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Busy work, menial tasks and never-ending Zoom meetings. It’s no wonder that knowledge workers are spending too much time on busy work.
Liberate your staff from the menial and watch them fly
18 August 2021
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5 minute read
Knowledge workers are the engine room of modern business. Yet bogging them down with menial, repetitive tasks can reduce their productivity and effectiveness. The problem is many key workers feel they’ve got to do these jobs – as well as the incessant meetings, death by PowerPoint and constant tagging on email chains.
But there’s a better way. There are management practices and techniques that can liberate your knowledge workers from tasks that just waste their time and allow them to really build value for the business, as well as help them improve their personal skills and development.
Get rid of menial office tasks
According to a study from the Harvard Business Review, knowledge workers spend around 40 per cent of their time on discretionary activities they could easily offload or automate. This raises the question: if these activities can be offloaded and automated, why are key workers still doing them?
Getting rid of menial, repetitive tasks is easier said than done. Part of the responsibility falls on the workers themselves. That’s because we like things that keep us busy and distract us from the real challenges. Worse still, bosses and management are always wanting to do more with less, and if they see someone performing well in the tasks they have been given, they tend to load that person up with even more work.
The pandemic has exacerbated this issue. Now many of us are working from home (and many won’t go back to the office) or in hybrid environments, we’re striving to show we’re actually doing our jobs, and so we tend to take on more, do more Zoom meetings and live in our Slack or Microsoft Teams channels.
This all comes at the cost of doing real, creative work that pushes the business forward and allows for innovative, lateral thinking.
Value of automation
The global financial crisis, and now the pandemic, have led to a wave of cost-cutting that has seen administrative staff and junior employees lose their jobs, or to those roles not being filled in the first place. The result is that business has to do more with less, and the responsibility to do those jobs has fallen on experienced workers, meaning that they have less time to focus on their real jobs.
One solution is to use automation. Even something as simple as scheduling calendar invites can be handed off to software to coordinate, rather than being done manually, with the associated email trails.
The same goes for management reporting. Automation means that data silos are eliminated, and every department is on the same page when it comes to business and staff performance. It also makes compliance and auditing far easier – each data point is attributable to a particular staff member, and all spending and invoicing is accounted for immediately. This eases the regulatory burden and makes reporting season much easier.
Planning and commitment
The same HBR report says that knowledge workers should do a self-audit to discover tasks they are doing that they can either drop, delegate or reassign to someone else. Undertaking this audit reveals that around a quarter of a knowledge worker’s activities fall into the drop or delegate categories and by relinquishing them, they can reclaim up to ten hours of productive time per week.
It’s also important to understand whether a job can be redesigned to ensure the worker is doing tasks that are innovative and bring a business benefit, rather than just work that rewards no one apart from the person doing it, simply because they feel they are doing something.
Humans like to be busy, and sometimes menial and repetitive tasks can scratch that itch. After all, if you’re filling the hours of the day, then you must be doing something good – right? As we’ve seen, that’s not the case.
Once you’ve dropped, delegated or rethought the role, the next step, in conjunction with a trusted manager or mentor, is to decide how to spend the free time that’s been generated by offloading menial and repetitive work.
The key here is to write down things you feel you could be doing, but currently aren’t. Workshop those with someone who’s onside with your productivity and innovation kick, and then …. get to work! It’s also important to commit to the plan once you’ve decided on a way forward. Planning and commitment are key to finding new ways forward.
The pandemic has turned business upside down. We’re all working harder, and many of us are working remotely. But with planning, delegation and offloading of menial tasks, knowledge workers can reallocate their time to innovative thinking, benefiting both the business and their careers.
Do you need to take a look at your business with fresh eyes? Our specialist team at MYOB are here to help. Click here for further information and business resources.
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