There aren’t enough workers to get everything done. But does it all need to be?

By now we have all heard about the Great Resignation. People are leaving the traditional workforce in droves. A sizeable proportion of these job leavers are retirees, who are unlikely ever to return to full-time employment. Many others (like myself!) are leaving for the gig economy, where they can be their own boss and control their own hours and activities.

Meanwhile, there is enormous demand for products and services that just seems to keep growing. This leaves organisational leaders in a constant battle to keep up. They not only need to recruit to backfill the vacant positions but also to take on new staff to support business growth.

It seems there is more work to be done then there are people available to do it. But wait – are we needlessly creating a rod for our own backs? Does all this work even need to be done? What if you could find ways to cut hours of pointless work from your own and your employees’ workloads? Here are a few suggestions to get you started.

Streamline processes

Work begets work. Without fail, in every organisation I have ever worked for or with, there are systems, processes, and procedures that only exist for their own sake. Most of these could be cut entirely. The meetings that could have been an email. The emails that went to Reply All, cluttering our inboxes. The Teams messages that also generate an alert in our email inbox, so we have two things to check and clear instead of one. The forms that need to be completed and filed, but no one ever reads them.

Other processes are necessary, for example due to legal or statutory obligations, or conforming to ISO standards that are critical for your business to compete. Even in these cases, there is scope to review and streamline these processes.

For example, in one place I worked, I asked that we buy a squeegee mop for the employee bathroom to deal with slippery floors from the shower. In response, I was asked to fill in a four-page incident and hazard reporting form, with the opposite of a user-friendly interface – terrible formatting and dozens of extraneous questions. Incident and hazard reporting mechanisms are critical to employee safety, but one shouldn’t need an MBA to fill them in.

Build your core

Many employees spend vast amounts of time doing work that is non-core to their role. Core work consists of productive tasks, those that genuinely link to the outcomes and deliverables for that role. It is different for every role – delivering product to the customer in person is core work for your delivery person, but a mere distraction for your chief engineer.

This has often come about due to cost-saving measures. Organisations wrongly think they can remove administrative roles to save money. Instead, they end up paying their executives to do low-level admin tasks at the expense of their core work.

In addition, leaders may not understand what skills and competencies their team members have, or how they can best be deployed. For example, assuming that a data analyst is good with computers, they assign them to the IT helpdesk, instead of allowing them to focus their time on the work that will help the business move forward.

Find the stops and blockages

In almost every organisation, there are people whose time is not being used wisely. We all like to declare how busy we are – it’s a proxy for how special and important we are – so people without enough to do will rarely admit it. It’s risky. Perversely, rather than see such people as efficient and effective, employers often presume they’re lazy, or reward their productivity with some more tedious, meaningless work (see above). So it’s safer for them to keep their heads below the parapet, occupying themselves with equally meaningless tasks that give the appearance of productivity.

Meanwhile, those with plenty to do often have significant self-esteem issues tied up in their workload. They may tend to workaholism or perfectionism; or hold a deep fear that if they ease back even a little, they’ll be seen as a slacker. That might lead to a lost promotion, or worse, a lost job. As a result, they hang on to their work overload, refusing to delegate or share tasks with team members.

Sharpen your axe

By now we all know Stephen Covey’s parable about the worker who is struggling to cut wood with a blunt axe. He won’t stop to sharpen the axe because he’s worried he may fall behind. Of course, with a sharper axe he would be able to cut the wood much faster, so this is a false economy.

Covey published his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People more than 30 years ago, but for some reason, we still haven’t paused to sharpen the axe. In a workplace setting, this means stopping to figure out which tools or processes need fixing to help streamline the work.

Often when you try to address inefficiencies, people raise lots of spurious objections, or complicate the issue by insisting that an efficient solution be added to the existing mess, rather than substituting for it. This can derail your pursuit of efficiency.

Team-source your solution

As a leader, you are almost certainly out of touch with what your team does every day. In modern, multidisciplinary workplaces, you simply cannot have a high level of technical proficiency across all the professions and trades that your division covers. That means this is not a problem that you can solve alone, via top-down mechanisms. Instead, you need to map and streamline the workflows with your team. They are the experts in what they do, so their input is vital.

This will take considerable time, but it is time spent sharpening your axe. Create space in people’s calendars by extending deadlines on other work and making it clear that this is your key priority.

Gather your team together in a room or online space with a whiteboard that you can use to map the workflows. Consider the following questions:

• What is the core work for each team member?
• Which work activities are consistent and repeatable? How could they be systematised?
• How are work activities delivered? How long does each step take?
• If this were a conveyor belt in a factory, would it be efficient, or would there be areas where the work is held up or sent back in the other direction?
• What steps in the workflow could be removed entirely?
• How could you minimise errors and mistakes that cause backflow or rework?
• What barriers will you need to overcome to remove these steps? Who would you need to bring along with you?
• How can you align tasks to employees’ signature strengths and core work?
• How can you foster teamwork and collaboration in task delivery?
• Who will be responsible for implementing the changes? How long will it take? How will you ensure it gets done?

You might want to take your whole team, or at least your key changemakers, on a Lean Manufacturing course. “Manufacturing” is a misnomer – these principles can be applied to almost any repeatable work task.

Resolving the inefficiencies and blockages in your workplace will not be a quick fix. Like unravelling Christmas lights, it will take time to undo the knots, and you may find that you need to go further up the wire to find where a globe is missing. Nor is it a silver bullet. You also need to develop positive workplace culture, lead and motivate teams and individuals, and train and develop your people for current and future needs.

But if you get this right, it will help you to develop a high-performing, productive work team, who consistently achieve their goals and love their jobs. Furthermore, your organisation will likely get a reputation as a great place to work, so next time you need to advertise a role, you will attract the top performers. Great resignation? Pffft!