The Impact of Valuing Employee Effort

Shafiq Lokhandwala

Nov Omana

Questions we will ponder today • Will valuing effort increase employee engagement?

• Are there practical ways to measure effort?

• If you had means of measuring effort would you?

• If effort was measurable, would your company benefit from measuring effort?

Strongly disagree Disagree Don’t Know Agree

Strongly Agree

Weapons of Mass Distraction

4

2.1 hours lost in digital distractions – Basex

Interrupts (digital + self) every 11 mins - UC Irvine

Only 25% of time is on core tasks – McKinsey

Productivity Loss from Interruptions

5

You Got Mail

Reading email sucks up 28

percent of the average workday;

employees send and receive an

average of 112 emails daily 

The average employee spends

40% of their working week

dealing with internal emails

which add no value to the

business

6

Meeting Tsunami

33 minutes a day is time

workers spent just

attempting to schedule

meetings

Average worker spends 16

hours a week in meetings;

government workers spend

22 hours a week in

meetings

7

Social Media Distractions

Workers get interrupted once every 10.5 minutes by things like IMs, tweets and Facebook messages

It then takes 23 minutes for those social media users to get back on task

8

$3600 per year for hourly employees

$2650 for salaried employees

Workplace Cost Epidemic, Productivity Loss and Employee Stress costs US Businesses $300 Billion

20-31% of Annual Salary Costs of the Position

For Positions over $100K per year, replacement cost is $213K

Distractions costs $10,375 per employee/ year for $30/hour salary

Workers Compensation due to stress

Lasts an average 23 days

4 times of non fatal occupational illness

Absenteeism Staff Replacement

Lower Productivity

Other Stress Costs

What if we mapped Effort to Productivity?

Effort

Rating levels 1 – Top 20% 2 – Middle 60% 3 – Bottom 20%

Assume we have a tool on PC and Mobile Device and Tablets to log work related time spent.

That company was able to collect this data from every employee in the company

Productivity

Rating levels 1 – Above Expectation 2 – Meeting Expectations 3 – Below Expectations

Assume that the performance rating was an accurate predictor of employee performance and the final rating was an accurate assessment of their value to the company

Find 3 words / phrases to label the employee type for your box

Effort Low -bottom

20%

 

Mid 60%

 

High -top 20%

 Performance

High -top 20% 3 2 1

Mid 60% 6 5 4

Low -bottom 20%

9 8 7

Effort Low -bottom 20%

 

Mid 60%

 

High -top 20%

 Performance

Above Expectations

3- 2- 1-

Meeting Expectations

6- 5- 4-

Below Expectations

9- 8- 7-

Labels we assigned – your comments?

Effort Low -bottom 20%

 

Mid 60%

 

High -top 20%

 Performance

Above Expectations

3Stars

Retention Risk

2Stars

1Engaged Leaders

Meeting Expectations

6Unmanaged Employee

5Managed Employee

4Engaged Employee

Below Expectations

9Performance Plan

8Needs Coaching

7Bad Job Fit

What is the best measure to quantify quality of employee output?

Your Comments

If every employee spent an extra half an hour on value work every day – would that impact the company?

Your comments

Value from Measuring Effort - Discuss

Employee Wellness Fitbit for work? Work Yoga? Work place effort hygiene Managing interruptions, Being in the zone, Communication hygiene Effective use of time – focusing on value work

Transparency across company on value work Shared value outcomes, respect for other jobs, teamwork

Setting up company wide work value time for employees Silent hours

Value Measures

Employee retention metrics

Employee referrals for incoming talent

Productivity metrics

Widely accepted agreement on job fit, work effort

Increased teamwork

Employees knowing and owning the value of their work

Company brand

Challenges to measuring Effort Finding a software solution that effectively measures employee effort

Finding the right balance between Privacy and Productivity

Employee resistance to employer having access to work data

Management too busy to focus on value inherent in effort data

Your Comments

Relook at questions we started with• Will valuing effort increase employee engagement?

• Are there practical ways to measure effort?

• If you had means of measuring effort would you?

• If effort was measurable, would your company benefit from measuring effort?

Strongly disagree Disagree Don’t Know Agree

Strongly Agree

Results – Start of Presentation

Strongly Disagree Disagree Don't Know Agree Strongly Agree0

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2

3

4

5

6

7

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Will valuing effort increase employee engagement? Do you know if there are practical ways to measure effort? If you had means of measuring effort would you?

If effort was measurable, would your company benefit from measuring effort?

Results – After 9 Box Exercise

Strongly Disagree Disagree Don't Know Agree Strongly Agree0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Will valuing effort increase employee engagement? Do you know if there are practical ways to measure effort? If you had means of measuring effort would you?

If effort was measurable, would your company benefit from measuring effort?

Ask your HR department their opinion

• Do you believe an initiative targeting work hygiene will help in employee wellness and play a part in reducing stress?

Strongly disagree Disagree Don’t Know Agree Strongly Agree

• If measurements of employee effort was visible to everybody would value work increase?

Strongly disagree Disagree Don’t Know Agree Strongly Agree

• If your company management had to override employee privacy concerns vs management visibility into employee effort; knowing visibility of employee effort had a positive impact on productivity would they pick privacy or effort visibility?

Privacy Visibility

• If you or your HR department had to manage employee privacy concerns vs management visibility into employee effort knowing visibility of employee effort had a positive impact on productivity would you pick privacy or effort visibility?

Privacy Visibility

Is it human nature to dislike work?

Barry Swartz – Rethinking Work NYTimes - Aug 30, 2015 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/opinion/sunday/rethinking-work.html

we have lived our lives with the assumption that Work is naturally abhorrent to Employees it’s just human nature to dislike work. This was the view of Adam Smith, the father of

industrial capitalism, who felt that people were naturally lazy and would work only for pay. “It is the interest of every man,” he wrote in 1776 in “The Wealth of Nations,” “to live as much at his ease as he can.”

Yet more than 200 years later, there is still little evidence of this satisfaction-efficiency trade-off. In fact, most evidence points in the opposite direction. In his 1998 book, “The Human Equation,” which reviewed numerous studies across dozens of different industries, the Stanford organizational behavior professor Jeffrey Pfeiffer found that workplaces that offered employees work that was challenging, engaging and meaningful, and over which they had some discretion, were more profitable than workplaces that treated employees as cogs in a production machine

List of Companies that Measure/Value Effort

Workforce management companies (time spent at work) Kronos, Workforce, SAP, ADP, Oracle, WorkDay, Amano, StratusTime, etc.

Talent management companies (performance at work, employee appraisals) CornerStone, Namely, Saba, SumTotal, TalentQuest, TalentSoft, TechnoMedia,

Success Factors, MyUnfold, Kratify, ShakerCG, Logi-Serve

Effort management Sapience, DeskTime, ValueTime

Health and Wellness LifeCare, Myoptimify, Virgin Pulse, Voom (list at Wellnesscompanies.com)

Discussion Topics Impact of unacknowledged distractions on value work

Biggest impediments to productivity in the workplace

Importance of Privacy in the work place

Effect of technology in controlling/creating distractions

Can effort be valued after it has been measured? If so How?

If employee productivity were to go up 10% by measuring effort would companies ignore privacy concerns and measure anyway?

How big is privacy concern in post Snowden world?