Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2013. Marissa Mayer’s ban on remote work at Yahoo in 2013 and the reference to “flu A” (the 2009 H1N1 pandemic) reflect the time of writing; remote-work practice has changed a lot since 2020.
Most company managers worry about whether their employees are being as productive as they could be. Sometimes the most toxic person for productivity is the manager, who, without realising it, may be distracting, holding up or wasting the time of their own employees, whether unconsciously or because of company policies that are long out of date. Here are 10 ways in which, as a manager, you could be undermining your employees’ productivity and your own.
1. Not delegating responsibility or authority to your employees
Many employees often end up as the manager’s assistants instead of having real authority, competence and responsibility. In some companies, many projects stall because every last detail needs the manager’s constant approval. The most creative employees then feel they are wasting their time. The kind of employee a company needs is one whose freedom allows them to work and create, taking responsibility for their successes and owning their failures. A manager will never know how competent an employee is until that person has the ability and authority to work on their own, and much of what holds progress back is often caused by management itself.
2. Creating a climate of fear, anxiety and control
Rigid controls and fear make sure nobody steps out of line, but they also make sure employees don’t bring new ideas for fear of being humiliated or attacked. Nor will they be honest about problems that are arising in a project or in the company as a whole. Many managers tend to confuse being serious about work with being a serious person, often in a bad mood. It never hurts to remember that a leader has no subjects, only followers. A leader is not feared but respected, which is very different. Remember that employees spend most of their time at the company, so the atmosphere has to be friendly, courteous and creatively free, never curt.
If, as a manager, you want to put the icing on the cake of total demotivation, make sure you scare your staff into thinking their jobs are at risk, and you will see what a demotivated workforce looks like.
3. Wasting time on unnecessary meetings
Many companies have heard that it’s good to communicate with employees to follow up on their goals and the problems they run into, so they now set aside one day a week for a meeting. Various workplace climate surveys have found that 80% of employees think these weekly meetings are totally unproductive. Many managers carefully study which day of the week is best for a weekly meeting. Our conclusion is that no fixed day of the week is right, because meetings should not be held by default but out of need. That means some weeks you may even need three meetings, and in a whole month you may need only one.
And if, the following week, the points discussed at the meeting have not only not been resolved but are put back on the table again, employees will feel it is a complete and utter waste of time, a “productivity incinerator”.
4. Constantly breaking your employees’ concentration
Many managers forget that we live in a technological age and that email exists for a reason. If you phone an employee and tell them to come up to your office when they can, they will come up even if they can’t, dropping whatever they were doing, whether it was a simple task or a complicated one. Either way, they will have to pick it up again afterwards. If we use email, the employee will see it when they finish what they are doing, read it when they can, and so really come up to your office once they have finished. Most of the time, we are sure, you are calling them about something that is not a matter of vital importance.
To some extent, part of the hours of Spain’s long and unproductive working days is due to these improvised conversations at people’s desks, a high percentage of which take place not between colleagues but between manager and employee. Ironically, keeping tabs on productivity is sometimes very unproductive.
5. Not asking employees what they need to do their job better
The company provides its employees with the means to do their work, but has the company ever asked its employees (supposedly professionals in what they do) what they need to work more efficiently?
Many employees won’t speak up on their own. If they think a new piece of software that they know and you, as a manager, don’t would help them, they will never tell you unless you ask. In other cases, an employee may be working on a computer that is far too slow and won’t tell you either, for fear that you’ll think them inconsiderate for hinting at an extra expense, replacing a computer that more than ten professionals have worked on over 12 years without anyone complaining.
6. Attacking the most productive part of the company: the salespeople
Many companies have never understood this point. The foundation and engine of a company are probably its salespeople, because if nothing is sold, the manager, the machines, the employees and the company itself are useless. And yet the sales department is often the least valued part of a company: no sales bonuses, and sometimes stingy commissions. In some companies, there is no commission policy for salespeople at all. “A salesperson without commission is like a garden without flowers or a sky without stars.” If you manage to make your salespeople unproductive, over time you will have an unproductive company as a whole. Even during a crisis, when there are fewer sales and fewer customers, that is precisely when you need the best people to find those few sales out there and win those few customers.
7. Not communicating clear expectations and concrete goals
Sometimes the worst thing we can do is nothing. If our employees work without knowing where they are supposed to get to, they won’t know whether they are far from it or close. Nor will they know whether they are doing a good job. In short, they are not motivated to reach a goal. Equation: not knowing + lack of motivation = unproductivity.
8. Not training your employees
Although we don’t yet have figures from the various surveys, everything suggests that the companies that have invested most in training their employees have achieved higher productivity in practically every area.
Better-trained, better-prepared employees become better professionals. If your company has better professionals, it will logically be more competitive in the market. Some companies still see training as an expendable cost, when it is really one of the best investments a company can make, as long as employees choose it freely and voluntarily.
9. Not allowing remote work when a job allows it
We won’t get into the debate over whether remote work is advisable for companies, since there is evidence on both sides. Remember that while Marissa Mayer banned it at Yahoo, other studies suggest that employees who work from home are more productive. Nothing prevents some employees, for various reasons, from working from home for 15 or 30 days or three months at a given time, as long as their role doesn’t require them to be physically present. Done properly, it can even save the company money. Sometimes remote work doesn’t happen because companies don’t trust their employees.
To begin with, if I don’t trust an employee and feel I have to watch them closely to make sure they do their work, I simply wouldn’t give that person remote work, or any work at all, just the door.
10. Handling illness at work badly
a. A company should have a clear policy on this. Often it does, but it’s poorly applied. No company wants one to five people off sick in a single week, so when someone is coming down with flu, they are usually kept at work until they start running a temperature. That’s when we send them home, but by then they have probably already infected most of their colleagues, because we didn’t send them home a little earlier.
Flu is among the leading causes of unproductive days at a company over the year, along with sick leave for depression. When the virus gets in, you have to stop it quickly by activating a kind of emergency protocol to prevent worse problems.
b. Some companies insist on keeping a sick employee at work when all they need is a couple of days’ rest to come back with their “batteries recharged”. Otherwise, you have a “presenteeist”, which is worse than an “absenteeist”, and the risk of workplace accidents even goes up. In any case, this person is not at 100%, and is therefore unproductive.
c. Other companies demand a doctor’s note when someone misses a day because they didn’t feel well. Sometimes an employee just needs a hot drink, a paracetamol and 24 hours of sleep. If we force them to see a doctor to get a note, we are spoiling their day of recovery, and at certain times of year you can walk into a clinic with a cold and exhaustion and walk out with flu A or any other virus going around.
Further reading
Featured image: Asa Wilson, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
