Revitalized Routines

by Mark S. Fulton

It always begins the same way. You enter the room and exchange pleasantries with the people who have arrived ahead of you. You ask a few people what’s new with them and they do likewise. Then someone signals the start of the proceedings and you take your place, checking the time as you sit down. Your life momentarily flashes before you, but you realize that it only seems like eternity is yawning before you. In fact, this gathering is only supposed to last an hour. “I might still get something done this morning,” you tell yourself.

The agenda for the assembly is presented. Each attendee reports on the latest developments in his or her area of responsibility. Someone yawns. The person next to you interjects a totally unrelated topic. Another person jumps on the bandwagon with his pet peeve. Someone else complains. Chaos ensues.

Two hours later, the group’s leader issues some directives that no one writes down and you stagger off to try to salvage the rest of your day. Yes, you’ve just be mugged by another meeting from Hell.

The meeting is just one of a host of routines common to the average workplace. Routines are standardized procedures and recurrent activities that serve many functions. They keep work flowing, maintain consistency in products and services and accommodate customer needs. At their best, routines promote productivity and establish an orderly environment.

However, routines can have their downside, especially if they fail to change along with the ever-evolving realities of the workplace. Doing something a certain way just because “that’s the way it’s always been done” can turn a relevant routine into a grueling grind — a chore that diminishes productivity, stifles creativity and inhibits enthusiasm.

Examine the routines in your workplace regularly and eliminate or change elements that have lost their significance or effectiveness. Here are two places to start looking for petrified practices:

The Mundane Meeting - Whenever teams of people have to accomplish a task, meetings are inevitable. But that doesn’t mean they have to be dull, repetitive tests of mental endurance.

Unfortunately, many meetings are exactly that. “Ineffective meeting management is fast becoming a national disgrace,” say Robert K. Mosvick and Robert B. Nelson in their book “We’ve Got to Start Meeting Like This.” “Poorly planned and poorly run meetings are the worst-kept secret of America’s vaunted business skills.” Citing a survey conducted by Hofstra University, the authors claim that unproductive time spent in poorly run meetings translates to a loss of nearly $60 billion for American businesses.

There are many ways to make the most of meetings. See the “Business Sense” column entitled “Making the Most of Staff Meetings” posted on the Inside Business web site (www.insidebiz.com). Beyond making them efficient, you should also endeavor to make meetings tolerable, even fun. Try these tactics:

• Team Building Activity - One way to get a meeting off to an energized start is to do something that engages the group in an activity that bonds members in some way. Authors John Newstrom and Edward Scannell have published three books of Games Trainers Play. They contain contests, puzzles and role playing exercises that create enthusiasm while providing insight into team dynamics.

• Ripples - This warm-up exercise provides meeting participants an opportunity to say something positive that will cause ripples of pride, hope and enthusiasm to permeate the room. Comments from each participant can include a personal insight, a piece of upbeat news, a compliment received from a customer and so on. The point is to create a positive atmosphere at the outset of the meeting.

The Enervating Evaluation - Performance evaluations are a valuable tool for documenting employee achievements and deficiencies and giving helpful feedback. They can be opportunities for engendering enthusiasm, loyalty and productivity. Or they can be occasions for fomenting frustration, defensiveness and apathy.

Many employee evaluations follow this pattern: the boss doles out criticisms and commendations and counsels the employee on how to do better; the employee takes notes and promises to try harder. Typically, both supervisor and subordinate hate the process. Here are two alternatives:

• The Performance Planning Conference - “People dread being told they haven’t done a good job or their work is not satisfactory,” writes Thomas Gordon in his book Leadership Effectiveness Training (L.E.T). “Supervisors, too, dislike sending such messages.” In his book Gordon explains an approach he calls the periodic planning conference, which focuses on the future, rather than the past, and sets clear goals and measurements so that employees can evaluate their own performance.

• The 360-degree Evaluation - This approach to performance evaluation gathers information from all directions (360 degrees). That means your evaluation will include input from your superior, your peers and your subordinates. Their are a number of sources from which to obtain information about doing a 360-degree evaluation. Panoramic Feedback is an Internet-based 360-degree feedback tool (www.panoramicfeedback.com) that can get you started.

Routines are important and helpful tools for managing your business. But they can easily become ruts without a periodic review of their effectiveness. Make it your goal to banish mundane meetings, enervating evaluations and other petrified practices from your organization.

Copyright 2001 © Mark S. Fulton