includes me in goal setting’.

It’s no surprise, considering how companies have adopted such a strong commitment to teamwork, that knowing what teammates are expected to do:

Gallup found that while less than half of employees with jobs that can be done remotely strongly agree that they know what is expected of them, the percentage jumps to 82%, 77%, and 84%, respectively, for fully remote, hybrid, and on-site employees who report that they know what their coworkers are expected to do.

But, as usual, despite teamwork’s importance in establishing clarity in expectations, as well as its pivotal position in productivity, companies overemphasis individual achievement:

Managers have the tough job of bridging this gap. Gallup has evidence that managers can be upskilled to accomplish that, but the numbers suggest that companies are failing to upskill managers in that way. [And I am not going to get into the mismatch between ‘customer-oriented goals’ and ‘creating customer value’. I’ll save that for another day.]

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Elsewhere

From Charter:

A new rule from the US Department of Labor will reclassify millions of gig workers as employees. Beginning March 11, the definitions for employees and independent contractors will change, reverting to an Obama-era test that considers the level of control an employer has over working conditions and workers’ ability to make a profit from their work, among other factors. 

This shift will have a broad impact, including ride-hailing companies (Uber, Lyft), and other industries who have pretended for years that workers are independent contractors, like nail salons, home health care, security services, and call centers. It will allow some of these workers to gain eligibility for benefits like minimum wage, overtime pay, social security cost-sharing, and unemployment insurance.

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In Two Hours of Meetings a Day Is More Than Enough for Most Workers, Matthew Boyle finds a hard ceiling on the time people tolerate for meetings:

Spending more than two hours a day in meetings can hurt productivity, a new survey found, putting a ceiling on an element of the daily grind that many workers have come to dread.

The survey of more than 10,000 desk workers globally from [Slack] found that two hours of meetings was the tipping point for most. Those who said they spent too much time on Zoom calls or in conference rooms were more than twice as likely to say they didn’t have enough time to focus on work that matters, instead of meetings. More than half of executives polled said they had too many meetings, while 27% of rank-and-file workers said the same. Too many meetings can force people to get tasks done after hours, something that about two out of five workers do at least once a week.

He adds some details of companies fighting meeting creep:

Large organizations waste $100 million a year on unnecessary gatherings. Twice a quarter, for example, Slack cancels all internal meetings for an entire week, and eliminates them on Fridays. The findings come as new tools are emerging that can capture the highlights of a meeting and send workers a summary — along with the agreed-upon next steps — later on.

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Also related to meetings: it seems meeting-free Fridays are now a thing, at least in the Tech sector: see How Asana and Slack’s meeting purges have paid off, by Cloey Callahan.

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Factoids

Mothers are 10 times as likely as fathers to take time off work to care for a sick child. | KKK

Only 10 times more likely?

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German companies are desperate to hire young people. More than a third of all businesses offering apprenticeships — on-the-job training alongside classroom work — did not receive a single application in 2023. | German Chamber of Commerce and Industry

Germany is in deep trouble, partly due to declining birth rates but also due to young people leaving less developed regions and migrating to urban areas.

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According to a recent report by SITA, in which 292 airlines and 382 airports around the world were surveyed, 70 percent of global airlines are expected to use some sort of biometric identification by 2026 and 90 percent of airports are currently investing in the technology. | Christine Chung

At least it will make airplane travel faster since travelers will flow through what today are long lines at security checkpoints. This is quite similar to the change on the highways when we adopted EZ-Pass and dismantled the toll booths.

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Convoluted decision-making processes waste time. Respondents to a 2018 McKinsey survey, for instance, said they spent 37% of their time making decisions, on average — and they estimated that more than half that time was spent ineffectively. | Nancy Duarte

This factoid was buried in an article that is half the confession of an obvious control freak CEO, and half an explanation of how senior staff to such a CEO should operate so that the company doesn’t go off the rails.