When there is a missing piece, we tend to complement it with an obvious answer. However, something obvious is not always the right answer.
We are looking for the meaning in life and it also stands for even the small things like everyday happenings. Business is no exception. Yet, we might find a simple answer that satisfies our hunger for completion, but it can easily mislead us. Be aware!
In their book, Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner investigate some weird phenomena. Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? Or why do drug dealers live with their mothers? Understanding the underlying connections, you might find some surprising answers.
Believing that you have found the right connection between two notions is one thing. While acting accordingly can make things worse.
Levitt and Dubner tell the story of a kindergarten where parents arrived late quite frequently at the end of the day. It made the teachers work some extra time without pay and suffer some time loss in their private life. To solve the situation, the kindergarten introduced a penalty fee for late arrivals. You can guess what happened. Yes, the opposite of what you would expect at the first place.
Instead of feeling punished, parents arrived late in even more cases. It turned out that with this extra fee, late arrivals were simply priced at a level which was liberating for the parents. In the past, they had had the stress of choosing between finishing their work or being a caring parent. After the change, they did not have to choose any more, they could finish what they had to AND they could take their children home a little later in exchange for a little money.
You can have influence on people’s decisions only when you understand the motivation behind.
Let’s see some false thoughts in relation to work.
“Home office is not good for the company as people can ‘hide’ from work”.
Let’s check the two sides, the company and the employee sides.
If the company thinks so, it has stuck in the taylorian phase, meaning that employees are just parts of the cogwheel which is inherently bad for them so the company needs to force them to work as they just wait for the right time and circumstances to avoid working. If you strongly agree with the previous sentence, you might have other serious issues with creating a sustainable and caring work environment. If you feel frustrated and angry while reading that sentence, you are probably on the right track.
When it comes to the employees, the statement depends on the given employee. If someone uses the home office to hide from work, they have been doing the same in the office as well. When they want to minimise the workload, they can have coffee or cigarettes, they can chit-chat with others, just to mention the obvious options.
Just like internet trolls. Anonymity helps them hide in the shadows, but probably they are not the most open minded and indulgent people in the offline world either. Those who listen to understand the other will not comment in anger even if there is an option to do so.
So actually, the home office just boosts what is already happening. It is also true for the hard working people, they can work even more at home. To have a real team that is enthusiastic about what they are doing, you must focus on your selection process in the first place to match the right tasks with the right people.
“Productivity tools are responsible for increased stress and burn-out as they enable you to achieve more in less time and they emphasise that you need to be useful all the time.”
In this logic, weapons are responsible for murders. Yet, there is no such thing as a murderous tool as it has no intentions. People have bad intentions and they use tools or weapons to harm another.
Productivity tools are helpful in doing what you have to do in a structured and efficient way. Adding more tasks and not setting your boundaries have nothing to do with the productivity tool itself. It’s you.
Don’t get me wrong! I know that these tools can make things worse. All I am saying is that they can make something worse if that something is already present. Being frustrated about delivering results or seeking for recognition are independent from the tools. Stopping using the tool while still having these needs will not help either. You need to work on yourself, understand your needs and frustrations so that you can intervene.
Let’s see the example of Richard. In an employee satisfaction survey, he recommended that his organisational unit shall make a rule of not sending emails after 6 p.m. It was obvious that such a restriction would not work due to the differences in the daily agendas the colleagues had. The management wanted to understand Richard's point of view and it turned out that Richard was bothered when he got an email after work time and his phone notified him about it. Instead of turning off the notification, he wanted everyone else to change their behaviour. Taking the responsibility on his own, he could have adjusted the features of the productivity tool and it would have solved his problem.
“Marketing is about communications and branding.”
The standard approach of the marketing mix already contains 4 elements (product, price, place, promotion), where promotion stands for all the communications. It clearly shows that marketing is far more than only one of its pillars.
“Every generation thinks it is smarter than the previous one and wiser than the following one.”
The whole generational thing comes from the increasing change of the world where technological and social shifts happen at a faster pace therefore they result in certain characteristics of the generations. Getting to know them helps us notice if something goes wrong due to different thinking. Realising it can trigger clarifying questions.
Yet, understanding each other is something we need to work on even within the same generation. We need to understand why our differences are valuable and how to reveal them in order to include any relevant aspects.
No surprise, it is extremely hard to do. Being self-conscious is just a start. You have to understand your own behaviour and your range of experiences. Then you have to be willing and open enough to make an effort to understand the other person’s behaviour and their range of experiences. It takes time. And then even more time. After a while you’ll know there is no good and bad, there are only different things. That’ll be the moment when you embrace the differences and get rid of the prejudices. Now you can start discussing the matters, and there is no guarantee that the other party has done the same work on themselves. However, this is the only way to communicate without any biases.
Why is it so hard to do? Many people were not raised by this approach, so they do not have a ready pattern or method to live accordingly. And if you don’t understand something, you’ll judge it to simplify whether it’s good or bad for you. But life is more sophisticated than that.
Make the effort, break the unconscious cycle.
