The Three Questions Leaders Should Ask Themselves about Employee Goals

There are three questions every manager should ask themselves while evaluating employee goals. If anyone of these three questions cannot be answered in the affirmative, then it might not be the best goal for that employee.

Is the goal achievable? As leaders we want our employees to succeed. Failing to achieve an impossible goal can be demoralizing to the employee. Once it becomes clear that the goals won’t be achieved; motivation will wane quickly.

Is the goal difficult? This might seem like it is in conflict with whether the goal is achievable, but it is different. The goal must stretch the employee. Successfully stretching employees will naturally improve productivity.

Will the goal move the strategic pendulum? Every employee goal should be linked to a company or team strategy. The employee needs to know how their success affects the organizations success.

PERFECTING THE ART OF WASTING TIME AT WORK

Writing in his column THE HUMAN FACTOR in the Business Standard, January 22, 2010, Shyamal Majumdar rightly announces, 

Managers of the world seem to be united in their passion for wasting time at work.

According to the Late Sumantra Ghoshal a whopping 90 per cent of managers waste their time by procrastinating, becoming emotionally detached, and distracting themselves with supposedly busy work.

Some examples of how many things “busy” people are doing that will never be missed.

·         just stare at just about anything so that people around them think that they are pondering something intense.

·         schedule meetings just to tell juniors to “work smarter, not harder” and to “think out of the box” etc.

·         send emails and call up people to find out about things that would have got done anyway without their intervention

·         insist on a written report for just about everything.

(on being given a written report, they will ask juniors to tell them about the matter in their own words briefly. If the subordinates come in with a verbal suggestion next time, these managers would demand a written report.)

In The Peter Principle, Laurence J Peter and Raymond Hull (people who have devoted many years to the study of incompetence) talk about managers having Rigor Cartis, an abnormal interest in the construction of organization and flow charts, and a stubborn insistence upon routing every scrap of business in strict accordance with the lines and arrows of the chart, no matter what delays or losses may result. These type of managers are always frantically busy, drawing up reports and flow charts and making appointments to confer with one another. 

The most popular form of wasting time at work is, of course, social networking. Employees may seem busy, but many are wasting time on the Internet, or are “cyberslacking”.

A study by Assocham last month has warned that employees waste a minimum one hour of office time every day accessing social networking sites for reasons other than work. Assocham’s Social Development Foundation (ASDF) survey says companies effectively lose 12.5 per cent of total productivity each day. The survey says most organisations do not monitor and manage these sites as closely as email.

However, this problem is not restricted to India alone. Managers of the world seem to be united in their passion for wasting time in office. Time-wasting at work was spoofed in the 1999 cult film Office Space, while The Office, a British TV comedy that now has a US version, has shown characters playing a computer war game as part of what they described as a team-building exercise.

Americans do work hard at surfing the Internet and catching up on gossip, according to studies done by Salary.com and America Online. The average worker admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per 8-hour workday, not including lunch and scheduled break-time. The total in lost salary dollars adds up to $759 billion per year, the studies have shown.