The Science of Small Wins
It’s 3 p.m. and you find yourself struggling to focus on work. You can’t seem to stop checking Facebook. Instead of being productive, you welcome distractions like text messages and co-workers coming by to chat.
Welcome to the afternoon slump: that time in your workday when your brain refuses to cooperate with you, and you can’t stop procrastinating.
This piece was originally published in 2016 and has been updated to include new advice for teams in 2019.
What exactly does ostracism at work look like?
On the exclusion spectrum, you’ll find everything from accidentally leaving someone off a calendar invite to purposefully avoiding an individual in the lunchroom. Feeling ignored at work is a silent but hurtful experience.
The topic may seem trivial — “Are adults really so sensitive?” you might ask — but it’s one that can have a serious impact on your employees’ job satisfaction, performance, and happiness. A 2014 study questioned if a lack of attention could be more painful for victims than bullying. Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is often yes.
Editor’s note: This post was first published in 2015. We’ve updated this post with new research and additional tips.
We live in the most distracting time in history. When else did people have access to so much information with so little effort?
It’s a phenomenon that can be both beautiful and terrible. You can easily stumble upon a new favorite song or a link to a book that changes your life. You can take personalized Portuguese lessons with a native speaker without leaving your house. Or . . .
Cats. So many cats. One click on a Facebook link can send you down the rabbit hole of lost time and missed productivity. Who knows how many hours and dollars you’re costing yourself in the long run.
Even worse, we’re most susceptible to these kinds of distractions at work, where our attention and energy are at their most vulnerable.
Distraction is taking away your time, and it’s taking away your money. But worse than that, it’s taking away the most valuable, important thing you can be doing at work: It’s taking away your flow.
Managing a team well requires expert communication.
Holding meetings and using project management software systems do not equate to effective management. Effective management means aligning your team through goals, inspiring them to do good work, and seamlessly transferring knowledge from person to person and team to team.
When it comes to communication, missing by an inch can result in missing by a mile. As messages get passed from person to person, they get diluted, so if your communication isn’t constant or consistent as it moves around your team, you can end up sending people off in the wrong direction.
That’s why, as a manager, if you want to increase your productivity, you should focus on improving your writing. Writing provides an unchanging source of information that employees can reference anytime.
When your writing is clear and comprehensive, you make ideas stick, create accountability, and force critical thinking.
Productivity apps continue to pop up right, left, and center. If you’re trying to stay up-to-date, it can quickly begin to feel like you’re wasting time looking for the perfect software rather than actually working efficiently. At I Done This, we continue to improve our done lists and integrations to eliminate the need for meetings — but we realize that there are many more ways that you and your team can get more done in less time.
To spare you hours of Internet sifting, we’ve updated our collection of the 35 best productivity software tools for the New Year.
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The famous management thinker Socrates once said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
As 2019 approaches, everyone is making resolutions. Most people do this without data, hypotheses or any idea of what they’re going to do differently. It’s usually a combination of regrets over bets that didn’t pan out, thoughts about what they feel they should improve, and inspiration from others. And they wonder why nothing really changes.
Intention without information is powerless. To misquote great management thinker, Albert Einstein, doing the same thing and hoping for a different result is the definition of inefficiency.
This is where the personal time and motion study can help.
[Image Source: Unsplash]
If you work on a remote team, there’s a good chance you’ve struggled with managing time zones.
With co-workers and subscribers spread all over the world, it can be hard to keep track of what time it is where your colleagues are. Even if you’re not working remote, it’s easier than ever to end up doing business with someone in a different time zone. As our world becomes more connected, discovering a good time zone meeting planner becomes more important than ever.
Here at I Done This, we face this challenge daily. We’re a small team dispersed across three continents. The work day is finishing up for some of us just as it’s getting started for others, which is why asynchronous communication is so important. There’s only a short window of time for us to communicate in real time, and that window is critical to our productivity.
Here’s a look at some of our favorite time zone apps and strategies for managing our workflow.
Jeff Bezos is prolific. In 21 letters to his investors over the years, he has delivered dozens of nuggets of wisdom ranging from prioritizing long-term outcomes over short-term results to embedding R&D in every single department.
He also has a unique take on company communication.
Bezos believes that no matter how large your company gets, individual teams shouldn’t be larger than what two pizzas can feed.
Think of it this way: at a large party, it’s hard to connect with people. You’re overwhelmed by the number of guests you could possibly meet and converse with. You end up with more — yet more shallow — interactions. If the host is trying to project a message to the crowd, he or she might have trouble shouting over the din. In contrast, at a small party, you might talk to the people sitting next to you for hours. You can develop more meaningful relationships and maybe come away with new ideas and inspiration.
Although Bezos first declared the “two-pizza” rule in Amazon’s early days, it continues to resonate in 2018. As the pace of venture capital accelerates, and more and more companies enter hypergrowth, figuring out how and when to design teams for effective communication becomes critical.
Not convinced? Here’s the hard evidence behind why the two-pizza team rule holds true.
Despite the growing popularity of instant-messaging support and “conversational agents”—better known as chatbots—actually talking to a customer on the phone is one of the best ways to engage in a real conversation and learn more about a customer’s problems.
Done right, such conversations can be helpful, valuable, and even fun. But we don’t tend to hear about those interactions. Instead, we usually hear horror stories of automated switchboards, interminable wait times, and disinterested customer support staff.
Everybody has a terrible story about customer support. Whether it’s waiting on hold for three hours to speak with someone at the IRS, having to explain a problem repeatedly to one support rep after another, or dealing with random disconnections in the middle of crucial support calls, we’ve been conditioned to accept that customer support is a uniquely terrible experience to be endured rather than a satisfying, rewarding part of patronizing a business.
According to data from GetApp Lab, all that most customers want from a support experience is to speak with a real live human being. That’s it.
[Source]
It’s no secret why a majority of customers want to speak with a real person during support calls. It’s one of the best channels for quickly identifying and solving complex customer problems. When we really understand where our customers are coming from, it’s much easier to solve their problems and build trust.
If speaking with a customer support rep is so effective, then why do so many people dread the thought of picking up the phone and calling an 800 number to speak with one?
On average, American consumers spend around 30 hours every year on the phone with customer support personnel. Because we spend so much time on these calls, we already have preconceived notions about how the entire experience will play out. We’re already on the defensive before we even finish dialing, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Although many consumers have legitimate grievances with telephone-based customer support, most of the negativity surrounding these calls is rooted in the perception that companies don’t respect customers’ time. Calling a customer support line isn’t just a pain in the ass—it’s often a considerable investment of time that prevents customers from doing other things. Even if there’s a very good reason for a lengthy wait to speak with a support rep, every minute a customer wastes waiting on hold damages that company’s brand. It creates negative perceptions about that company that can be very difficult to undo, even if the actual support call goes well.
These experiences also play a significant role in whether a customer will even attempt to contact customer support in the first place. It doesn’t matter how skilled, knowledgeable, or friendly your support reps are if your customers don’t even want to pick up the phone.
Instead of treating customer support as an afterthought, think of it as a way to further differentiate yourself from the competition. Talking through an issue with a customer over the phone allows you to get to the heart of the problem—and ultimately solve it—much faster, but it’s also a unique opportunity to strengthen the relationship with the customer and create a positive association with your brand.
The better the customer support experience, the more positive the association—a crucial competitive advantage in any industry.
However, before you can deliver a world-class customer support experience, it’s important to understand why your customer chose to call you in the first place. Customers who prefer phone support are often looking for:
It’s vital to understand the mindset of the customers who choose voice support over other channels. The needs of a customer who chooses to pick up the phone to speak with a rep are very different from those of a customer who opts to utilize live chat. Similarly, customers who favor email support aren’t likely to need as prompt a response as someone who calls your support team.
Understanding the differences in the needs of customers who choose different support channels is the first step in creating better, more rewarding support experiences. Likewise, considering the frame of mind a customer is likely to be in during a support call allows your reps to preemptively address problems before they arise and alleviate the frustrations of the caller.
The biggest challenge to overcome for voice support personnel is the negativity surrounding perceptions of voice support itself. A little understanding goes a long way, and by demonstrating empathy with customers and proving that you genuinely value their time, you can prove that customer support is a crucial part of your entire business, not merely an afterthought.
Your customers don’t just expect you to provide best-in-class support experiences when things go wrong—they also need to be understood and met where they are. Voice support is one of the most effective ways to solve your customers’ problems, but only if your reps understand where your customers are coming from long before the phone rings.
Great customer support isn’t just about solving problems; it’s also about building relationships, strengthening your brand, and helping people feel that their time is as valuable to you as their business.
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Aside from “innovation,” few buzzwords carry as little real meaning in Silicon Valley and the broader tech sector than “culture.”
While countless startups and established companies alike have seized upon the idea of corporate culture as a vehicle of employee attraction and a way to differentiate themselves in crowded markets, culture remains one of the most crucial aspects of your organization.
So how do you cultivate and maintain a strong, ethical corporate culture when you’re trying to scale?
In this article, we’ll be taking a look at what companies actually mean when they talk about culture, as well as ways to foster your corporate culture as a direct reflection of your company’s brand values.
First, let’s talk about what culture really means.
Perhaps the most important thing to realize about culture—at least as it pertains to companies and brands—is that, even if you do nothing, a culture will emerge across your organization. Once we understand this, it becomes easier to see that culture is a result of actions, decisions, and direct actions.
Put another way, strong corporate cultures don’t just “happen.” We have to make them happen.
This is surprisingly difficult even in the early stages of small companies. Think about it for a second. If workplace culture is an extension of a company’s brand values, who decides what those values are? Once that’s been figured out, how do you actually disseminate these ideas and values across your organization?
You could be forgiven for thinking that the CEO or founders are responsible for identifying and shaping a company’s values as well as ensuring that every employee understands these principles. The problem with this approach is that it’s up to a single individual to arbitrarily decide what the entire company’s values are and adopt a top-down approach to implementing those values. This is fine if your company aspires to be the personal fiefdom of a control-freak CEO, but for companies that want to cultivate and nurture genuinely meaningful corporate cultures, it’s completely, wildly unrealistic.
One way to think about culture is to see it as “our way of life.” As you can probably imagine, this covers virtually every single aspect of a company and its operations, from large, intangible brand values to how your customer support teams answer the phone or respond to email.
Culture encompasses big and small things, such as:
This is by no means an exhaustive list of the things that fall under the umbrella of corporate culture. It is, however, a way to start thinking beyond Casual Fridays and ping-pong tables as being representative of the cultures we create.
Our companies—and our people—deserve better.
One of the major challenges to establishing and maintaining a strong, cohesive corporate culture is the fact that many companies rely on at least partially distributed teams. It’s hard enough to foster and cultivate an inclusive culture at a growing company without tossing remote workers and asynchronous communication into the mix.
That’s what makes understanding that corporate values are the direct result of what we do every day and how we communicate with each other so important.
However, even this is easier said than done. For small teams, it may well be possible to intentionally create a positive culture via Slack. For larger teams or fast-growing companies, it’s completely impossible.
As Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius once said, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” For our purposes, this means that all those negative interactions we try to avoid—angry posts on social, customer support tickets, bad reviews—are actually the most valuable opportunities to identify and cultivate the brand values we want to foster across our companies. A negative tweet, for example, may be a great opportunity to identify a potential feature gap in a product or fix an overlooked bug. A customer support ticket might be a great way to update your internal documentation or develop a new troubleshooting tool.
Put another way, failure is a much better teacher than success.
As we mentioned earlier, “culture” has become one of the most overused buzzwords in tech. Many companies talk a good game about their culture and values, but talk is cheap.
Values mean nothing until we act on them. We’re inherently social creatures. We follow the examples set by others, particularly those we admire. It’s easy for a CEO to talk about open-door policies, but their actions are what matter; it doesn’t matter how easy it is for employees to air their grievances with the Executive team if nothing ever comes of it.
There are unique challenges to retaining a strong corporate culture as a company grows. However, it always comes back to the same two things: how we communicate and how we choose to act upon that communication. This applies to the scrappiest underdog startups and to established tech behemoths.
Corporate culture is a lot like a garden. Left alone, it may be fine for a while, but before long, you’ll be confronted with a tangled, overgrown wilderness that bears no resemblance to the garden you originally planted. If, however, you tend that garden carefully and consistently, it will bloom and thrive.
Take a look at the culture of your company and think of it as that garden. How are you nurturing it? When was the last time you got on your hands and knees and weeded it? How often do you water it? Sure, Mother Nature will do most of the work, but we have to get our hands dirty, too.
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