4 minute read
Work about work: Focus on the responsibilities that matter
By Edel Quinn Mwende
Every Friday presents a new opportunity for Millicent (not her real name) to diarize the activities for the coming week, and carry forward the incomplete activities from the current week.
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Her normal workday runs from 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Looking at her checklist, she realizes an alarming trend; only about 40% of planned tasks on her notebook are completed at the end of every week.
This necessitated an evaluation of her daily activities and the amount of time she puts into tasks. She became conscious about how she spent her typical day at work. Looking at the big picture, Millicent has to deliver on her targets at work, maintain great relationships both at home and in the marketplace, remain healthy while maintaining excellence in her position as a supervisor.
On a typical day, Millicent begins to work on the first item listed in her notebook; a report on the half-year staff performance for her twenty staff which would ideally take 45 minutes to complete. Minutes later, a colleague walks into her office and notifies her about an urgent meeting starting in 15 minutes, that she will need to attend.
She then has to stop working on the report and prepare for the unexpected meeting. After the 1-hour long meeting in which her contribution was just a nod, she embarks on the report, and just before recording the performance of her twentieth supervisee, she remembers that she needed to get a training plan approved by her boss who would be away for two weeks. Chasing for this approval takes an hour and a half because she has to wait for the boss to finish their meeting.
Her day is then spent on responding to emails and messages, allocating tasks, receiving calls; all of which ‘comes with the job,’ and finally, the day ends and as she is closing the ‘windows’ on her desktop computer, she remembers that she needs to review the staff performance report and email it to the Human Resource department. As she closes her notebook, she glances at the remaining four tasks and realizes that she has spent her day ‘working about work.’
‘Work about work’ entails the activities that take time away from meaningful work. It is all of the activities one engages in throughout the day that are not the skilled work one is hired to do.
They inundate employees and get in the way of real work and some include; communicating about work, searching for information, managing shifting priorities, and chasing the status of work. These activities are mundane, time-consuming and most people erroneously assume that ‘it comes with the job.’
According to Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index 2021, 60% of a person’s time at work is spent on work about work and not on skilled work. Those hours add up to huge amounts of lost time hence resulting in unbalanced workloads and long hours at work.
At the very top of an organization’s pyramid is the mission, which guides all decisions, followed by strategy, then company-wide objectives, departmental objectives, quarterly objectives, individual projects, and tasks. This is the everyday work that fills up most of our time. Work about work is a universal problem, but there are a few ways to combat it:
Be clear on their organization’s objectives for the year
Get clarity on how your work adds value to the company
Once everyone is aligned with the organization’s pyramid, rethink technology- using it in a way that helps, rather than hinders, processes while at the same time cutting the clutter and bringing everyone into a single system by not having too many systems in place. A good example is the new SAP ERP and E-hospital systems at KNH which will assist combat ‘work about work.’
At the end of each workday at KNH, consider spending five minutes doing a self-reflection on how your day has been: what things went right and what did not. Think about the reasons for that, as well as what you could do to change that in the future to ‘work on work.’
MAIN PHOTO | Source: https://blog.asana. com/2021/01/anatomy-of-work-index/#close
