The Outlook is rosy

Say what you like about Microsoft but when it came to Outlook, they really came up with a great productivity tool. I recently purchased a MacBook, to use as my main home computer, and I’ve been disappointed to discover that I can’t find an Apple equivalent that’s as good as Outlook – to the extent that I’m seriously considering forking out a couple of hundred quid on Outlook for Mac.

Outlook does so many things and is used by so many people that I’m baffled by how little people know about what it can do. Few people ever seem to have had any training on how to use Outlook, beyond sending an email. As email, it seems, is the thing that most people struggle with, here are some techniques to help you get on top of your in-box.

The first tip to get on top of your in-box is to stay out of it – or, at least, not dive straight into it every day. When you open Outlook for the first time in the morning, it probably takes you to your in-box and the temptation is then to start dealing with those emails. Instead, set your opening folder to your Calendar (Tools>Options>Other>Advanced Options>Browse and choose the Calendar folder).

Next, stop Outlook telling you when it receives an email (Tools>Options>Preferences>E-Mail Options>Advanced E-Mail Options and uncheck the boxes under the heading “When new items arrive”). The key thing here is that you check your email when it’s convenient for you, not every time someone sends you a mail. If you’re doing the latter, you’re effectively treating email like another telephone – and you probably already have a couple of those.

Once you’ve freed yourself from the constant interruption of arriving email, you can concentrate on other things. A really good habit to get into is only checking your in-box every couple of hours or so – if you like, you can book out half an hour in the calendar to do this, so that you get into a routine.

Why do this? Well, if you were trying to lose weight, imagine how you’d feel if someone regularly waved a cream cake under your nose, telling you how delicious it was. You wouldn’t be very happy, would you? It would make losing weight that much harder. If you’re struggling with email, that’s the equivalent of what Outlook is doing to you. Take some control and give yourself the space to concentrate on your job - which is not, believe it or not, to handle/produce emails.

You have mail...

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by “abroad” – by which I mean, from my Anglo-centric viewpoint, any country that wasn’t the UK. I’m of a certain age, which means I predate email, when the only way of contacting people abroad was to send them airmail letter. I vividly remember the excitement of seeing one of those lovely blue envelopes hit the mat, the glamour and mystique of the strange address and the poetry of the phrase “par avion”. Weeks would pass between posting a letter and getting a reply, the excitement would build and the eventual letter would be read and re-read, digested, considered and then finally responded to.

All that’s changed now, of course. Nowadays, I can text friends on the other side of the world and get a reply almost instantly – assuming they’re awake, of course. I can share pictures of events with friends in at least six other countries (and comment on pictures of their events) through Facebook and Twitter. The waiting for the postman has gone, replaced by the much shorter wait for the ping of the email inbox. Lest this sound like an old man’s paean to a bygone age, let me be clear: what we’ve lost in romance we’ve more than gained in sheer convenience. I’m in touch with friends now in a way that simply wouldn’t be possible twenty – or even ten – years ago.

But there is, of course, a price to be paid. Email has revolutionised communication but it’s brought a whole slew of problems along with its tremendous advantages. And while email itself is steadily becoming less popular amongst what I suppose I must now call the “younger generation” it’s still the dominant form used in business. So if you feel overwhelmed by email, over the next couple of weeks I’ll be taking a look at some email best-practise to help alleviate the information overload you might be feeling.

We’ll start next week by looking at a few of the basic skills but if you have any hints and tips on how to make email – and, in particular, the main tool for using email, Microsoft’s Outlook – work better for you, do please drop me a line.

The normalisation of deviance

Every now and then, in my travels across the internet, I come across a quotation so perfect that I’ll start using it on every workshop I run. I found one of those quotes the other day and I’ve been using it everywhere I can ever since:

Each uneventful day that passes reinforces a steadily growing false sense of confidence that everything is all right – that I, we, my group must be OK because the way we did things today resulted in no adverse consequences.

It’s a quote from Scott Snook, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, and is used in the context of the “normalisation of deviance” which is not as much fun as it sounds.

It describes a situation whereby a group or an organisation, usually under duress, takes a risk or a short-cut that it wouldn’t normally take. Perhaps it eases its safety procedures or lowers its quality control standards. Whatever it is, the decision is made in good faith that the measure is only temporary and that normal service or standards will be resumed when the crisis or unusual circumstances have passed.

However the group realises, consciously or unconsciously, that having taken a risk they have, effectively, gotten away with it – nothing bad has happened. And so, instead of returning to the stricter procedures, the laxer regime is allowed to continue. The longer this goes on without any adverse consequences, the more used to it the group or organisation becomes – essentially forgetting that there is any risk involved in what they’re doing as the deviant procedure or process becomes part of the normal, everyday run of things.

This applies to serious and tragic events such as the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and to trivial events, like me being pulled over by the police because one of my headlights wasn’t working. It hadn’t been working for a while; I knew I had to fix it but the longer I left it the more normal it became until I had forgotten that I was taking a risk

And this is the key thing, I think. At the start, we know we’re running a risk but when disaster doesn’t strike we forget that risk doesn’t mean that an event will happen – merely that it is possible. The longer we continue without the risked event occurring, the more we forget that the risk is still there – it just hasn’t happened yet. As the deviance is normalised we forget the risk that’s being taken and then suddenly disaster arrives out of, apparently, nowhere.

Are you successful? Are you, your team, your organisation doing well? Are you doing well because of the actions you’re taking or despite them? What risks have you normalised? What disaster, even now, as you read this, could be building because of a deviant procedure that you might even have forgotten about? Sleep well – and don’t have nightmares.

Empathy

I talked last week about my experiences playing – or rather not playing – Dead Space and I ended by mentioning that it had something to do with our capacity for empathy. Empathy is the ability, though the use of imagination, to “feel” the emotions felt by another person. It’s our ability to put ourselves in the place of another and feel what they feel.

From an evolutionary point of view, it obviously makes sense for us to be able to empathise with others – it helps us live together in groups. Neuroscientists speculate that mirror neurons in the brain are responsible for the feeling of empathy. Studying the experience or actions of someone else triggers the kind of cognitive and chemical processes in our brains that we would have if we were experiencing or doing what they were experiencing or doing. Mirror neurons are the reason why we yawn when we see someone else yawn, or why your foot twitches when watching someone play football – in your head, you’re playing football, too. The ability to empathise appears to be a perfectly natural process, present in most psychologically healthy people, regardless of gender.

If you have siblings, the odds are that at some point during your youth they would have pretended not to hear you. So what did you do? You will have followed three stages. First, you’d have shouted louder, maybe stood right next to them to get their attention. If that didn’t work, you might have appealed to your mum or dad. And if that didn’t work, you probably hit them! I spent six or seven years dealing with complaints and I can tell you that we never grow out of that pattern; the methods change but we follow the same pattern. When someone ignores us or doesn’t understand us we repeat, appeal and then act out in some way.

Why does everyone follow that pattern? Why does being ignored bother us, hurt us so much? It seems that we interpret someone ignoring what we say as meaning they’re ignoring us as a person. They’re discounting us, like we don’t matter or even exist. Learning to truly pay attention to someone else – not just through what they’re saying but also through what they’re not saying, their expressions, their tone, their body language – is the fastest route to really understanding them. And understanding is at the heart of empathy, which is so important in human relationships: we all want to feel that someone truly understands how we feel. We all need empathy.

What are you doing right now?

I read a story about a life coach, who recorded this message on his answering machine: “Please tell me who you are and what you want; if you think those are trivial questions, consider that 95% of the population goes through life and never answers either one!” It’s an entertaining story and it reminds me that seemingly trivial questions are often the most effective. I often joke with groups that my primary role on a workshop is to ask all the really obvious and “stupid” questions and recently I started to ask myself the obvious question – when it comes to my chosen career, what am I trying to do?

Having thought about it quite deeply, I think there are three answers to that question. The first – and most superficial – is that I’m trying to train people on various topics. That’s fine but training someone is never an outcome: the purpose of training, after all, is not knowledge but action. The second answer is that I’m trying to help people or make their lives easier in some way. That’s a key value for me; I know that the times in my life when I’ve been most dissatisfied with my work are those times when I don’t feel like I’m helping anyone. But, laudable as it may be, it still doesn’t quite answer the question.

For me, the answer is that I’m trying to create three things in delegates. Awareness: you cannot make any changes – or even decide not to make any changes – if you are unaware of what you’re doing now and/or unaware of the alternatives. Secondly, choice: whatever we do, whatever our situation, we are all volunteers. We do what we do because we choose to do it – even when it comes to something as fundamental as living. We continue to live because we have not chosen the alternative. Thirdly, consequence: whatever we do, whatever actions we take or do not take, there are consequences that flow from it. Those consequences may be obvious and what you intend or they may be unintended and come as a complete surprise.

I’ve presented those three things – awareness, choice and consequences – as sequential but they are inextricably linked. For instance, understanding as much as possible about consequences makes for better-informed choices. The one thing that I’m not trying to do in my workshops is convince or persuade you that what I’m saying is right. Persuasion leads, inevitably, to competition and conflict and that doesn’t help me achieve my objectives. I believe a little scepticism is a vital and healthy ingredient in a delegate and I encourage it. You don’t have to believe what I say just because I say it – I encourage you to try for yourself.

As you go through life this week, stop periodically and ask yourself what it is you’re trying to do – and what you’re not trying to do: you may be surprised by the answer.

Training isn't working - part three

Having spent the last couple of weeks trying to convince you that training doesn’t work, this week it’s time to turn our attention to the things you can do to make sure that it does. The good news, with which I teased you last week, is that there are some relatively simple things you can do to greatly improve the chances of seeing real, on-the-job application of the things delegates learn on workshops.

This diagram shows how training and development should work, at an organisational level. It starts on the left, with the identification of a business need. What is it that the company or team needs to achieve? What is the goal the individual is working towards? What, in other words, is the purpose of the training – what is it designed to achieve and how does this help the individual, the team or the company?

Moving into the middle box, in order to achieve this goal, the company, team or individual needs to start doing something – it’s only natural to assume that, in order to achieve goals you’ve never achieved before, someone somewhere needs to start doing something they’ve never done before. What is that “something”?

This then drives the right-hand box; to do this “something”, what kind of training do people need. This is when the training intervention can be put together – safe in the knowledge that the workshop (or whatever it is) is designed specifically to achieve business-relevant results.

The picture shows a shaded area around the behaviour box – this is the environment within which the delegates will be trying to apply what they’ve learned. That environment can be destructive and unhelpful, as we’ve covered previously, or it can be supportive and helpful. If you’re a manager, you can make all the difference.

Talk to your people before they go on the workshop. Ask them questions like:

• As a result of this training, what will you do differently?
• When will I see you doing it?
• What help do you need to put what you’ve learned into practice?

Keep in touch with them and use the trainer that you hire – any good trainer worth his or her salt with provide after-workshop support of some kind, so make sure you or the delegates make the most of it. What goes on at work, the messages you give to the people who’ve been on training, the support you offer, the encouragement you give, will make all the difference. And, of course, I’m honour bound to point out that if you want to make big changes – get inspired!

Training isn't working - part two

Last week, I think we covered enough statistics to convince even the hardiest sceptic that training isn’t working. The question this week, is why does this happen and the answer lies, in research by Geary Rummler and Alan Brache (1995), who found that 80% of performance problems relate to factors within the work environment. In other words, what happens outside of the training room gets in the way of application.

In my experience, three scenarios occur repeatedly, and make application difficult, if not impossible:

Training for no reason

I’m working with a multinational company training sixty of their managers, at great cost, simply because they haven’t had any training for a couple of years and the company thought some training might be a nice idea. Training is supposed to be performance enhancing: it's the bridge that takes you from point A to point B. If there isn’t a point B, why do it?

There is a reason – the delegates just don't know what it is

There is an idea that training can “fix” people. A manager has a member of staff with performance or behavioural issues; they don’t want to confront the issue directly, so they send the member of staff on a training course, in the hope that they’ll learn something and change. It’s not always that extreme, though: so many times, I see delegates who’ve had no conversation with their managers in advance of the workshop – they’ve just been sent there. What does that do to their willingness to learn?

Nothing happens afterwards

What happens after the workshop is crucial – if on-the-job reinforcement is missing, there's no reason or incentive to do anything. It’s difficult to sustain changes in behaviour and often we need help and support; if that’s not forthcoming, most of what we learn is gradually forgotten.

Of course, a fourth reason is that sometimes the training's just bad. A poor workshop or a poor trainer (and, lets face it, some are terrible) won’t generate any kind of change or application at all – but that’s a topic for another day!

So what’s the solution? There’s a great quote, attributed to both Einstein and Woody Guthrie (it’s easy to get them confused): “Any fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.” The inspired philosophy is simple things, done well, repeatedly: the good news is, for all of these problems there some very simple solutions and we’ll look at them next week.

The dignity of labour

Are you busy? Feel like you’ve got too much to do? If you do, it would seem that you’re not alone: I was struck by some recent statistics from the Corporate Leadership Council showing that the average job “footprint” (i.e., what someone is expected to do as part of their job) has increased by a third since the beginning of the recession. The Hay Group has found that two-thirds of workers say they are regularly putting in unpaid overtime, in order to cope with this increased footprint.

But, you might argue, these are hard times and we must all pull together and do our best; it’s all hands to the pumps. Companies and workers understand that and the extra effort people put in now in order to help keep their employers afloat is appreciated. Except it isn’t: in the same Hay survey, 63% of workers say their employers do not appreciate their extra effort and 57% feel they are treated like “disposable commodities”. Around fifty per cent say that their current level of work is unsustainable. What are the consequences of those statistics?

This is a familiar theme on the inspiredblog – it’s one that we’ve returned to a number of times over the months. Booker T Washington said “no race can prosper until it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem” and it’s true. At inspired, we strongly believe that all jobs contain and provide dignity. Work defines us and having spent some time in the past without a job, we know how corrosive it can be, how meaningless and empty the days can become, and the crippling effect it can have on self esteem. But, to quote Camus, “there is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted” and what we’re seeing increasingly is that work is not freely accepted; it’s forced on us. It doesn’t provide dignity, it provides anxiety and illness. Is it any wonder that absenteeism, disengagement and low level corporate crime are all increasing, at precisely the time we need people to stay and engage the most?

Have you ever heard anyone say that their employees are their company’s greatest asset? Next time you hear it, remind them that employees are people, not assets. We’re human beings, not “Human Resources.” Unless employers ensure their employees are treated like people – with care, with consideration, with respect – statistics like the ones quoted above will increase and I fear that this recession will get an awful lot worse before it gets better.

Business Maths

I was never particularly good at maths when I was at school and that inadequacy with figures has, I’m afraid, carried over into my adult life. The chances are, many of you could or would say the same. It’s socially easy to admit to difficulties with maths whereas it’s very difficult to admit to difficulties with reading. Perhaps that’s what explains some of the very questionable business maths that I heard from a group the other day.

Let’s begin by setting you a simple problem. You have a team of eight people, all of whom produce one widget per day. If you take away four people, how many widgets per day will the remaining four have to produce in order to maintain your total output of eight? The answer is, of course, two per day: even I could work that out.

However, there’s a problem. The current eight people don’t appear to be slacking. They all appear to be busy each day; they’re not sitting around drinking coffee and gossiping. One widget per day appears to be about right; in fact given that you used to have a team of 16 people producing eight widgets per day, the current productivity seems very good. So what do you do?

The answer to that, of course, is equally simple: you make the cuts anyway and drive the remaining four to work even harder, until they burn out or leave. It seems crazy – no, wait; it is crazy – but that’s exactly what the company was proposing to do. The group I was working with were resigned to taking on a whole lot of extra work on top of their existing responsibilities. When I asked them how they proposed to do that, someone muttered something about “discretionary time” but, in order to be discretionary, you have to have some choice in whether you give that time. They felt they didn’t; they had to work the extra hours, just to keep up with the job.

Oh, I understand that there are efficiency savings to be made. I understand that there might be synergies (and, unlike a lot of people who bandy that word about, I know what it means) but there is a bottom line. This bottom line isn’t on the accounts: it’s the baseline below which no-one can go. Everything you do takes time; there is nothing you do that you can do in an instant. You can be more efficient and look for ways of, perhaps, doing two things at once to speed things up, but there is a bottom line below which we cannot go. There is a point at which there are no more efficiencies; there are no more synergies. What then? Work harder is no longer the right answer...

Speed

Like many people, I’ve been keeping an eye on the television over the past few days, keeping up with the ongoing political situation here in the UK. The thing that’s struck me most is the number of presenters who have been camped out in all weathers, reporting from outside various locations, waiting for something to happen. Exactly why it was necessary to drag these presenters blinking into the sunlight from their warm and cosy studios, I’m not entirely sure but I suspect it has a lot to do with our culture’s current obsession with speed.

Aside from giving the spurious impression that the news they are conveying is somehow more accurate because they are “on the scene”, the main reason for having presenters in Downing Street or outside the cabinet offices is so that they can capture events, as they happen. Sky, for one, makes great play of being the first to bring what is now referred to as “breaking” news as does BBC Radio 5 Live.

But what does speed give us? In all but a very few instances, speed or immediacy adds little: it tells us what has happened but the focus on immediacy means we don’t understand why it happened, or the consequences of what has happened. It’s symptomatic of our broader desire now to get things done quickly. Mobile phones are with us all the time and we’re expected to be available almost 24 hours a day. Email is all but instantaneous so some people assume that the reply should be, too, and I’ve written before about the pressure for ever increasing efficiency – for which, again, read speed.

Where in all of this instant reaction is the opportunity to stop and think? Where is the opportunity to consider, to reflect, to weigh up alternatives? How many mistakes might be avoided, how many ideas might be improved, how many decisions might be better, simply by avoiding this pressure and slowing down? I’ve spent this week with a great bunch of people, all of whom report being under so much pressure that they are at near breaking point. It’s not that they’re inefficient, or poor at their jobs, or unintelligent – they’re just struggling to keep up with the relentless pace of the jobs they do. The only way they stand any chance of keeping up is to react instantly, constantly spending time in Quadrant One, slowly but surely burning out.

It takes courage to take a stand against this tide and I hope, during the course of this week, I was able to give them something that might help. It’s a situation that I’m facing with delegates more and more often, though, and seems to be a trend which is only going one way. It’s like we’re all speeding along a motorway: we’re unsure of where we are or where we’re going, certain only that we’re making such good progress we don’t have time to check the map.