Feature Article   • Delegation Dr Daily Dose  • Corner Crack-up • WIDR Products & Services • My Virtual Manager^TM

Feature Article

The Vacation Vacuum

     Summer is here! What are your vacation plans? What? You don’t have any? Well you’re not alone. But then misery does love company. Speaking of misery; let’s look at some recent statistics: 

      According to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive for the online travel agent Expedia, American workers failed to use more than 421 million vacation days in 2005. That’s an average of three out of 14 vacation days left on the table last year. It’s not getting better. For 2006, the average number of vacation days employees will walk away from is expected to rise to four out of 14 days. Worse, Americans get less vacation to start with, comparatively speaking. While the U.S. has an average of 12 days of vacation, Canada has 21 days, Australia has four weeks and France has 37 days! The quality of vacation time is deteriorating as well. Twenty-three percent of American employees check their email or voice mail while on vacation, up from 16 percent in 2005. 

       According to the Families and Work Institute (FWI), a nonprofit center for research that offers some of the most comprehensive research on the U.S. workforce available:  

• More than one-third (37 percent) of American workers take fewer than seven days vacation per year.

• Only 14 percent of employees take vacations of two weeks or more.

• Employees report needing three days on average to begin to relax. Further, the longer they take off at any one time, the more relaxed and energized they will feel when returning to work. For example, among employees who take one to three days off (including weekends), 68 percent return feeling relaxed compared with 85 percent who take seven or more days (including weekends).

• The more employees work during vacations, the more overworked they feel. Although employees who work during vacations may feel they are doing themselves a favor in avoiding a pile-up of work when they return, the opposite seems to be true. Employees report that being truly away from work helps them return less overwhelmed and more enthusiastic about work.

     Because employees are not taking vacations, they are feeling more overworked than ever. Employees who are overworked are more likely to make mistakes at work, to be angry with their employers for expecting them to do so much and to resent coworkers who don’t work as hard as they do. Health care costs are also affected as nearly half of employees who feel overworked report that their health is poor. For example, only 8 percent of employees who are not overworked experience symptoms of clinical depression compared with 21 percent of those who are highly overworked. According to the Family Work Institute:

• One in three American employees is chronically overworked.

• Fifty-four percent of American employees have felt overwhelmed at some time in the past month by how much work they had to complete.

• Twenty-nine percent of employees spend a lot of time doing work that they consider a waste of time. These employees are more likely to report being overworked.

     What can we do in response to these statistics?

1. Get work done right the first time so employees do not feel so overworked. In other words, use effective delegation to eliminate rework which will reduce workloads.

2. Make sure the workload is evenly distributed so you don’t have your “go-to” people working significantly harder than your “non go-to” people.

3. With the productivity improvements from the first two steps, encourage employees to use their vacation time (preferably a minimum of three days attached to a weekend with no contact with the office while they’re gone) so they return to work rejuvenated.

4. Conduct your own vacation research to determine the impact on health care costs, morale and productivity within your organization.

5. Don’t let your vacation be sucked into a vacuum. Start planning your own vacation now!

Corner Crack-up

     Reaching the end of a job interview, the Human Resources Person asked the young MBA fresh out of MIT, "And what starting salary were you looking for?"
     The candidate said, "In the neighborhood of $125,000 a year, depending on the benefits package."
    

     The HR Person said, "Well, what would you say to a package of 5-weeks vacation, 14 paid holidays, full medical and dental, company matching retirement fund to 50% of salary, and a company car leased every 2 years—say, a red Corvette?"
     The Engineer sat up straight and said, "Wow!!! Are you kidding?"
     And the HR Person said, "Certainly, but you started it."

Delegation Doctor’s Daily Dose

     I was thinking about a topic for this section of this edition when an email popped up from someone who wrote that he enjoyed my book but was still perplexed by a question. His question was “How do you deal with employees who say “yes’ to everything regardless of the impact on their overall performance as opposed to those who say “no” to everything because "their plates are full" even though your experience tells you they should be handling more projects or tasks?” Great question! He went on to phrase it another way, “How do I read when somebody's plate is legitimately full and when it's not in order to properly delegate a new project or task to that person without having that guilt sensation that I’m overloading them?” In keeping with this edition’s feature article, I’d like to rephrase it once more, “How can you tell if an employee is truly overworked?” 

      We can pretty much differentiate our “go-to” people from our “non go-to” people by their responses to work we delegate. The “go-to” people say “yes”; the “non go-to” people say “no”. The problem is neither may be the best answer. While we need people who are willing, we also need people who can legitimately evaluate whether or not taking on more work will put them over the top of their burnout curve. Often our best performers are not very good at this self-assessment. In the case of lower performers, saying “no” to additional work doesn’t mean they are accurately assessing whether or not they are overworked. Many people equate being busy with being overworked which brings us to the question of how to determine the difference between working hard and working smart.  

     How do we evaluate whether people are working hard or working smart? That’s one of our key roles as a manager: to ensure we are maximizing the performance of every employee. Here are some questions that will help you:
 

1. What are they busy working on? Often employees are very busy but do not prioritize well. How well do they prioritize their work? Are they working on the most important stuff first? Even more importantly, do they accurately assess their value-added versus non-value-added efforts? For example, do they spend four hours researching and addressing a customer complaint that should have taken 15 minutes?

2. What is the percentage of their time spent in re-work? If they (or you) don’t know the answer to this question, have them keep a re-work log for one week, including notes on how much time was spent and why the rework was necessary. Companies estimate between 30 and 50 percent of every employee’s day is spent in re-work. A new client of mine recently estimated their re-work at 75 percent! According to the research quoted in the feature article, “Twenty-nine percent of employees spend a lot of time doing work that they consider a waste of time. These employees are more likely to report being overworked.” This estimate is from the employee’s perspective. From a manager’s perspective that number is likely to be much higher. Eliminating re-work then, literally takes a load off! A productive worker is more likely to be a happy worker. Nobody enjoys wasting their time.

3. What are the results achieved? This question is similar to the first one but comes from a slightly different angle. The feedback I get is that most managers struggle with accurately assessing whether or not people are overworked. Yet, few seem to look at the correlation between how busy people are and whether or not they are busy achieving results. To be fair, results in today’s world are often hard to measure. However, if we take the time and a closer look, most work is measurable. The more accurately we can measure results, the more accurately we can measure people’s productivity. Once we get this far, it’s a small leap to assess whether or not people are truly overworked. The answer to this question is the bridge between the employee’s perception of being overworked and the manager’s perception of them being overworked. After all, as a manager, you have to make the case for adding staff. It would be (or should be) pretty hard to justify adding staff if results are not being achieved.

Thank you to my reader for asking a question that seems to weigh heavily on a lot of people’s minds! 

WIDR

Products & Services

If You Want It Done Right, You Don’t Have to Do It Yourself!: The Power of Effective Delegation
 

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and Trainings

Help Your Kids Get It Done Right at Home and School!: Building Responsibility and Self-Esteem in Children

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Feature Article   • Delegation Dr Daily Dose  • Corner Crack-up • WIDR Products & Services • My Virtual Manager^TM

Newsletter Staff—Executive Editor: Donna M. Genett, Ph.D. Senior Editor: Brigitte Phillips • info@wantitdoneright.com