5 Ways To Achieve Sustainable Productivity in the Year Ahead
As companies may continue to face employee burnout this year, discover the top ways to achieve sustainable productivity.
A tight labor market and employee burnout are some of the top challenges companies may continue to face this year. Hence, one goal for companies craving productivity is sustainable productivity. Matthew Finlayson, VP of Engineering, ActivTrak, lays down his top recommendations to achieve sustainable productivity this year.
It is hard to believe that 2023 marks three years since the start of the pandemic when IT teams were put to the test to support their organizations as they shifted to working from home en masse overnight.
Since then, we have gained insights into supporting digital work for our IT organizations and the employees we support, resulting in new best practices that help us work together and realize our full potential. And while we have come a long way, some challenges will likely persist in 2023.
One challenge is the talent shortage. As a result of the pandemic, nearly 2 million fewer professionals immigrated to the US. When combined with overall demographic shifts, the tight labor markets we see today will likely not be going away anytime soon. IT is no exception.
In IT especially, burnout remains a risk. A recent study of more than 36,200 IT professionals across 33 counties by Yerbo found that two in five employees are at high risk of burnout, prompted by longer hours, more demanding workloads, and conflicts in work-life balance. The study also found that one in four tech employees wants to leave their workplace in the short term.
It is not surprising. According to ActivTrak Productivity Lab data, more than one-third of employees today are overutilized, despite indicators that this figure is trending downward.
With high burnout still a risk factor, IT teams and employees must be empowered with tools and processes that foster self-awareness, enabling them to set limits and goals that ensure well-being.
One worthy goal is sustainable productivity. This is the happy medium between employers’ need for high output to achieve business outcomes and employees’ desire for work-life balance. It requires a new approach to productivity metrics.
Among knowledge workers, two emerging measures of success for productive work are focus time and collaboration time. These metrics replace traditional metrics, such as total hours worked, pure outcomes measures and “presence” in offices, and they could become the primary productivity metrics contributing to performance goals.
It was reported that Kaz Nejatian, VP and COO at Shopify, recently sent an email to staff that said the company is clearing all recurring meetings from employee calendars where more than three people are invited and restricting all meetings on Wednesdays. This change will remove nearly 10,000 events, which will equate to more than 76,000 hours of meetings. That is a lot of time they can now dedicate to developing new products and supporting customers.
It is also anticipated that in the coming year, labor market trends could be driven by employee preferences. This could lead to more flexibility beyond work location and organizations adopting creative and innovative ways to employ employees on a part- and full-time basis, compensating for just-in-time skill sets when needed.
In other words, employers will care less about having everyone work the same amount simultaneously and adapt to preferences as a trade-off for getting the skills they need.
As we think about this year’s trends and challenges, I have put together my top recommendations for sustaining productivity in 2023 based on my experiences.
Limit Meetings
Modern workforces are distributed across locations, time zones, and roles, requiring focus time and asynchronous work. Having insight into how teams spend their days gives managers a fighting chance to protect focus time when scheduling meetings. Managers should keep meetings short and small. Doing so keeps employee productivity levels up for those left out while encouraging active participation from staff members who attend. Protecting staff time can boost morale, empower employees to work wiser and lower operating costs.
Respect Location
With distributed teams across various time zones, establishing regular core hours (e.g., we use 10 am – 3 pm CT) helps ensure no one is intruding on personal time for regular work meetings. In addition to respecting time zones, having insights into location preferences, whether remote or in the office, and understanding personal work preferences can help employees and companies work better together. These insights can also help leaders develop hybrid work policies based on objective data about where and when employees work best.
Balance Communication Time
Workdays should focus on communication for some roles like people or project management. Other roles, such as developers, should focus on… well, development. Team alignment can be negatively impacted when a developer’s time shifts in balance to address other issues. In that case, clarifying a project’s requirements or reducing the scope is important. The opposite is also true; when an engineer’s or a product manager’s time is spent primarily on tooling, it may be that someone is not leading and needs to focus more on their personal and team goals.
See More: Communication and Flexibility as the Solution to Employee Appreciation
Gather Feedback
For a distributed team, workflows define formal processes with touchpoints to verify that projects and deliverables are on course. Despite good intentions, formal processes can achieve desired outcomes, but they can also damage focus time, availability and engineering satisfaction. Team health surveys, formal quarterly reviews and project retrospectives help workflows stay lean and streamlined while ensuring goals are met.
Prevent Overwork
Some employees are at a higher risk of overworking in remote work settings. It is important to look for anyone working extra hours or late into the night and understand how the entire team shares the workload. New employees can often have difficulty onboarding in a remote organization and a tendency to work long hours on the threshold of burnout. During those first few months, managers must coach employees through 1:1’s. Communication with mentors and teammates is also critical. Overwork mode typically ends within three months of a start date. At that point, new employees tend to feel more comfortable and have less urgency to demonstrate effectiveness through such Herculean effort.
As we map out the year ahead, limiting meetings, respecting location with core hours, gathering feedback, and preventing overwork are all ways to help ensure teams have sustainable productivity in the year ahead and beyond.
How are you planning to achieve sustainable productivity in your organization this year? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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