Productivity: People and Technology

What happens when you put two productivity experts on a Skype call together?

Donna Hanson and I both help you be more productive. The twist is Donna comes from the technology process and communication angle while I focus on productivity through the lens of people skills and communication. Our conversation was driven by a desire for better personal and organisational productivity for our clients, for you.

Collaboration

Before I share the insights from our conversation I wanted to share a little about the experience of chatting with Donna. In a world where competition is rife and everyone seems to be wanting to be the first, the best, the richest, the <insert latest buzz word>, what I truly valued from hanging out with Donna was that while we could easily choose to see each other as competitors, we didn't and we don't. We collaborated. By chatting about our respective expertise we enhanced our respective expertise. Donna and I don't work with the same clients - even though there would be similarities - our learning, research and experience in the field supports both our approaches and would help all our clients. We were both richer for the experience, and we look forward to collaborating more in the future.

Instead of viewing someone as a competitor, ask yourself how you could be a collaborator?

Back to productivity!

You can listen to the conversation here: Web iTunes Stitcher

Or

You can read the transcript (it's been edited slightly) below:

Donna: In this conversation with a fellow productivity expert, Sally Foley-Lewis. Sally comes from the productivity angle of people, process, and communication, and I come from the technology process and communication angle, and we thought today, a conversation to bring the two together would definitely help both our audiences get better personal and organisational productivity.

In our conversation, Sally and I have come up with a number of topics we know for our work with clients as some of the roadblocks to individual and personal productivity. We wanted to share with you both our takes on it to provide you with some ideas and strategies to ensure they don't block your own or your organisation's productivity. Sally, let's start up by framing up what productivity means to you.

Defining Productivity

Sally: Three words come together for me when it comes to what productivity means: effectiveness of effort. To me, productivity is understanding how can I make the best impact with what I'm doing right now with the resources I have on hand. In a nutshell: am I being as effective as I can possibly be and if not, exploring why not, and then making the changes. It's about how we deal with ourselves and the people around us.

Donna: Something a little bit different for me. I think it's three things. It's doing the right things at the right time with the right tools. As simple as that.

Donna: That being the case, we've established how each of us perceives productivity, which isn't too dissimilar, I guess it's just a little different framework that we put around it given the position that we come from. What do soft skills or people skills have to do with productivity, Sally?

Sally: I see that the way in which we relate to the people around us and even with ourselves, our communication skills, and our mindset and attitude has an absolute direct impact on our productivity. The example I would give here is, if you are:

• constantly in conflict,
• forever putting out fires,
• forever fixing everyone else's problem,
• forever having a negative mindset and negative self-talk,
• being dragged into meetings that aren't controlled and aren't 'agenda-ed' (that's a word, right?)
• aren't finishing meetings, projects or your spark day on time, ...

... to me there's an obvious impact on your ability to achieve great work, to increase that bottom line. That's how I put soft skills and productivity neatly into the same box.

Donna: What about things like organisational negativity, where you have people saying bad stuff about the organisation. "Well it's another day," or, "Gee, that person, they always say that, but they're never going to do it." Do those same things have an impact on productivity in your experience?

Sally: Absolutely. The longer that sort of behaviour goes on, and even if you challenge it at one level, most people go, "Oh I was only joking." Yes, that may be so, but if that persists, then we're talking about the culture of the organisation. If you have a longitudinal view of that, you'll see that your turnover of employees starts to increase. You'll see staff morale decrease, and you'll see productivity decrease. If we don't make line call (i.e. call the behaviour) sometimes, and look at the way in which we speak to each other, and speak about the work we do, then we need to be very careful about how that impacts on the work we're getting done, or in this case not getting done.

Trust and Productivity

Donna: What about trust from an organisational perspective?

Sally: Trust is massive, isn't it? It's a personal thing even in the workplace. If you don't trust someone, then how can you communicate with them with a sense of openness and a feeling that you can actually disclose an issue or you can take responsibility easily for something. It's a key piece where people will shut down if they don't feel as though they have their boss or their colleagues watching their back for them.

Donna: The reason I asked about trust is I've just returned from the UK and I was talking with a family member over there who was saying, and this just blows my mind, that from a trust perspective, all their staff have to fingerprint sign-on when they arrive to work, and then must be at work, at their desk, 15 minutes before their allocated start time. I'm talking about a service-based industry. If they're not there by a minute past their due start time, they're actually docked 15 minutes of paid time. If they stay later in the day to, I guess, make up that time, that's not counted.

Sally: Wow. That just sends shivers up my spine.

Donna: I don't know. Have you seen anything like that here in Australia? I certainly haven't experienced anything like that, and I was just dumbfounded.

Sally: As you describe the scenario for your family member, the question that first popped into my head was, "Is this a security issue?" For example, I'm related to someone who works in the aviation industry, and so there are incredibly strict security issues as you would hope and imagine, on access and exit to the facility, and the time in which you access the facility. That makes a lot of sense. But if you're talking about someone who works in the service industry, that there isn't any security issue, then we have to start looking at what's going on with the culture, what's driving this decision? Because it's going to heavily and negatively impact on the productivity, and basically the bottom line as well. If there's no real reason for it, if there's isn't an understanding why that's in place, people are just going to get up and go.

Donna: That's exactly right. I just think it was just really surprising. In fact it was a gymnasium, so it wasn't high level ASIO-type security, but it's just interesting to think that even organisational process, that people feel they don't have any control over, can create this framework of negativity that can impact on productivity, then in turn just flow on, don't they?

Sally: Absolutely. I have a little smirk on my face, because I'm very visual, and so I imagined someone like the manager or the owner of this facility is super frustrated with a handful of people turning up late, not really pulling their weight, maybe some products gone missing, just little things that over time really annoy the owner, and rightly so they annoy the owner, that's money going out the door. It's money being wasted. It's in the handling of that I can see that, obviously I don't know the whole story, but I have this image of the complete and utter frustration the manager or owner has, and it's legitimate frustration, is actually driving the resolution process, and they've chosen the wrong process.

Donna: I just thought I'd flank that because I think we often forget that it's not just the people. There's layers of whole other stuff, isn't there? The two key things, I don't know about you, but I tend to find are the people and the tools. But we also need to take into account the environment itself, don't we?

Sally: Yes. If they haven't got all staff on board understanding why it's important to be on time, why they need to do stock control, why they need to be present and really focused on their work ... If the why hasn't actually been explained very well and the employees don't get it, then that's the first piece to start with. So often we are so pushed for time, managers and leaders struggle with this, but they need to spend more time on the why. More than they even think they should.

When we spend more time on the why, it means we can get buy-in from people and engagement a lot quicker. That also holds true in all our communication. I know that with the work you do, and it leads me think about email, because email's such a big thing as well these days. I imagine that you come across a lot of concerns, questions, and struggles around email, and I want to ask, what is it about email that has an impact on productivity, Donna?

Email and Productivity

Donna: Sally, that's such an interesting question because I get quite a range of responses when I talk to people. I have to giggle every time I hear a client that says to me, "We don't have a problem with email." I've got one client in a public sector industry, no problem at all with email, but I know that they do, because they do. They just do. Last week I saw somebody's inbox, and he was laughing about the fact that he had 50 000 emails in his inbox, and I'm asking, "How can you be productive with that?"

Maybe I like things organised, I don't know, I'm lucky to have maybe a maximum of 10 or 12 emails in my inbox, and just tidy up as I go. But 50,000! How do you propose to be productive with that? I think the challenge is that email was originally a tool that was designed to make our lives easier. Back in the good old days, it used to be that you could buy yourself some time because somebody would ring and they'd ask for a quote, or some sort of documentation. You'd create the document, you'd print it off, and you'd send it to them by snail mail, and you knew straightaway that you had at least a day or two before they received the documentation, they then had to read it, and then they got back to you to have a chat: it bought you some time.

But now it's instantaneous. You send stuff, and what happens is we're reactive rather than proactive. In effect, what we're doing is, it's almost like just throwing off theses statements or pieces of work here and there and just trying to tick things off our own To-Do list. By doing that we don't realise the snowballing effect and the implications that sending one email can have, that could be counteracted by using another mechanism to have your questions answered. Certainly what I've seen is rather than making less work, it's actually created a whole new layer of work, and layer of expectation, in that a lot of people just don't know how they're expected to deal with it, so they create their own framework, and end up putting undue pressure on themselves.

Sally: Completely. Everything you just said resonated with me. Every single word. I remember a story I was told about a reporter who had been on a long sabbatical, came back into the office, and there were 700 and something emails and he sat down at his computer and hit delete on all 700. Almost everyone else in the office had heart attacks! "Why did you do that?" He turned around and said, "Well if it was urgent, they'll ring me." I thought, "Wow." That's rash, yet one way of handling it. I don't know if it's necessarily be your recommended way, but there was a level of understanding around that framework that we do create for ourselves.

Donna: But that person obviously felt really, really comfortable in their process. People can feel comfortable in their process, but the challenge is when you're in an organisation where there's certain expectations, there's legal obligations, et cetera. We've got clients where, from a human resources or a finance or a legal perspective, you need to retain all of that documentation for such a long period of time just in case it's ever needed. Everybody's got, I call it CYA, the Cover Your 'Donkey'! [Why people tend to keep every email.]

There's some simple things that people can do, especially after returning from leave, instead of starting at the bottom, start at the top and work your way down, because you'll often find some of the questions people had a day or two after you left the office, if you've been away for, for example, three weeks, they've probably been answered or they're no longer important anymore.

The other thing that I've done in the past and I've recommended to clients is, when you actually go on extended leave, some organisations have protocols around you have to put an out of office on if you're going to be out of the office for 24 hours. Every organisation has their own protocols. I say if you're off for more than a week, you might want to put something in your out of office that says, "I'm away from the office. XYZ is the person that you need to talk to. When I return I'll be deleting any emails that I've received in that period of time. If something comes up you can contact me after I return."

I've had a number of people respond with a "Gasp. Shock. Horror." But my thoughts are, you've got the choice as to whether you choose to delete them all or not, but you're creating an expectation, an awareness to the people that are sending you stuff that you're not actually going to look at it because when you come back you're going to be overloaded.

That's the third thing I want to mention about those leave pieces, and that is, when you return, on your first day back, you don't want to be jumping into three hour meetings straight off the bat. You want to make sure that you schedule in a half hour or 45 minutes of some solitary time when you get back into the office to deal with your email so that you're calm and you can get stuck into your week.

It can be really really overwhelming, and certainly with the clients I'm working with, we're looking at ways that we can get people off the computer and in the case of sales teams that I'm working with, getting them out selling again. More face-to-face time.

What are your thoughts around email and its impact on productivity in your work, Sally?

Sally: I think 'ditto' to everything you just said. People get caught up with subscribing to all sorts of newsletters and promises and whizz-bang fix-alls and everything that's out there. I have this process, that, if for example, it's a weekly email newsletter that you've subscribed to, and you've not read it for four weeks in a row, then you need to unsubscribe. You might say, "Oh, but it's a friend of mine and it's their newsletter." I've got a Gmail and I've got my email. Supporting my friends goes into my Gmail, and it gets reviewed less regularly than my daily email. I'm vigilant about making sure that if I haven't read something in a reasonable amount of time, then I get rid of it. It's really stressful watching all those emails come in and your inbox getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and you don't feel like you're getting on top of it. There's no sense of achievement in that. To me that equates to the To-Do list. If your To-Do list has got more than 10 things on it, then it's going to overwhelm you.

Donna: That's interesting you say about emails from friends. I've almost developed a culture where none of my friends email me, and I actually like it that way. I have a strategy where when I say that to people that I'll put some of my friends into junk mail, so I'll mark them as junk and it just goes straight there. I'm horrible. It just goes straight to deleted items. I'm not blocking them, so they're not blocked, they just think I get the emails, and then when they ring and say, "Did you get my email?" I'll go, "Oh, no, I must have missed it." Now what I'm doing is letting all our listeners onto it, but that's okay.

Sally: The cat's out of the bag, folks.

Donna: I actually think that we create the stress for ourselves sometimes. I know that we create these expectations. I had another example of a client of mine that I was working with, and she left her email open all day. She'd have the dialogue back and forth with a customer, and then after about the third response from her customer she got distracted, she had to go off and do something, and about 15 minutes later she got a phone call, "Did you get my email?"

Sally: Oh, I'm sure that happens to everyone. Yes.

Donna: The reality is, it's become our primary communication tool, when really it should just be a mechanism by which we can support conversations and discussions we've had. That's certainly something I push with my clients. Use it as a tool to confirm conversations and not as the conversation.

Sally: Exactly. I think the piece out of what you just said that resonated with me is that when they went away, they created a little bit of scarcity, and this sometimes freaks people out. But it's okay to not be contactable for a little while. Not weeks and days, but just create that little bit of scarcity, because it allows people to stop and think, and maybe problem solve on their own. It also allows you to get on and complete something. If it's that urgent, they will find you.

Donna: Absolutely. I just think sometimes we do just make it a little too easy for us to get to each other. I'm mindful that you and I, I'm positive, could talk the leg off a chair, to use an 'Aussie-ism' there [Australian slang], and I know we've got so many questions that I want to ask, as I'm sure you do. Are there any specific skill areas that you deal with that you could share that demonstrate an impact on productivity? I know we've probably touched on a few.

Soft Skills and Productivity

Sally: Yes, I'd say that there's probably three core ones, and two of them are related to people who actually manage and lead others. I'll start with those two, and then I'll add the third one in after that. The first two skills, and I deal with these a lot, and that is delegation and feedback. When a manager or leader really does delegate successfully, the productivity, and the value-add, is phenomenal, because as the manager you get 'stuff', and I mean 'stuff', off your plate and being done and handled by those people who should actually be doing it and handling it. You're can also use it as a developmental opportunity so that others are training others, so that what happens is, you don't stay the bottleneck for decisions, you don't stay the bottleneck for progress. You can actually start thinking more strategically.

The reason why we have managers and leaders is that they're meant to be the ones that do the thinking yet they don't have enough thinking time. They also feel as though they may be perceived as just sitting and doing nothing, which they're not, they're thinking. We have to undo that. Delegation is a really key skill that needs to be [understood], finessed, fine-tuned and mastered as an opportunity to increase productivity.

The second one is feedback. When we give feedback, we're actually helping people to be as good as they can be, to do better, to drive their performance higher. Whether it's praise or whether we're trying to correct something. What stops really good quality feedback conversations is our own mindset. You know that if you think about a situation where someone's just driving them mad, and they don't know how to have that conversation, the script that plays in your head is, "Oh, it's just going to be awful. They're going to cry. They're going to be a victim. They're going to blame. I don't want to have this conversation. It's just going to be a hassle. They're going to be a crier. They're going to be a mess. I'll get called into HR. They'll accuse me of bullying," and on it goes. This is the tape that plays in our heads, and we've got to stop that.

Before we even say anything to the other person, we need to change our own mindset and say, "I really want this employee to perform to the standard that I know they can. I'm going to have a helpful conversation, not a difficult conversation." What happens is, the minute we can change our frame of mind, our frame of reference, around what this conversation will look like we actually have a good quality, open, two-way conversation that addresses the poor performance. The employee knows or can start exploring ways to improve, and therefore productivity can improve.

Even from a praise perspective, if we actually give someone some praise and say, "Is this something that could be done elsewhere? Is there some other opportunity? How much more support would you need to make this even better?" That's productivity boosted that comes out of a feedback conversation.

Delegation and feedback are massively important, are under-utilised, and not done well, and that's what I love doing: helping leaders do these.

The third piece I wanted to put together when it comes to people skills is around conflict. We have a lot of conflict going on in organisations that's unnecessary, and it usually stems from not stating our intention in the first place. I want you to imagine somebody does something and it ticks you off, but you don't do anything about it, and it just festers away, festers away. Then they do it again. You ramp up your festering a bit, and you get a bit more cranky. Then it happens again, and you explode, and the other person's looking at you like you've just lost your banana, [i.e. you've lost your cool, you've been angry and aggressive towards that person].

Without actually checking in on intentions we can really lose our calm unnecessarily. If somebody does something and it ticks you off, then go and ask what their intention was. Just check in, say, "Look, I noticed you did this. What's that about? Can you help me understand why you've done it this way?" Have a conversation and seek to understand, which is one of Stephen Covey's 7 habits: seek to understand. When you understand, then you've got opportunity. What happens is you stop festering and wasting time, effort and energy and being annoyed at the other person so you can actually get on with some work. You can then work out whether they actually know what they've done is wrong or you can learn, "Oh look at that, there's a different way of doing something."

Do you see how if we go and check intentions we can improve on productivity? But it also goes the same, is if we're about to do something that's kind of new or a bit unusual for everyone, state your intention.

Donna: Absolutely.

Sally: State it up front. Even in feedback conversations, "My intention for this conversation is to have a really open two way chat with you, explore where you're at, because I am seeing this..., and I know that your performance is usually better. My intention is to have a conversation about how I can help you, and what you can do to get your performance back up to where I know it can be."

What happens is, if the conversation then goes off track, you can come back to, "Well, like I said before, my intention is about...," and restate your intention. If you come back to that, as the goal of the conversation, you can come back, or it can bring it down any emotional escalation. I think intention is something that's massively important for all of us. Not just leaders and managers, but every single one of us.

Donna: I think for me, following on from what you've said there, is assumptions. I know we're going to talk about assumptions a little bit later, but one of the things that I find is a specific area that I deal with with my clients is around that assumptive piece and communication. One of those key things: people being busy versus being productive. Understanding the difference between those two. I often talk to clients about some examples that I experienced when I was working with the team at Microsoft, although obviously I can't share that proprietary process, what I can share is one of the key things that our programme working with Microsoft was making sure that staff understood that their primary purpose in their role was to meet their key performance indicators.

The question they should be asking themselves about whether they have a meeting, if they send an email, about whether they calendarize something, is, "Is this going to lead me towards achieving my KPIs or away from it". If it was away from it then what was the reasoning behind that? Was this in order to get some alignment or support on something else that they were working on? Being quite purposeful.

Expectations, Purpose and Productivity

I'm working a lot with sales teams and productivity with technology, and the expectations that people understand how, as group, they're going to use email. Well that's like saying you're understanding how the rest of your family is going to respond to a piece of news that you're going to give them. You're just making an assumption or applying your own feelings, actions, or emotions around something to somebody else, and just assuming everybody's going to be the same.

Often if I'm teaching email management with a sales team, for example, I might ask, "How soon do you respond, how quickly should you respond to an email?" I get a variety of answers from:

• straight away
• it depends
• it depends on if I know the answer
• it depends on who it's from
• it depends on when I get it

What that does is it opens up a dialogue in the group and creates a communication piece which is ultimately what email is meant to do. Let's have a conversation around how as a team we're going to use email so that, like a sporting team, we all know what direction we're headed in. We all know what the expectations are. We all know that we only use email for this purpose. Creating some clarity around that, and ensuring that we're not just busy, we're productive.

Sally: Completely. You and I are so on the same page, because you talk about email, whereas when I'm working with my clients, I dive into, as an example, "Tell me what you define A.S.A.P. as?"

It's just hilarious, [even the participants of the exercise laugh when they see what happens] when you have a group of people who all work in the same organisation, and I've challenge them to think of A.S.A.P. in time, and split that even further int A.S.A.P. when you are sending a request versus A.S.A.P. when you're receiving one.

It's a delight: the dialogue opens up and allows the group to say, "No wonder! No wonder we're having so many issues."

Donna: But you know what? We're losing so much time as a result of just not having those conversations, which really is exactly what we're both talking about today. It's taking the time to clearly understand the expectation, so that we can all be working together on joint goals and join outcomes that we need to achieve.

I want to ask a few more questions. Where does technology fit in your approach to people and productivity?

Technology and Productivity

Sally: I love technology. I'm a little bit of a player with technology myself. I wouldn't say I'm an early adopter, but I'm not exactly a laggard either. One of the things I talk about, and I don't actually talk about a lot of [technology] hacks with people. I do have a few apps that I suggest. The key point is, if you want to build more technology into your productivity, then find someone like Donna Hanson, number one. Number two, if you spend more time chopping and changing between different technologies, spend more time trying to understand a technology than actually getting a return on the investment, we have to have a serious conversation.

I have nothing against technology. I think it's really important to explore any new technology that you want to adopt, explore how it's going to give you a return on investment. Pilot periods, trialling things, are incredibly important, and one of the things that falls down when we do have a trial period of something is that we start it, we get a little excited about it, we get into it, and we don't think to review it. The review piece gets dropped, it's really important that the whole process gets followed through.

There are a gazillion apps, there's some fantastic technology that is forever and always being improved upon, and it's important to keep an eye on it, but I'm not someone who will stand in front of a room and suggest any one particular piece of technology. I want to know that you're getting the absolute most out of it, which is where you and I might have a really good complementary perspective on technology. Do you find your clients make assumptions about what their staff or team members do or don't know about technology?

Donna: Oh, absolutely. One of the classic scenarios I get is a situation where we might have a chief financial officer or an accountant who assumes, because they know how to do complex pivot tables, that everybody in their team knows how to do them, or that they should know how to do them. Sometimes it's a matter of saying, "Whoa, let's pull back on the reigns a bit," because realistically it's not just about knowing how to do something, it's working out whether it's worthwhile having that person doing something, and is the risk equating to the reward, or are we better to, for example, lock up an Excel worksheet in such a way that only certain people can get access to certain areas, minimising the risk and that also means that when you're looking at data it's more likely to be accurate.

There's plenty of examples available on the internet. I know that there was a big article called Excel Ruined the World a couple of years ago, and it was all about errors in spreadsheets in the big financial institutions in the US, and how errors in spreadsheets meant that it had serious financial consequences on organisations like Fannie Mae, who were part of the subprime mortgage market. What about some assumptions on productivity for you, Sally?

Sally: I was having a great conversation with someone at a networking event recently, and when I mentioned that I play in the space of productivity, he said, "Oh, you need to tell me. My staff, you know, they're forever on Facebook, and they're doing social media during work time." I said, "Okay, are you focused on the amount of hours that they're in attendance at work, or are you focused on the outcome that they achieve?" He said, "Well, do I have to have on or the other?" I said, "Maybe not. But here's the thing. If you have a social media policy in place then they need to be made aware of it. Do you have a social media policy? Secondly, are they getting the work done? Number three, do you know what they're doing social media about? Is it promoting the organisation?"

There seems to be a big assumption that every time someone's on social media it's always going to be a negative, or it's a detractor from the organisation. I think the assumption that social media, particularly from a lot of organisations' perspectives is that it's just a time suck, when it actually isn't always a time suck. It is a valuable tool for a lot of purposes. The other assumption that I really come up against is, "But how much time is it going to take to actually fix that?" or "It's going to take too much time to fix it." Well maybe, but also maybe not. When we don't identify a problem and we don't actually explore what that problem is, the image we might have of that problem about technology or it's impact on what we're doing is so much bigger.

Donna: I'm just going to grab on one of those points that you made there, and that was around social media policy. One of the things that really gets on my nerves is, and I'm probably sure maybe I'm the only ever person that this has happened to, is when I hear from a client, "Ah yes, we've told them that." My thoughts are, if you've told somebody something and you're expecting them to remember it, well good luck with that. I consider when you're trying to share information in your organisation, it's almost like marketing, isn't it? They say the magic number's around seven. You need to touch base with people seven times before they potentially buy. Well the same applies when you're sharing important knowledge.

I had a client who purchased a whole range of my video clips on how to do things in Word and Excel and they said, "Oh, we'll put them up on our server and we'll just send an email out to let everybody know that they're there." I said, "No, no, no, we need to consistently market to them." We created a newsletter scenario where we touched people once a month and reminded them to get in there and have a look at those things. It was enough to be non-intrusive, to just remind them gently that those were there, rather than going, "Well why aren't you using them?"

Sally: Exactly, and I think we'll take that a step further. I worked with a very small childcare organisation about two years ago now. We sat down with everyone, all the staff. As the facilitator I asked the whole group to create their own social media policy. It wasn't just about continuously marketing, it was about getting input. The framework was set up in respect to the impact of social media and technology on time, productivity, and who the stakeholders are in this conversation? As a team, if they're to serve the children of the community, because it is a childcare centre, and their stakeholders are the children, the board, the parents, etc., then what's an acceptable level of social media? What sort of language? How do we represent the organisation? Do we do social media as a group or separate? And so.

I facilitated that day so that the whole group were representative in creating their own policy. As for big, big multinational organisations? You can't necessarily have everyone in the room creating the policy. However, input and representation from different areas helps with that process, and helps with ensuring a deeper engagement with it.

Donna: Sally, we're fast coming to an end of our time together, because I'm convinced that we could both talk for hours about this subject. Let's close out by working out what are three people skills that you could share with our listeners that could have an immediate positive impact on productivity? Not a negative impact, a positive impact.

To close: three tips from Sally and Donna:

Sally: The first tip I would say is, before giving an answer, ask a question. When you ask that question, be quiet and listen. So often we jump in too early, and we miss valuable information, and so often we're so busy that we just want to get on with it, if we don't stop and be present and pay attention, we miss the unspoken as well as the spoken. Instead of giving an answer, ask a question, and that increases engagement and then productivity.

The second tip: shift your mindset from the difficult conversation to the helpful conversation. Have the assumption that people are trying to do their best, even though it might not work out that way. Most people, and there are statistics, but most people really do want to do a good job, so if we start from that mindset, then the conversations we have are going to be far more positive.

I think the biggest one, and I've saved it for last, is spending time to get to know your people. There's a great line that I was told when I was a young green leader for the first time, and the line was, "You cannot hate the person whose story you know." I'll repeat it. "You cannot hate the person whose story you know.".

The more you and I get to know each other, the more leaders and managers connect with their team members, their staff, their senior managers, and I don't mean you need to know everybody's dirty laundry, but the better the relationship, the more I'm going to trust you, the more I'm going to be more comfortable saying, "Hey, I don't get what you're doing here, can you explain it to me?" and because we've got a good relationship, you're going to be more willing to accept me challenging you respectfully than if you and I don't trust each other. Relationship building is number one, hands down, that's where the gold is when it comes to productivity with people skills.

In summary:

Ask Questions

Shift the mindset

Build relationships

Sally: What are your three tips, Donna?

Donna: First of all communicate. We need to talk to each other if we want to get more productive with our technology. Don't assume. Don't assume that what you know is what everybody else knows, and that's a common thing. The third one is you've got to switch off to switch on, and by that I mean sometimes the best place to get the best work done is actually off the computer and either talking to people or working on things when you're not disrupted.

For example, if you've got a regular report that you do that is quite mentally time consuming, you might consider, and I've had people almost turn white when I suggest this, switch off your email to allow you to have 100% concentration and focus on the task that you need to do, and you'll find you'll actually get it done a lot more quickly.

In summary:

Communicate

Don't assume

Switch off to switch on.

If you want more productivity in your workplace, start looking at how you use your technology and how your people are interacting! 

Donna Hanson: www.primesolutions.net.au or www.donnahanson.com.au

Sally Foley-Lewis: www.sallyfoleylewis.com

#Productivity #Technology #Email #EmailManagement #Communication #Delegation #Feedback #PerformanceManagement #Trust #Leadership #Management

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Sally Foley-Lewis works with Managers, Leaders, Team Leaders and Supervisors to help them master essential management skills for increasing productivity for today's workforce.

She is a speaker, author, mentor and a much sought after facilitator and executive coach.

To book Sally for your meeting or conference: sally @ sallyfoleylewis.com or check sallyfoleylewis.com