Researcher Jim Collins in his book “Good to Great” outlines the CEO of great companies and found empirical evidence that Charismatic leaders may not be good for your organisation. This is because most of the focus tends to be on them, their brilliance or how they might save their company. This is detrimental to the growth of a company.

Watch this video to understand why:

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Hawthorne Workers (picture from ansanelli.com)

In 1924-1932, a series of experiments were conducted to examine how fatigue, monotony and supervision on an assembly line affected productivity. However at the end of the experiment, researchers were amazed to find out many other correlations that affected employee productivity and morale. Many of their insights and observations are still used by today’s management. What they have discovered decades ago will be to increase productivity of your team today.

The name of this experiment is called ….

The Hawthorne Experiment

This experiment was carried out at Hawthorne Works, a factory that produced electrical components and equipment. It was one of the state-of-the-art factory of its time where over 40,000 people worked there. Hawthorne Works also pioneered many quality control practices and principles.

In all the experiments, an observer sat and watched a particular control group. In some of the experiments, changes to the illumination of the room were made. In another, conditions of the work environment constantly changed. In fact, it was changed 23 times. Changes included introduction of 2 five minute breaks, more breaks being subsequently added, breaks were lengthened to 10 minutes, food was given during breaks and staff were being dismissed half an hour earlier and then 1 hour earlier. In most cases, output generally increased.

What was interesting was even when conditions were worse off at some time, production generally increased. The amazing thing was that when these privileges were taken away and workers resumed their normal working conditions, output was increased by 25%. What was more interesting was that the team had no supervisor and they assumed personal responsibility for their work and output.

Here are some of the findings of the Hawthorne Experiment:

1.    The simple fact that the participants were asked to be part of an important experiment, created better attitude within them. They considered themselves to be an important group because their views were constantly sought after by the company.

2.    There is an eager desire within each person for cooperative activity…. and can be utilised by intelligent and straight-forward management.

3.    Consultation between management and employees gave a sense of belonging to the company. This helps people to take ownership of what they do.

4.    When employees form a social atmosphere in the work environment (which also included the observer), they tend to be more motivated.

Implications to the work environment and how you can use the Hawthorne effect in your work place:

1.    Giving your staff specialised training or verbal appreciation will help them work harder and increase their motivation.

2.    Getting people to work in small teams helps to improve performance if the team is harmonious and dedicated.

3.    Giving a sense of freedom to staff without a need for micro-management will tend to yield ownership in their work. Frequent interaction between management and staff is also a crucial contributing factor.

4.    Creating an environment where there is a social factor is also important to staff motivation. There is a need to change some management’s thinking that fun or social relationships should not take place in work environments. It does add to your bottom line when you have employees who feel a sense of belonging to the company.

PS: I would love to hear your comments. Do let me know what you think! If you have other reasons, do share them in the comment link above this article.

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This is part 2/2 of the continuation in “Get Back 20% of Your Time Lost At Work!”

4. Reduce Meeting Time And Set Clear Objectives For It

Long meetings with no clear objectives are often another potential time waster. It is always essential to have a clear agenda with a specific outcome you want to achieve. Eg, decide on our marketing direction by the end of this meeting or set out a timeline of programs for 2009. If you are clear on the objectives, you tend to stay focused on the topic and avoid wandering off to other issues. It is also wise to set an end time to the meeting. Instead of the usual 1 hr blocks for meeting, decide that its going to be no long than 45 minutes. Then slowly reduce future meetings to just 30min blocks. Reducing meeting durations also trains people to get straight to the point and not wander from topic to topic.

5. Kaizen Approach To The Way You Do Things

How many times do we fall into this trap of busyness and we do not spend enough time to plan and evaluate how to improve things? The Japanese have this “Kaizen” principle, which means Continuous Improvement. This slow, incremental improvement is always observed at all levels of work. If we are too busy, how can we set aside time to evaluate and improve our work processes? In my previous experience working with a manufacturing company, I’ve learnt that if you could improve an operation by just 2 seconds, you literally save thousands of dollars in man hours and machinery cost.

6. Do Not Multi-Task

I know this statement will offend probably many people; however I stand by this rule. Multi-tasking actually makes us feel very rushed and we tend to shorten our attention span on things. This makes us feel rather frustrated and unsettled. Intense multitasking can induce a stress response, an adrenaline rush that when prolonged, can damage cells that form new memory, according to a research study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology by Dr. David Meyer. He mentions that multitasking actually makes a person inefficient. There is time lost between switching among tasks increases with the complexity of the tasks.

The best way approach to doing things is just doing things one thing at a time.

If you like this article, please subscribe to our blog by getting the Free Report on “7 Deadly Secrets to creating a Dynamic and Cohesive Team”. If you have comments, I would love to hear them. Please post them below.

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Believe me, I have been there. I used to think that being busy was extremely important, not till I found out that I was doing a lot of things, but nothing productive was done. In this world of multi-tasking, I asked myself is there something I could do to make myself more effective and yet have more time for myself?

The answer was a resounding YES! It is so simple and you could do it too. Now is the time to do less and yet be more effective. Follow these lessons and you will immediately gain back your lost time!

1. Dispel the Myth of Time Management

There is NO such thing as time management, only self management. We cannot technically manage time, but we can manage ourselves in the way we do things. We have to decide the difference between being productive and being busy. There is no other way.

2. Check your emails only twice a day

Emails are considered to be the most disruptive thing to work in our everyday work. We tend to have this compulsive urge to check out emails almost 20 times a day. When there are no emails, we tend to create them. Some of us even fall into the habit of replying emails thru and fro when it all takes is a phone call to quickly resolve an issue. If there are more than 2 emails replies going out from you, try talking over the phone instead.

My suggestion is to check emails twice a day at 10am and 4pm. This gives you the early morning to plan what you need to do for the whole day. By only checking twice a day, you also tend to clear emails faster than usual.  Doing things in bulk give you momentum and you tend to be more selective in the way you read emails.

3. Avoid taking phone calls as much as possible

Taking phone calls can literally break your momentum when you do things. Have you ever got into the momentum of doing sometime and when the call comes, it just suddenly breaks your concentration? Even during meetings and discussions, phone calls can often disrupt the flow of thoughts and exchanges between colleagues.

Okay, I am going to stop here. Do watch out for the next post. If you like this article, please subscribe to our blog by getting the Free Report on “7 Deadly Secrets to creating a Dynamic and Cohesive Team”. If you have comments, I would love to hear them. Please post them below.

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Here’s an important lesson that helped moved my business even in the dark times that we are experiencing. If you get this, it will totally change your perspective on things.

What do I mean by this?

In the current economic situation we are facing, listen to what people are saying. What are their minds thinking about most of the time? Is there brightness of the future or is it dominated by doom and gloom?

I recently had a tea session with a business friend of mine and he lamented that things were going to get worse from Oct 2008. He painted an extremely bleak picture and was rather despondent on what is to come, eg. further lay offs, his company diving into the red and looking at ways how to cut his business cost. His mind was the impending doom and he basically focused on how bad the situation was.

He asked me, “How about you? How are you doing now?”

I told him that I was fine; in a position that was much better than I was last year.

I totally agree with him that times are bad and some of my clients have already cut back their training budgets. This affected me. However, I told him that this economic crisis was interpreted differently from me.

I choose not to stumble to all the negativity and decided that I had personal responsibility in deciding how I should react to the bad news.

I chose to spend even more money in advertising this year and started to work with strategic partners in pushing out programs. We also started explaining to companies how we could help their employees be resourceful in their work. This lead to over 9 clients meeting up with me over a span of 1 month, indicating interest in spending on my programs.

I choose to focus on abundance even during this period, because companies need help in getting their employees to stay motivated and start generating profits, even if they are not sales people.

I choose to see the dark times as an opportunity to evaluate what are the inefficient things that have plagued my company that I want to eliminate them.

What we focus on in times like this is really important. This is not just positive thinking but actually focusing on what we have influence over and doing something about it. I cannot change the economy, but I can change the way I make my company grow. For employees, are you afraid of the lay-offs that are happening? Can I urge you to add more value to your organisation, till the extend that there is really no fear of being fired simply because you are too valuable.

So… what are you focusing on right now? Possibilities or Limitations?

Kenneth’s notes:  I actually hang the flipchart on my side of my office to remind myself to focus correctly. This keeps me focused in what I should be doing. Why don’t you try it?

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