Everybody’s busy. No time to get anything done. Is that actually true? Or are we so psychologically busy? There are people who are basically overwhelmed when they get out of bed. They sit there at breakfast, wringing their hands, rubbing their eyes, and fidgeting in their chair about their dreaded workload that awaits them. They slump their shoulders, drag their feet, and move at a pace that would make a snail yawn. Slogging their way through traffic, they make it to work- even more tired than when they woke up. Eight trips to the break room for coffee, and they’re still not feeling better. Overwhelmed, they pass their day fidgeting as more work piles up and they roll their eyes. Having accomplished nothing, they go home, totally stressed from their work day. And didn’t do a damn thing. Every story that follows is true- I couldn’t possibly be this creative with fiction.

I was a co-op engineering student while attending Purdue University, working every other semester as an apprentice engineer for Illinois Tool Works, Inc. One semester, ITW assigned me to the secondary assembly operations department. Many machines in the department were constantly breaking down. So, as an inquisitive engineering student, I found the department supervisor, who coincidentally, had his head stuck in a machine- fixing it. I asked, “Fred, have you got any preventative maintenance routines for these machines?” His answer was a classic lesson in human behavior: “Preventative maintenance?! I haven’t got time for preventative maintenance! I’m too busy fixing machines!” He couldn’t find two minutes to grease a bearing, but he always found four hours to replace one.

In early 2001, we were running a sustained sales training program for a client. Occasionally, during a training program we get a call from someone who likes to vent. I received a “vent’ call from a disgruntled participant late on a Monday morning. “It took me fours hours to write this proposal this morning. I haven’t got time for that!” He went on for another hour complaining about management and doing reports and so on. I asked him if he did three proposals per week for the next five weeks (which was the goal), how long would it take to do a proposal at the end of those five weeks? He answered, “About thirty minutes.” I wondered if he ever listened to himself.

He didn’t have the time to do the first proposal, but he had all the time in the world to call me and complain about management. And he didn’t even understand his own answer of “thirty minutes” if he kept working at it, instead of four hours if he did it once. Then, you have to consider that time to do proposals equals money; but time complaining about management equals frustration. While some salespeople need to vent- and do so effectively at the local pub or gym or the great outdoors - this was not a case of effective venting namely because at the end of his conversation, he was not going to feel better since HE was the problem, not management.

We took another call from a client’s VP of Sales in the middle of an online training program. According to the VP, their telesales production numbers were down significantly- by 25%, in fact. When the telesales manager was asked to account for this, the response was “Our numbers are down because of the time devoted to the training.” Time was money and this training time was apparently equated to 25% less performance in telesales, which prompted the conclusion that the training was chewing into 25% of their “production time”. That comes out to two hours per day or ten hours per week per person.

There was a problem with this off-the-cuff typical remark we get from many managers: Facts. First, let’s take a look at the workload for the training program:

• Monday- read two pages and write one paragraph that summarizes the trainee’s thoughts on the reading material.
• Wednesday- ditto.
• Friday- take an open-book, multiple-choice, four to seven- question quiz covering the four pages of reading.

The problem wasn’t just the obviousness that this load couldn’t possibly take ten hours per week to do. The problem was we actually monitor how much time people spend online with the program. Uh-oh, here come the facts. After checking the data we found the average time spent per week online per person was 53 minutes. About twenty minutes per homework session and 13 minutes to take the quiz. If time were indeed money, then our training program should have cut production time by a maximum of less than 1/40^th of the total time, or about one-tenth of the 25% claimed. What’s even more fascinating is when confronted with these facts and forced to continue and finish the training program, the department’s productivity went up 20% over quota- which they then attributed to the training. Whew- we were grateful for the facts.

This year, we were running a sales management team intervention for a client. This intervention was at the request of the CEO and included the sales department’s eight managers. The CEO was concerned- and rightfully so- that her management team was not functioning as a team and that this was hurting the department’s performance and would jeopardize the long-term growth.

At our first meeting, one of the department managers announced, “I don’t understand the point of this. I get along with everyone here and don’t need to be wasting my time here. I have all these performance reports to get out for my salespeople and I don’t want to be late on that.” Fortunately I was able to stifle the wise-guy inside my head that screamed, “Apparently your boss doesn’t think you get along with everyone, that’s why she’s invested in us to deliver this program” and instead politely said, “Then you really need to participate to give us an internal bench-mark for the proper behavior”. Now that was some good fiction.

What’s interesting about “not having the time for this” was it was a lunch meeting. They ate, we talked. Done. Then, on the way out I happened to pass by Mr. Get-along-with-everybody’s booth and asked him about the performance reports (if they are like most companies- screwed up- I was looking for our next project to fix after the teamwork program). He proceeded to tell me and my partner about how this report works and how that report works and how much work he has to do. This explanation went on for forty-five minutes, and was cut short by us extracting ourselves from the psychiatry venting session. Feigning interest was just too challenging at that point. This guy didn’t have time for lunch to go through the intervention kick-off meeting, but ask for a complaint and he’s got all day.

Now, I don’t want to be offensive to those people are actually working their tails off on a daily basis. I did work at an aerospace company in the late 70’s and realized that 90% of the work was done by 10% of the people- and the rest were in meetings or walking around. So I know that all of you reading this fall into the 10% worker bee category. I’m just trying to shed a little light on the other 90%. Maybe we can start to engage them a bit more to pick up some of the work load. This working 25 hours a day, 8 days a week has just got to stop.