Boosting productivity in an Activity Based Workplace (ABW)

My phone is ringing more and more with requests to help organisations that have moved, or are moving to an Activity Based Workplace or ABW. This exciting style of workplace goes beyond open-plan and hot-desking, to create a workplace where workers can book the appropriate space for the type of work they are doing that day or week, from single desks to project tables and collaboration spaces. Originally pioneered in the Netherlands, ABW’s are catching on with some of Australia’s top companies. They are cost effective for the organisation, boost productivity and collaboration, and are extremely flexible for the workers.

But do they really improve productivity? That is my focus, and my biggest concern. After working in a number of ABW’s, I believe the answer is yes. But only if implemented well, and some key productivity principles are kept in mind.

The common concerns
I must admit, that most people that I have talked to about their experience working in an ABW overwhelmingly love it. But there are those that don’t like it, and usually share the concerns below:

• A loss of control for managers, who no longer have the team in their line of sight.
• Keeping everybody focused and motivated when the team is fragmented.
• The logistical drama of having to book the workspace you need every day or week.
• An increase in the volume of email as the main form of communication. 300 email per day can be standard in an ABW.
• For senior managers, the loss of the traditional corner office can be a massive challenge, both from a status point of view, and from a concentration standpoint.
• The need to reduce baggage – paper piles, folders and the stuff that used to be kept on our desk no longer has a place in an ABW.

 
Strategies for boosting productivity in an ABW
If you are working in an ABW, or will be moving to one in the coming year, keep the following productivity strategies in mind.

At the team level:

• Develop email guidelines to reduce the volume of email and ensure productive communications.
• Agree on meeting protocols to ensure that meetings are timely, focused and effective.
• Discuss the issue of interruptions with the team, and work out strategies to foster collaboration without constantly distracting people from important work.
• Develop strategies to communicate your location to others in the team. Using tools like Microsoft Lync can help with this.

At the individual level:

• Centralise all of your work electronically so you are highly mobile and have access to your schedules, action lists and emails in any location.
• Reduce your reliance on paper tools to stay organised, as you just cannot carry or store everything in this sort of workplace.
• Synchronise your mobile tools such as smartphones and tablets with your laptop. You should be able to enter it once and see it on any device.
• Stay on top of your inbox, and use email productively. The positive impact of an ABW is quickly lost when workers are drowning in 300 emails per day!  

I am all for this exciting change to the modern workplace, and believe that this way of working is appropriate for the type of work that the modern knowledge worker does. But it is a change, and it needs new tools and strategies to make it work.
 

Leading Productivity Podcast

Productivity does not just happen. True productivity across a team or organisation needs more than training, it needs leadership - productive leadership. In this episode Dermot talks about the key ingredients that managers and leaders need in order to amplify the productivity of their team.

If you would like access to the email and meeting protocols mentioned by Dermot in this podcast, please email him on dermot.crowley@adapttraining.com.au and he will send them to you with compliments.

The six P's of Productive Meetings Podcast

Are you tired of too many meetings that go for too long and don't achieve results? In the modern workplace where our time is our most precious resource, we need to make sure meetings amplify productivity, not dilute it. This week Dermot talks through some strategies to ensure you spend less time in unproductive meetings, and more time getting meaningful work done.

Download the Productive Collaboration Whitepaper

Podcast: Digital Intelligence with Simon Waller

We have the technology that could unlock our productivity and effectiveness, but are we too busy, too complacent or even too scared to use it? This amazing interview with Digital Intelligence expert Simon Waller provides much food for thought for the busy executive. Simon talks about how a change in mindset can allow you to fully realise the opportunities that are at your fingertips.

Get the balance right

Listen to the latest 21st Century Productivity podcast - Get the balance right.

We have too much to do and too little time. We are all busy, but busy is just a mindset. We need to get some balance in our lives, but easier said than done, right? This week Dermot takes five key ideas from his Get The Balance Right keynote speech and outlines some practical strategies to help you stop blurring the lines and create some definition between work and life.

Podcast: Is your Inbox noisy?

Every day we get more and more emails. Over the past few years the average daily volumes of email have increased in the workplace. Unfortunately, what has increased the most is the volume of noise - emails that don't help us to do our jobs or achieve our objectives.

In this episode, Dermot talks about the challenges that inbox noise can create, and his top 5 strategies for reducing the noise.

Podcast: Why wait to Procrastinate?

Listen to the episode #4 in the podcast series - 21st Century Productivity. In this episode, Dermot talks about procrastination, and 5 key strategies to avoid it. Don't put this one off - listen now!

Podcast: The battle of the task list

We all have a lot on our plate, and need a way of managing multiple priorities and actions at any one time. What are the attributes of an effective task management system, and what is the best system to use?

Dermot examines these questions and more in this weeks episode. Se the wonderful sketchnotes below created by the brilliant Lynne Cazaly (www.lynnecazaly.com.au) as she listened!

Fight for your priorities

Over the past few months, I have put a lot of effort into spending most of my core working hours doing meaningful, appropriate work that will help me achieve my goals and objectives for this year. A worthy endeavor indeed, but as you will know, there are many things that distract us from our important work every day. We are all extremely busy but sometimes we are busy doing the wrong stuff.

I will put my hand up and declare that I have been guilty in the past. One reason for this is that I had not clarified what I was trying to achieve, so therefore I did not prioritise my time and attention effectively. When you are not clear about what you are trying to achieve, everything that comes your way seems a reasonable use of your time. But when you get crystal clear about your objectives, you protect your time fiercely and fight for the work that is most important.

A good example of this for me is my new podcast - 21st Century Productivity (see sidebar for details on how to listen). I recently joined a gym, and decided that this time I would stick it out more than the usual 4 weeks. So i decided to make gym time also learning time, and started listening to podcasts on my iPhone. A whole new world of learning opened up for me, and I realised that a productivity podcast would be a great way to help our clients embed the system, as well as promote Adapt in the marketplace.

Here is the catch. It takes a lot of time to script, record and produce a podcast (not to mention the time needed to learn how to podcast). How do I fit it in around a full schedule of training, coaching, sales meetings and the day-to-day activities of running a lively small business? The answer - I fight for it! I fight fiercely to make and protect time for the important activities that will make a real difference at the end of the day.

You see, I have decided that the podcast is a valuable strategy to help me to achieve one of my key goals for this year - to position myself as a productivity thought leader in the Australian marketplace. I know that the time invested in creating the podcasts will not only help my clients, it will showcase our brand and will also push my creative thinking on productivity.

"If you really believe in what you are doing, work hard, take nothing personally and if something blocks one route, find another. Never give up".

Laurie Notaro

So there is no doubt in my mind on the importance of this work. The problem is, there is no urgency. You see, nobody has asked me to create a podcast. I don't have any clients that have contracted me to create a podcast, and there is no deadline looming that will force my hand and make me commit to action. This has to be driven by me, and if I am going to commit to delivering a podcast every two weeks, I will need to fight for that time in my schedule. The fight will mostly be against myself, and my desire to procrastinate if I can.

Does this resonate for you? Have you got a proactive piece of work that you should be fighting for? If so, here are some tips that might help you fight the good fight:

• Don't just think it and mean to do it - schedule time to do it in your calendar or task list
• Resist the urge to defer the activity as soon as something urgent comes along
• Review your objectives regularly to reconnect with what is actually important in your role
• If something does come up, reschedule the activity, don't just cancel it
• Learn to keep commitments you make to yourself in the same way as you keep commitments to others

My new-found clarity about what is really important in my role has helped me get so much really valuable work done that in the past would have drifted. It has helped me to remember the things that are worth fighting for!

Podcast: File it fast - Find it fast

How much time do you spend on filing each week. If you totalled it up, it might shock you! This podcast looks at some creative ways to streamline your filing and finding process. Listen here or search for 21st Century Productivity in iTunes to listen on your mobile device.

Podcast: Minimise the disruption of interruptions

Do you find it hard to get to your priorities because of the constant flow of interruptions in your day? Do you get to the end of the day feeling like you did not get anything done? Is your day disrupted by interruption.

In the very first episode of 21st century productivity, Dermot Crowley looks at a range of strategies to help minimise disruptive interruptions. He examines the 3 work modes that will help you make the right decisions about your response to interruptions, and the common interruptions that we get in the modern, open-plan workplace.

Look out for more audio and video podcasts here in the coming weeks.

Do your bit

I recently spent a whole day working on a video for our website. I considered this to be an excellent use of my time because it helps to position our business and helps potential clients to understand our approach to productivity. It did take much longer than I anticipated though, and I began to question the true value of me doing the whole task. 

You see, the part of the task that was a really good use of my time was scripting and shooting the video itself. That is a creative piece that fits my skill set and is appropriate to my role.

But out of the eight hours that I spent on the activity, only 2 hours was actually spent on the creation. The rest of the time was spent editing, uploading, creating intro screens, tweaking, reloading, fixing errors, tweaking again, reviewing, tweaking yet again (you get the picture). Instead of doing my bit, I did the whole thing, and convinced myself that the whole thing was an appropriate use of my time.

I wonder how often we find ourselves in similar situations? How often do we end up spending way more time on something than it is worth, and convince ourselves that it is necessary because the outcome is important?

I believe that if we want to save time and get more done, we need to examine everything we do, and work out what is our bit, and how can we get the other bits done without spending significant amounts of our time on them. Here are some ideas:

• Delegate some of the task to someone else. Either delegate the front end and then review and finalise, or delegate the back end and get someone to finish what you have created.
• Streamline or automate the lower-value parts of tasks you repeat often. Set up templates or systems that make this part of the task more efficient.
• Consider outsourcing if delegation is not an option. There are many online services in the cloud that can do basic process work quickly and cheaply.
• Worst case scenario - do it yourself, but set a limit to the time you will spend on it. Don't go for perfect when good enough will do.

Over the next few weeks, try to catch yourself in the act of doing work that is not the best use of your time and ask yourself how you could get it off your plate. Remember the opportunity cost - every time you are working on one thing, there is something else you are not doing!

Fight for your time

This week I learned how powerful it can be when you fight for your time. I am involved in a year long training and coaching program as a participant. The main focus is on implementation, and there is a very high level of accountability to ensure that we do what we say we will do.

I have attended many training programs in the past and like a lot of people have not implemented afterwards. A part of the problem was that I would come out with so many ideas and actions,that I would get overwhelmed and not implement any. But this program did things a bit differently. Each quarter we just have one major project to launch, and therefore just need to focus on one thing. 

Now don't get me wrong, there is a lot to do in relation to this one project, but by keeping focus on one big thing, I am finding that I can integrate the work in with my business as usual work. I also find I am fighting for the time to work on this project more, and my resolve to see this one through to the end is paying dividends. I had a hugely busy week last week between delivering training, coaching and running the business. But I scheduled time into my system to work on this project (fought inertia), and I protected that time fiercely (fought others) and I honored that time even though I had other seemingly urgent things to do (fought myself). 

So, if you are flat out with your normal day to day work, and are struggling to get time for the proactive projects, try the 'less is more' approach. 

Instead of overwhelming yourself with ten projects that you will not do, choose one project and start actually doing it! Your motivation will increase, you will feel more balanced and you will get better results if you just get a bit of the high-value proactive work mixed in with the urgent day-to-day.

By the way, a project is any chunk of work that will require more than one task or activity to complete it. Choose a chunk, break it down and just do it! 

Capturing a high level deliverable list in Outlook

If you have created a high level deliverables list, you may be wondering where to keep it so it is readily accessible, but not cluttering up your task list in MS Outlook. I simply create an All Day Event in my calendar in MS Outlook. I schedule it from the 1st of the month to the last day of the month so that it appears at the top of every day in my calendar.

I then use the notes area in the All Day Event to list each role and top 3 deliverables under each role. The All day Event then synchronises with my iPhone and iPad, which give me editable access to my list anytime, anywhere!

- See more at: http://www.adapttraining.com.au/_blog/Productivity_Blog/post/Mobile_Productivity_MobileDeliverables/#sthash.VCiLGDrv.dpuf

Capture your thoughts using Instacorder

How often have you thought of something that you need to do, or tell someone, and then promptly forgotten it?  Do you come out of important meetings with your head full of information, and then get vague about what was said when you get back to your desk?  Do you think of brilliant ideas, only to lose them when the next thought strikes?

If yes, download Instacorder on the iPhone. With one press of a button it captures a voice memo and emails the sound file straight into your inbox for retrieval when you get back to your desk.  Simple and very effective! http://instacorder.com/

A productive partnership

In a recent executive team training session, I asked the organisations Managing Director how they felt about their workload.  They replied “overwhelmed”. I then asked their EA how they felt and they replied “Helpless”. What an interesting dynamic, yet one I see on a regular basis.

Senior executives are usually the most time poor workers in any organisation. They are also the most expensive, so improving their productivity can create a valuable ROI for the organisation. They will often have an EA, PA or secretary to assist them, but do they always leverage this resource fully? Do they enable their EA to keep them as focused and organised as they can be? I suggest not, but there are simple strategies that can greatly enhance the effectiveness of this powerful productivity partnership!

The first step to enhancing the productive partnership is to create a shared system for managing the executives schedule, priorities and information. "But this is already in place I hear you cry!"  "My EA can see my calendar, and has access to my Inbox." Yes, that work may be visible.  But what about all of the work buried in your inbox? What about all of the important priorities you carry around in your head? What about the things you are meaning to find time to do, but never seem to? And what about the actions still stuck in your meeting notepad?

We often forget that our support staff are not mind readers, and so cannot help to organise this work, or help you find time to do it. If you can create a planning system that both you and your EA have access to, learn to centralise all of your work into this system, and together plan the what, when, why and how of getting this stuff done, you will both work much more effectively.

You probably already use either MS Outlook or Lotus Notes as your email and calendar system, so it makes sense to add your task management to this system and make this visible to your EA as well. Visibility is the key to control, and both MS Outlook and Lotus Notes have powerful task management systems that work alongside your calendar to allow scheduling of priorities for individual days in your schedule.  This promotes a proactive approach to task management, and will help your EA to know your priorities and help you to stay focused.

A productive Executive/EA partnership requires a clear set of processes to be designed and agreed by both parties, as well as constant communication to make it work. Both parties should strive to provide the following attributes to the partnership:

The Executive

Visibility - make all commitments, priorities and actions visible

Priority - communicate a sense of what is important today, this week and this month

Authority - provide the authority to deal with lower value work on their behalf

The EA/PA/Secretary

Awareness - be aware of the bigger picture as well as the day-to-day

Anticipation - pro-actively anticipate what is coming up and what can be organised

Protection - protect the executives time and focus from low-value distractions

Try the following strategies to maximize your productivity partnership:

- Centralise all of your actions into one system, preferably MS Outlook or Lotus Notes.

- Clear your inbox regularly.  Your EA cannot help you manage email if they cannot make sense of what needs action, needs to be filed or what can be deleted.

- Meet first thing every day, even by phone, and agree on the plan for the day. Communicate your top 3-5 priorities for the day, and work out when you will do these.

- Agree on and simplify your email filing system so that both of you can quickly and easily file emails. We recommend less than 10 folders for efficient filing and efficient finding.

- Get meeting actions delegated or scheduled quickly by capturing clear actions and next steps, and communicating these to your EA daily.

- Spend one hour together each week planning the week ahead in detail, and anticipating what is coming over the horizon.

- Identify your top ten outcomes each month and communicate these to your EA so these are top of mind for both of you. Then plan time into your schedule to work on them.

Not enough time, too much to do, too few resources. I hear these words every day from clients. It is a struggle, but with a bit of work we can leverage our time, focus on the important stuff and feel the full benefit of our resources.  Give it a go, it may just help!

Capture anything with Turboscan

TurboScan is a fantastic new app for the iPhone that lets you take a high resolution picture of your meeting notes, or any document, save it as a multi page PDF, and quickly send it to your inbox where you can attach it to the meeting in Outlook for future reference.  The documents also gets stored in the app which means you can search for it quickly when you need it.

https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/turboscan-quickly-scan-multipage/id342548956?mt=8

Three levels of productivity

Here we are in 2014. Lets make this the year when you work at your productive best, while at the same time encouraging others to operate productively too. 

Productivity is often seen as an individual undertaking.  We hope that by simply applying a system, or a set of principles, we will be more organised and more productive. This is definitely true. But our productivity is also dependent on others. Every interaction we have has the potential to pull team productivity down. Every meeting we attend, every email we receive, every delegation we give or get has the potential to disrupt our productivity if it is not done well.

So, I believe we need to go beyond the single level of personal productivity, and operate on three levels of productivity, and encourage our colleagues to work across these levels as well.

Firstly, we need to collaborate productively. The most basic principle for a doctor is "do no harm". Likewise, every time you organise or attend a meeting, send an email, delegate work or collaborate on a project, you should be mindful about how this collaboration impacts on the productivity of those around you. Do no harm!

Secondly, we need to work productively. This is our core focus at Adapt - helping our clients enhance their personal productivity strategies and work more productively using tools like MS Outlook. Make sure you have good productivity systems in place, and work hard to use these systems daily to stay on top of your time, priorities and information.

Thirdly, we need to lead productively.  This leadership is not about being bossy or directive. It is about influencing those around us to create a culture of productivity that helps everyone, and makes getting stuff done that little bit easier and more enjoyable. Model productive behaviours, set expectations and enable your team to work proactively on the most important work, not just the urgent crises of the moment.

My absolute focus this year will be to help leaders and managers create productivity cultures that amplify the effectiveness of those around them. Drop me a line at dermot.crowley@adapttraining.com.au if you would like to talk about this for your team.