Slack is Good – Working Hard Just Might be Wasting Time

There is no virtue in hard work. What matters are results. 

Working hard may or may not produce results. In fact, working hard usually means there is a concentration on effort rather than thinking smarter.

Why am I being so harsh about hard work? I get to observe a lot because I spend time consulting and, quite frankly, trying to sell ideas; and I see a lot of distraction from key objectives by people working really hard in the daily melee dealing with the urgency next in line; but working tangentially to achieving actual business objectives- by degrees. Too many people believe hard work is a virtue in itself, when what really counts are results around strategic business objectives.

Now, a major theme of this blog is creating strategic content, and strategic content, first off, is not one more brain fart; not just stopping and conjuring a trifle out of thin air; or more braggadocio about your company; but real useful content that serves a real business objective. LINK

And real useful content revolves around stories build around real experts solving problems for customers, talking to pre-customers; your key people getting a sense of their personal mythology and unreal expectations which need addressing and sharing a story. And there are always unreasonable fears which need to be allayed and this can be done effectively with strategic content.

But story telling, even the outlining of a theme, take time; plus time to take appropriate pictures, and maybe a short video; requires some time for thinking and doing...
and some slack in the schedule. 

Stopping to think about creating strategic content is not in the usual milieu of what is productive to be doing during the average workday. Such an activity is given a low to near non existent priority because we must be busy and hard working.

There is a business as usual filling up of the day with the habitual, standard issue "productive" things needing doing even though who knows how well daily activities actually serve the strategic outcomes we want.

And so moments to think about and create some content just are incompatible with the going idea of working hard as a virtue. In fact, creating content is not time consuming for your key people, the time factor can be managed well with smart processes and people really enjoy telling stories. LINK

Well, we need slack for many important but not urgent activities and creating strategic content is one of them. And, of course, how  important is strategic content? It is the core of smart marketing in the 21st century. We  address that here LINK

Of course, this also means that there has been some slack to actually stop and determine what are the strategic goals... or there should be some slack here. LINK

So we are making a big deal about the necessity of slack here.

Some employers like to see their people coming in early and staying late under the perception that this produces top results. Many employers like to see their employees busy, even overloaded with work, because they see busy as good.

There is a lot of  industrial age thinking going on... business owners who have the idea that by adding on more and more work onto the plates of staff that they are getting more done. Employees get paid for so many hours and so adding on something else, just gets more done. This is not necessarily true.

The nature of work has changed. At one time,  galley slaves could do more, I guess, by being pushed. Once, assembly lines could be sped up but now robots assemble most everything or soon will.

We now live in a service business age and productivity revolves around intellectual activities. Customer service is critical. Quality estimates are crucial. Critical thinking is essential. Anyone who wants to keep pushing employees harder for more productivity in these functions will eventually figure out what works or actually fail at it.

Productivity here revolves around virtues that are near impossible to measure although we love to measure money to the penny and never worry about extrapolating a bridge too far with such results. Sometimes we just need to stop and figure out what we can't measure and figure out if what we are measuring actually counts for anything. LINK

Busy is not necessarily good. The right results are good.

Employees working hard is not good for you. Inspired employees who enjoy what they do as significant parts of a list of strategic goals- is good for you

Slack provides useful benefits. Lack of slack costs dearly.

Imagine people calling up for an estimate getting a relaxed unhurried voice on the phone that is empathetic and helpful. The benefit here cannot be measured with any accuracy, but certainly improves conversions and sales. The payoff is more profit.

Lack of slack causes delays in critical work getting done on time; prospects don’t get timely estimates. Lack of slack causes more excuses to be made. More items fall through the crack and not discovered again until the irate customer calls. Then you have to spend the time to try and make the irate customer happy again. Lack of slack creates disruptions, and distractions and stress.

Lack of proper attention can cause prospects to cool down- maybe find someone more responsive. Conversions go down. Profits go down and a conjured up rationale for business results has no idea of the possible role of a lack of slack in the outcome.

How do you account for or even track a future online review that is lost because the  customer  was less than enthusiastic about the results.  How do we account for when the pressure is on resulting in a mediocre YELP review or a problem on the local BBB site. Then you get  to make slack to deal with the repercussions.

With slack,  people are operating from a relaxed and engaged mindset rather than a distracted, tense mindset being stressed.

Having slack is not slacking  off.

The real culprit here is friction in business processes which create busy work. With slack, with taking a little time and analyzing what is happening, business processes which are not optimized, can be discovered by process analysis, new innovations can be tried and tested...  innovation always takes slack because what goes smoother  and without error that the same old procedures- no matter how unproductive they really are.

The central issue here is finding and fixing the Friction. Get rid of friction and you have slack. 

Fighting friction requires innovation.  People with some slack can listen better, are better engaged and have more tolerance for new ideas.

And finding the friction points creates the slack in the schedule, you just have to learn to accept some slack  and not figure out how to take the slack back out. Keep the bean counters away from the slack. Maybe you need to reread notes on measuring what counts. LINK

Results are what count. More slack provides more results. Better results improve marginal profits per unit of production. We have to improve our productivity and our profit margins because this is what allows us to take our company to the next level of growth – what does that mean to you?

How do you create slack? By systematically addressing friction.

And when you are able to address the friction, you have the time to do the important yet not urgent stuff that gets waylaid in the melee of the busy day or hard working people working without proper slack.

What are your thoughts? Pretty radical idea – giving more slack to employees… you probably have a few thoughts here.

Was something left out here?

What was not taken into consideration?