The busy culture worsens the problem it promises to solve. Busy culture destroys productivity and keeps us away from our family as well as from understanding our colleagues better.
The busy culture starts at the top with leaders who want to appear busy, important, productive. It percolates down to the bottom, where the employees compete and seem eager to compete and contribute. At the same time, our work-life boundaries are merging with new technologies making it possible to work from anywhere at any time.
How do you break this habit of being busy? The following strategies may help.
Incentivize Boundary setting
Busy culture has to be fought with company commitment. What would pay-off is paying them to be less busy. However, the busy culture has become a serious problem with people replying and sending emails during weekends also and monitoring the progress of projects during weekends. This is further aided by technology and availability of off-shore manpower ready to work all the time and report status.
These are problematic behaviours especially on health, productivity and job satisfaction of employees. However, these are behaviours that can easily be tracked and use to set boundaries to ensure employees do not undertake these activities during weekends and reward them.
Another approach is to treat vacations as paid sabbaticals. Sabbaticals are an accepted way to take time for personal development not directly connected with work.
Focus on your contribution
Employees should learn to say no to tasks that do not align with their primary duties. Leaders should lead the way. Until the rest of the team learn to say no to secondary duties, no one would feel comfortable doing so either.
Do not abandon side projects which are useful in so far as they serve the core duties. DO all the employees know their primary duties? Even employees that you don't directly work with should know what their primary duties are and your commitment to them.
A radical approach may be more effective. Leaders should accept only 10% of the tasks presented to them, in order to create a healthier and productive work environment. Show through these actions that your core duties are your priority and saying no to other work should become the norm. More details in Essentialism: The disciplined pursuit of less by Greg McKeown.
Lean on external and internal influencers.
Culture is built informally, step by step. No single person can change the culture of the organisation alone. Change is affected by peer pressure, by social connections and not top-down directives.
When technology is interfering find ways to exclude technology beyond work hours. A simple exercise to be followed - device-free dinner with family. Establish such small daily traditions and share the experience with the team and encourage them to follow suit.
All companies get busy and workers tend to carry this work beyond office hours too. The trick is to keep the busyness from becoming a habit or part of the culture and it will become corrosive no matter how productive it may seem.
by Serenity Gibbons HBR 2020/09
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