Tag: Management

Innovation and working from home

It’s hard not to be confronted these days with arguments on both sides of the working from issue. In general, we’re seeing more employees desiring to keep work from home options and more CEOs and managers wanting to see more of their staff back in the office. Employees say they are more productive at home. Employers say the business is less efficient. What’s going on?

Aftre reading an interesting HBR article on redesigning how we work (https://hbr.org/2023/03/redesigning-how-we-work), it struck me that employees feeling more productive at home and CEOs feeling their workers are less innovative when they are not in the office (and therefore overall, the company is less efficient) are actually the same thing. Employees feel more productive at home precisely because they are less innovative.

Innovation is hard work. It requires synthesis of a number of different ideas. It dead ends far more frequently than it leads to new vistas. It requires energy and motivation to pursue. Innovation is inefficient — a distraction. Working from home eliminates a lot of the office distractions, allowing workers to get high quality focus time to complete their work without the extraneous ideas, thoughts, and counter-proposals that arise in an office setting. These distractions make it harder to get the job done while occasionally spurring meaningful innovation that drives the company forward with a sudden jolt.

Many times the office dynamic just feels like too many cooks stirring the pot, like a buzz of activity for activity’s sake. Office employees are grateful for that hour during lunch or at the end of their day where they can actually get their work done. At home, that hour is actually the entire day and employees are indeed doing more in less time, just as they say they are.

Meanwhile, CEOs have it right, too. Employees are doing their work, but not synthesizing new ideas and generating new ways of doing things. They get more done, but they have fewer chances to innovate and bring new ideas and new efficiencies to the organization because they have few chance encounters and conversations with diverse opinions and thoughts.

The challenge, then, is to capture the best of both these worlds. Provide those working from home with purposeful opportunities to share ideas, motivate each other, and develop new problems and new solutions. Provide those working at the office with more high-quality, distraction-free time that they can control to focus on their work. With some purposeful thought, we can share the good from both environments, be both efficient and innovative, and hopefully move on to another water cooler topic.

As an independent contractor, Scot generally works from home where he uses the variety of projects he is working on and ample breaks to expose himself to other ideas, fields, and people, to spur innovation. Comment below on what you do to be more innovative at home and more productive in the office.

17 October 23
Another class offering this October

I just signed up with the UH Manoa Outreach College again to offer a one-day class this October. This one is scheduled to be in person, pandemic permitting. The College made a nice little writeup about the class here. It combines my general workplace productivity content including email and task management and priority setting, with a focus on balancing the urge to constantly do more with a purposeful effort to do less and free your mind from constant busyness. Hope I can see some of you there.

29 March 22
Navigating the maze

By this time next month, my regular paychecks will have stopped, to be replaced by something as yet not completely known, perhaps by nothing at all, but hopefully by something. A month ago, I lost my father; we weren’t particularly close, but he was my father and he was a life with his own dreams, scars, and sense of moving forward that is now extinguished. That’s sad no matter the relationship and getting this new perspective on his (and my own) life has taken time to process – time I had intended to prepare for that lost paycheck. I’m feeling OK, actually, going through things one at a time, with more of life unsettled than I would normally prefer.

I decided some time ago I needed to do something else, something different, a different environment, with my career. I applied and interviewed for a couple jobs – feeling like I was more interviewing than being interviewed; I wanted something different, not just a different color paycheck. I didn’t actually get any offers, and it probably appears like sour grapes to say I probably wouldn’t have accepted had I, so I won’t. But it was a good process and I learned things – about myself and my industry. For instance, I’ve now applied for a major facility Director position three times, to get invited to the panel interview each time, but never progressing beyond, and I now think I understand why. I also understand more about what’s important to me, what I am looking for in meaningful work, and what it would take to actually want and get such a position in the future, if that’s what I decide to do.

So, what’s my current plan? I’ve started Astromanager LLC and will be doing my own thing. I wrote myself a business plan so I could better lay out my thoughts for myself and to explain to others. I hope it will be a good start, but I doubt it will be an accurate roadmap to what actually happens in the end. I’m hoping to spend <~50% of my time doing meaningful, but temporary project-related work for astronomy – helping to get projects started, or through some tough spots, or filling in a temporary gap or need. With my experiences in the science, observations/operations, and technical/project sides of astronomy, I think I can fill a variety of needed roles and offer groups a way to seize opportunities they might not have otherwise. Is there a market for this? If there isn’t, I think there should be, and judging by the inquiries I’ve received already, I’m optimistic there is a real mutual need here I can address. I’m really grateful for the support I’ve received so far and in addition to fearing I won’t have enough work offers, I am beginning to fear I may have too many.

I want to spend the other ~50% of my time on my coaching and training material – a lot of which I’ve discussed here already. I’ve got content on workplace productivity, anti-productivity, project management, leadership, teamwork, systems engineering, and personal and professional growth. I think there’s relevance here to a more general audience beyond astronomy that I’d like to explore. I also think there’s value in continuing to bring these ideas to astronomy and the broader technical/academic world, particularly to students and those in early career stages. A colleague told me today that she thought our training teaches us the technical aspects of our industry, but it doesn’t teach us how to be humans; how to relate to others; how to get our ideas across and accept others’, etc. I’ve learned, and am still learning, most of this the hard way. How great it would have been to figure this stuff out earlier. I’d like to help others learn some of my lessons earlier than I did.

Contributing to both efforts, I’ve got too many ideas for new content I want to generate, blogs I want to write, books I want to publish, videos I want to make, and communities I want to engage with. It’s both exciting and scary and with an office full of boxes from my father’s estate, and soon to be from my old office, it’s all a bit jumbled right now. I’ve got a business plan, a great network of friends and colleagues, and a path through the boxes. I think I’m going to make it and I hope you’ll be here for, and help me along, the journey.

Mahalo, and aloha.

Scot

20 February 22
Online classes and a new YouTube channel

I’m working with the Outreach College at the University of Hawaii at Manoa to offer a unique combination of my class content in a remote, zoom-like, environment. You can read more about it and sign up at their page here. I’ll be including most of my Email Management, Task Management, and Prioritization (Getting the Right Things Done) courses along with some of my newer Doing Less content. I’m looking forward to it and hopefully the first focus on productivity doesn’t dilute the ending message to slow down and take a step back from time to time too much. 🙂

I’m also experimenting with ways to get some of these courses out to a broader audience, so I’ve started a YouTube channel. I’m starting it with my Email Management course content and some random other thoughts. Stop on by and let me know if you’ve found it useful. I need 100 initial subscribers to get a better URL and make my content easier to find, so if you feel like subscribing, it would be a big help if you could. I’m not going to beg for likes and subscribes in the videos themselves, but I would like them to be accessible to people looking for such content.

Well, that’s it for now. Mahalo.

11 August 21
The pandemic and the unhealthy interrupt culture

I was just relating to a colleague the other day how I find this whole pandemic working from home thing beneficial in certain ways. True, I have more meetings. tiring zoom meetings, than I ever had, but generally outside of my meetings, my time stays mine. People tend to hold things for our meetings, or they deal with things themselves that they might previously have come through my open office door with. There also seems to be a more general awareness that our non-work life is going to intersect with our work life, so there’s less expectation, generally, of immediate email response as well. I’m finding it easier to put my email aside for longer periods of time while I concentrate on a specific task or project without drawing people’s ire.

Open door policies have good intentions and several benefits, but they also have some significant drawbacks. For one, they essentially say that your interruption is more important than my otherwise planned work. All the time – without exception. Yes, you can close your doors at times, or respond to an interruption with a statement that this isn’t a good time, but the general expectation at the office was anyone can go see anyone at any time and get a response right then and there. Not only does that devalue the work of the one interrupted, it can also be disservice to the interrupters who don’t derive the benefits from spending a bit more time on their problems and discovering the solutions themselves. Even in the pre-pandemic world, when someone you wanted help from wasn’t in the office when you needed, you usually went back to your own office, googled for a bit, sketched out some ideas, and generally found the solution you were looking for on your own. Would have it been easier or faster to get the answer from your absent colleague? Yes, perhaps, and in some cases that is indeed the right thing to do. But in other cases, it’s just not.

From 3 Easy Steps to Establishing an Open Door Policy That Really Works with some good suggestions, but mostly missing the point about the value of the interrupted person’s time. https://www.insperity.com/blog/3-easy-steps-establishing-open-door-policy-really-works/

I think the norms that have arisen around remote work have been good for abating the rise of an unhealthy interruption culture. People don’t interrupt unless they really feel they need to, tending normally to figure out the issue on their own or store it for the next scheduled zoom meeting. This, I think is the intent of the open office policy – I’m here to help when you really need it, but it’s that when you really need it that tended to get lost and people sought others’ help whenever it was convenient, not whenever it was really necessary. I want to hear from you and an open door helps make that possible. I also want you to spend some time with your problems and own your solutions and I have my own work I’d like to complete as well. Open doors don’t help very much with the latter two objectives.

So now, even though I have fewer free hours in a day, I can generally use those hours more effectively than I could in the office. I have time to think; time to do the important, but not urgent; time to get into a state of flow and stay there for a while. None of these things are possible with the usual daily interruptions of an open door in the office.

There are lessons here for the eventual return to office. I’m leaning more towards the concept of office hours rather than open door. I’ve considered that before, but this pandemic experience has really demonstrated the value of that approach. Stop looking for the quick answer that disrupts someone else. Work through the problem on your own, seek help when you really need it, and let others enjoy the same quality time for their work that you have for yours. Supplement this with scheduled time to talk to your colleagues and then really listen. Combined, I think these efforts could bring some of this work from home productivity back to the office.

Working from home, of course, has its own set of distractions and interruptions that don’t apply to the office, but having more occasions for uninterrupted time, even for an hour, is a big enough benefit that Scot would like to find a way to continue this once back in the office.

7 July 21
Class Offerings

Over the years, I’ve developed a number of short courses on a variety of topics concerning workplace efficiency, effective management, and leadership. Lately, I have expanded the content and realized there may be a larger audience for all of this than what I am currently reaching. So, I’m also thinking of new ways I can present the material and am considering whether I can make them into a set of self-serve videos that people could pick and choose from. The classes usually include a lot of interactive discussion and some exercises, so I’m trying to develop some way to translate all that into the different format. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

I also need a place to record a summary of the offerings, so for now at least, this is that place.

The Productivity Series

Your email inbox includes hundreds of emails that demand your attention or some action to close out. You are continually barraged with new work requests that make it difficult to both keep track of everything on your plate and stay focused on the task at hand. You find yourself constantly working to do the urgent tasks on your list and seldom find the time to work on those long-term important projects that don’t have specific deadlines. You would love to delegate some of your work, but the process is usually painful enough that it seems easier to just do things yourself. You sometimes wonder if it’s all worth it. If any or all these situations sound familiar, and they are too much so for many of us, these four classes can help you regain control or refine your existing processes for more thoughtful productivity:

1. Email. Learn how to reduce the amount of time you spend processing your email and make your own emails more effective.

2. Task Management. Learn how to organize your tasks so you don’t lose track of what you have to do or where you are on a given task. Reduce the amount of time you spend switching tasks and prepare yourself to better respond to new task requests.

3. Prioritization. Learn to make time for the important as well as the urgent. Understand basic human tendencies that sometimes inhibit us from making the best decisions on what task to spend our time on. Learn when and how to slow down and say no.

4. Delegation. Learn effective ways to offload tasks to others and still get results.

Individual Components

Email Management
Finally, a meeting where you’re not only allowed, but instructed to read your emails. Leave this class in control of your email. We’ll discuss the zero inbox method of email management, including ways to send more effective emails, receive fewer emails, and derive better processes to organize the emails you receive.

Task Management
Once you’ve learned to manage your email, attend this session and learn to manage your tasks. How do you keep track of what needs doing? How do you make sure important tasks don’t slip through the cracks? How do you stop your mind from reminding you at all the wrong times about all the things you need to do? We’ll focus primarily on a simplified Getting things Done (GTD) type task management approach and discuss several practical ways to implement it.

Getting the Right Things Done
Go beyond task management and learn how to identify what the right things to be doing are and explore why we don’t always seem to do the right things, even when we know what they are. Mastering this content should help attendees remove low return tasks from their plates, focus on getting the most important tasks done, and partner better with their colleagues.

Doing Less or There’s more to Life than Efficiency
Focusing on productivity and efficiency are good things, but as with most things, too much of a good thing can still be too much. In Doing Less we talk about the value of slowing down, allowing time for context and creativity, and choosing a path simply because it is unknown. Together with Getting the Right Things Done, we address the other half of task management beyond organizing and controlling your tasks to prioritizing, doing, and sometimes purposefully not doing.

Successful Delegation
An important part of controlling your own task list is delegation. A critical and necessary part of delegation is tracking and ensuring your delegated tasks get done. Here, we discuss techniques to make proper requests of others, set deadlines, and follow up without coming across as a nag or an untrusting colleague.

Effective Meetings
You’ve mastered your inbox, taken control of your task list and become a master of delegation. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to attend, or perhaps even hold, a meeting to discuss your projects. This course offers a framework for meetings that helps ensure you walk away from each meeting with the results you need and with appropriate participation from the attendees. Would you rather watch a good move, or go to a meeting? If you chose a movie, come learn why and how you should attend a meeting instead.

Leadership and Teamwork
Can anyone be a leader? Do I need a title to be a leader? How do I learn my leadership style? Leadership is about character and skills and both can be learned. In this course we differentiate management from leadership, discuss the different ways one can lead, find a common thread running through most leadership models and the best leaders, and learn to lead by first understanding yourself, then others. We build a set of skills and a problem solving framework to help leaders and teams focus on the right problem solving steps while avoiding common pitfalls.

Still occasionally suffering from an email inbox that doesn’t get emptied, tasks that don’t get done, meetings that aren’t efficient, and other signs that he has still not fully mastered this material, Scot enjoys presenting these courses and learns something new every time. As a result, his processes continually evolve and improve and hopefully others also gain control and purpose in their work life. It is all a work in progress and a journey he hopes to share with others for mutual benefit.

In preparation for a new delivery system, Scot has started a new Astromanager youtube channel with as of yet, no content. If you want to check it out you can find it at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2lJ7RdBBowLLON762LQ6Qg. You can subscribe now for that first video notification and a valuable early subscriber number.

7 April 21
Is science really first?

I frequently hear the phrase “the science has to come first” that generally means all we have to do is select whichever course of action produces the most science (as if that were easy to determine, but that’s another topic) when faced with any decision. While I agree the business of observatories is to produce science, I often wonder if saying the science comes first is a bit like saying profit comes first. Is doing whatever produces the most science equivalent to doing whatever produces the most profit? These days, the latter sounds antiquated and uninspiring. Many modern companies put their mission, their customers, and even their employees over profits (see Vineet Nayar’s book, Employees First, Customers Second, Ricardo Semler’s Maverick, and many others, for example). The thought is that if you put your employees or your mission first, the profits will follow (see also Simon Sinek’s Start with Why, for example). Looking into these sources, you can convince yourself (as I have) that this is not all just a bunch of feel good new age talk, but a real recipe for both doing general good and being rewarded for it with enhanced profit (or in our case, science).

When I was working on my MBA, I often had to build a translation table to map for-profit strategies to their equivalents in the nonprofit world. More often than not, the mapping was as simple as changing dollars profit to science output (measured in published papers, if you must). There isn’t a whole lot in what I often refer to as “the real world” that doesn’t apply to the academic world if you make that mapping.

It therefore seems no stretch at all to believe that if we build good scientific organizations that put employees’ needs first, the good science will follow. Imagine a corporation that makes every decision based on maximizing profit. Is that a place you would want to work? Is that organization going to attract and retain the best people that will bring the best ideas that generate more profit? I think not. Putting profit first may appear the more. ahem, profitable approach, but it is a short-sighted one that leaves a lot of additional unseen opportunity on the table. An employee-centered organization, on the other hand, taps into one of humans’ best profit(/science)-generating fountains: self motivation and a general desire to contribute to a larger goal.

Simon Sinek talks about “people don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it.” Is science output our profit, or our mission – our why, in this context? Clearly, we have a why people can buy into – we are exploring the Universe around us and sharing our knowledge. Yet science output is also our currency. In making science the bottom line, are we being a greedy company focused only on profit, or a noble organization focused on a larger mission of exploration and the transfer of knowledge? (Hint: science output is both our why and our profit and for both, we need the best from our people.) Too often we fool ourselves into believing that putting science first enhances our mission, when in reality, it can end up demotivating our staff and making us an undesirable place to work.

Science is our mission, and it is a grand and noble one, yet we need our best people fully engaged to produce the most of it. People first – in order to produce more science – is the key that will help us fulfill that mission.

Our focus on our scientific and educational mission is what allows us to have such a dedicated staff of people that want the organization to succeed. It is why we often get professional managers, engineers and technicians that could be making more money in the “real world”, but come to us to be part of the mission of discovery and sharing. Science provides a compelling answer to Simon Sinek’s why? Focusing on science outcomes is good.

And yet, it is not enough. Focusing on our output only, whether it be science productivity or dollars, sets the focus away from the people we are serving and more importantly the people who are doing the work. It says the ends are more important than the means and I don’t believe they are.

To produce the most science, we need to focus on the means as well as the ends. We need to allow our people to innovate and deliver more and better science because we have made it easy for them to do so. We need to create an environment where our people can create and enable the most science by setting things up, then getting out of their way. By focusing on our staff, we allow them to focus on enabling and producing science, just as many companies have found focusing on their staff allows them to produce more profits. For any given decision, one choice might appear to produce the most immediate amount of science, but if it hinders a staff member, limits their ability or motivation to produce and innovate, lower output will result. Businesses cannot afford to focus on profit over their people; and neither can we. If we want the most and best science, we have to focus on enabling our employees to go out and produce it for us.

As an astromanger himself, Scot wants his work to deliver the most possible science, and before he became a manager, he contributed to that mission by producing science, individually and in collaboration with others. At that time in his career, he could indeed focus on what action would produce the most science. As an astronomanger, however, his primary mission is no longer to produce compelling science himself, but to enable those in his care to do so for the good of the overall organization. Making that happen meant changing his focus from what he was trained in, the objective, relentless, scientific process, to what he had to learn, how to enable the people in his care to live and work to their greatest potential. That is the true role of the astromanager, and one he strives to be worthy of, despite its subjective, squishy, nature.

11 February 21
Recognizing our anxieties

I was mowing my lawn the other day, lost in my own thoughts as I usually am when mowing the lawn, when I saw someone I didn’t know walking by. I saw him watching me and I found myself thinking he’s probably wondering why I am mowing in such an inefficient pattern. I wonder if I could do this better. It looks like it is about to storm at any moment, so I am trying to cover as much ground as I can before it starts to pour. Yes, my pattern is inefficient with respect to completing the lawn, but it is efficient with respect to getting more area mowed in a short amount of time….

And then I had to stop and laugh when I realized the huge projection I had just made of my own needs and insecurities onto this random passerby. This stranger gave me no indication that he really was thinking about my inefficient mowing strategy. That was entirely my own projection. There are many things I could have thought, but didn’t:

He’s probably hoping he gets back home in time before the rain starts.

He’s probably glad he got his lawn mowed yesterday when it was dry.

He’s probably wondering if I am going to continue mowing even when the downpour starts.

Isn’t that a neighbor? Hi.

and so on. Yet I didn’t think any of those things, I thought about my inefficiency, clearly indicating my own focus and hangups.

If the passerby had stopped to talk while I was still projecting, I might have offered a defense of why my apparent inefficient mowing strategy really was actually the most efficient thing I could be doing at that time. I might have said this even though the odds are this thought wasn’t even close to being on his mind.

These assumptions and projections fill our lives and flavor our communications with people all the time. Listen for them in yourself and in those you work with. Understanding these assumptions can help you correct them in yourself to be more open to what others really have to say. They also illustrate the nature of the lenses you have on the world. What is important to you? How do you see and judge yourself?

By listening for these assumptions and projections in others, you can tailor your words to both address their needs and get your point across in an easier way. When you find someone being defensive when you approach them about something, they are probably projecting their own anxieties on you. If you listen to what they are, you can better address them while adjusting your approach to get your issue in the mix, as well.

Efficiency, as the vignette above demonstrates, is important to Scot. He is naturally keenly aware of time and does not like to see it wasted. While this fixation has some generally good consequences, it can also hamper his ability to spend a bit more time to explore a different path, get people settled, or discuss how people feel about a given action. Luckily, there are both (and more) types in the world for us all to learn from. And occasionally, Scot even remembers taking the time to do these things can actually end up being more efficient in the end than not doing them.

21 October 15

Tag: Management

The Productivity Series

Individual Components