We encourage a frantic work culture rather than encourage building and maintaining work processes.
How often do typical tasks become emergencies that require extra effort to meet the deadline? Then after the urgent deadline is met congratulations are given to the “heroes”. If it was a typical task, shouldn’t there be a process for it? What happens to the other tasks that are set aside during the emergency? What about the quiet calm people who maintain the system and never receive recognition but accomplish work every day?
Your company has processes for completing the work but these processes are not a natural state of work therefore they require continuous energy input and maintenance due to change. This change can be new types of activities, individuals using more “convenient” ways to complete tasks, overall business change, new employees, more employees, new software, etc. These can all lead to hidden factories.
Side Note: Email allows us to work in a more natural state so we tend to use it for everything. Consider processes that could be put into place to replace many of the emails you receive in a day (or meetings you attend).
This is what I am implementing with my team for Calm Critical Work
- Implement metrics to identify when work processes are failing such as when requests come outside of our ticketing system and increases in emails
- Update processes when they are not working as intended and make the update with the appropriate resources. We don’t want to find ways to wedge it into other people’s jobs.
Hopefully, these ideas can be used at your company and help to understand why some initiatives fail at companies.