5 Ways Less Is More When Managing Your People

There is absolutely a time and a place for a pizza party in the office (particularly on May 20 which is National Pizza Party Day!) Unless, of course, you’re the kind of monster that puts pineapple on pizza. 

And while pizza is a fun way to appreciate your people, sorry, the occasional pizza party isn’t going to cut it. Even frequent pizza parties won’t, and neither will any other lunch treat. 

It’s nice, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not enough. You need a solid strategy for retaining your employees that helps prevent burnout.

Modern culture is all about the hustle, and too many corporations, companies, bosses, supervisors, and business owners have bought into the myth that doing more stuff = more results. Unfortunately, that’s just not true. 

Doing the right stuff is what brings results. When your people can do more of the right things at the right time for them, you get better results.

It may be counterintuitive, but when it comes to productivity and efficiency, less is more. 

Less time in the office, more accomplishments

At the exact moment you read the title, you probably thought that must be wrong. However, there’s only a certain amount of time that the human brain has each day for focused work. 

That’s regardless of how smart or educated or accomplished that your people are. Human brains did not develop in the office in front of computers and screens.

You can demand that your people do more busy work so they look busier and more productive, but that doesn’t make them more productive. In fact, that leads to burnout.

Instead, expect staff to get their important work done in a reasonable amount of time so they can go home to their friends and families and pets and their hobbies and the things they like to do. Friends, family, and hobbies help the brain recharge - which refills the “productivity tank”.

And those things make people happier. You know research shows that people happy with their jobs are less likely to leave. Choose wisely by providing people with the ability to go home without feeling guilty.

It’s also key to consider after-hours activities. Team bonding is important and sometimes works better away from the office. But how many happy hours do you expect your people to go to? What about all the women who often go home to their full-time jobs as wife and mother after work? 

And most importantly, you need to allow this time without either implicitly or explicitly penalizing employees who choose to spend time at home. If you never give raises to people who don’t show up for every single happy hour, you’re not encouraging staff to recharge and reset.

Less “management by walking around”, more contentment

During the pandemic, remote and flexible work increased. Most employees liked it, though not all. If you want to retain your talent and they do jobs that are accessible remotely, figure out how to include remote or hybrid work. Otherwise they’re going to jump ship to a company that’s more accommodating.

You may need some more off-sites, like quarterly retreats or something similar, to help the team bond when people work flexible hours. You may need to include some socialization before and/or after scheduled virtual meetings so colleagues can connect with each other.

Also, you need to be measuring success by results, not by butt time in the seat. Some jobs experience periods of hectic work and other times where things are more relaxed. If you’ve got people working 60-hour weeks during their cram time, they should not be penalized for some 20 or 30-hour weeks during downtime. 

And if they’re working 60-hour weeks all the time, they’re headed for burnout. Take charge of that before they quit on you. 

Fewer KPIs, more results

There are so many hours in a day, so many hours the human brain can focus on “thinky work”, and so many tasks that can be accomplished in each hour. The more KPIs there are to measure, the more time people spend managing KPIs and not doing work.

Overloading people with too many key performance indicators means that you don’t know what you’re doing. You may have a couple of leading and a couple of lagging indicators, but not much more than that. Laser focusing on the important tasks (20%) is what gets 80% of the results - Pareto Principle in action!

Less micromanagement, more results

When you’re onboarding new people, you may need to spend more time with them to help them get acclimated and understand what you expect. But once they’re up to speed, micromanaging means you are doing something wrong as a supervisor. 

If you hire the right people, they don’t need you to micromanage them. They’ll look for jobs elsewhere where they can feel respected.

And if you didn’t hire the right people, well, micromanagement isn’t the solution. Getting rid of them and getting the right ones is the solution. Or maybe they’re just not the right people yet, which again means that micromanagement is not the solution. Spending time and money training them is.

Less computer time, more spacing out

OK, this one is going to be a tough sell, I know. (I was inspired by Collaborative Fund’s discussion of John Rockefeller, the world’s richest man, whose job was to think, not to drill wells or build railroads or whatever.)

If you have knowledge workers, then their job is to think, right? Providing them that time - which often looks like staring into space or out a window, or can sometimes be going for a long walk in the afternoon (as long as you don’t work in the Coachella Valley in the summer) - means they’ll spend time not typing furiously away on the keyboard.

Even if you don’t have knowledge workers - if you own a retail store or manufacturing business or something else - you might still find it worthwhile to give employees a little time to think.

The line workers, the ones who are doing the jobs, are often the ones who can figure out how to do it the best and most efficiently. So let them help you help them from time to time.

Recap:

If you’ve got talented staff and you don’t want them to burn out, remember the principle of “less is more”. Give them more flexibility, more time for doing things that are not work, more time to think and less time in front of screens and watch the productivity in your company skyrocket.