This article originally appeared in The Learning Curve and The Networker in January, 1997.
Most businesses these days like to call themselves "results-driven." In a typical company the primary concern is on productivity and the bottom line. Hoever, this emphasis on results can negatively affect employee well-being. By focusing on results without a balanced attention to their well-being, employees may produce a great deal during a long work crunch, yet burn out in the process. Optimizing results does not guarantee optimal employee well-being.
Conventional productivity measures can provide very helpful feedback on work progress, but besides the fact that they ignore employee well-being, we can question the scope for which such a measure can be applied. How many of us have jobs where all we do all day long is make one or two products? Most of us also do countless other tasks that are not included in conventional productivity measures. How can productivity be assessed at times when we're not making the products that are measured? To foster truly continuous improvement, we need feedback that is always available, no matter what task we're doing, and even when we're changing tasks. So what does guarantee results and well-being?
Mastery Results from Increasing Involvement
What if we took a close look at what we do when we successfully improve productivity? Suppose you're preparing a speech. And suppose you're really into it, very involved. You write down a few key ideas that you want to present, then visualize yourself giving the speech.
Then you feel a little puzzled about the order of the ideas. There's some momentum to write more ideas down, and there's also some motivation to feel the confusion. You are stuck and don't know how to proceed. You look at the clock and wonder if you should take a break. You feel your involvement in the task decreasing, and consider ways to completely avoid the task.
You've reached what I call a transition point where your productivity can either decrease, continue gradually, or maybe even improve. You know that taking a break now would waste time. You'd still have to face things when you came back.
So you drop your distracting thinking about escapes and concentrate on the task again. You remember being confused about the order of ideas, and then realize it was actually the confusion that you wanted to avoid. This time you let yourself get confused. Your thoughts go back and forth about how to proceed, and then finally you get some insight on rearranging the ideas to be presented.
Now you're really involved again. The work's flow picks up again and gradually accelerates beyond your productivity before the confusion arose. (You can also check out an extended example of changing involvement.)
What facilitated the improvement in productivity? Wasn't it to feel the confusion and see how you had decreased your involvement and pulled away from the task? Wasn't it necessary to distinguish productive directions from counterproductive directions, then choose a productive direction and gradually become even more involved than you were before getting confused?
Could we summarize and say that increasing productivity resulted from noticing the transition point where your involvement could either increase or decrease, and then choosing a direction of increasing involvement? Isn't this the natural way that we improve productivity without even thinking about it?
At work you can periodically recall your recent experience as if you were viewing a videotape replay, and look for ways in which you weren't completely involved, just as tennis players look for ways to improve their stroke. A high degree of involvement implies a melding or identification of worker and objects worked on, a timeless and effortless flow of events, and an unrestricted sense of openness pervading the entire scenario. If you felt any separation from work or the objects being worked on, if you and time's ordinary flow weren't completely swept up in the energy of work, or if your work space felt a bit emotional or heavy, you have identified a key to improving your work game. This way of noticing your level of involvement provides self-actualizing feedback useful in directly approaching peak performance.
Optimizing Involvement Optimizes Well-Being
At this point there may be a voice in the background saying "My company would benefit greatly from this, but what would I get out of it?" The answer: your health and level of well-being should gradually improve.
Recall a time when you significantly improved your involvement in a work project by breaking through strong emotional resistance. When you broke through, wasn't there an immediate change in the sense of well-being and satisfaction that you experienced? Was there a decrease in the feeling of being at the effect of things, or an increase in confidence? Did the breakthrough boost your overall outlook on life? The increase in well-being we experience during such breakthroughs seems proportional to the amount of emotional resistance transformed.
So tracking involvement is a powerful means of increasing productivity and well-being. And the natural practice of tracking involvement has the important benefit that it can be used while focusing on any task, as you switch between tasks, or even when there is no apparent task at hand. But there's another benefit: increasing quality.
Optimizing Involvement Optimizes Quality
Noticing your increasing or decreasing involvement is the foundation for continuous quality improvement. What else triggers improving a work process except a transition point-conflict, unnecessary complexity, confusion, or wasted energy or effort? These disruptions in work flow are what draw attention to something that can be changed for the better. When something slows the flow, your involvement in the work process is lessened in a particular way that can serve as a focus for inquiry into the nature of the blockage.
Similarly, defects in a product are discernible only by means of a decrease in our involvement when we are using or perceiving them. For example, a car is a high quality product when the driver can feel one with it. (Some years ago Volkswagen advertised that in contrast to other auto manufacturers that distinguished the driver from the auto, Volkswagen's distinction as an auto manufacturer was that they considered the auto and the driver to be one.) If the steering mechanism of a race car is designed so that the driver usually feels somewhat out of control when making high-speed turns, this decrease in involvement indicates an opportunity for increasing quality. Whenever a product does not meet a customer's need or expectation, the customer is upset, and cannot be 100% engrossed or appreciative when using the product.
So if a company encourages its employees to focus on increasing their involvement, the likelihood of simultaneous and continuous improvement of quality, well-being, and productivity is maximized.
Involvement-Driven Work Optimizes Work Capacity
Some managers might fear that people would take advantage of this system and use it as license to focus on self-improvement and personal satisfaction, causing a decrease in productivity. This objection, while natural, is not well founded.
First of all, efforts to increase involvement often require letting go of personal desires and preferences in favor of dedication to a larger cause. But more to the point, these efforts do not improve the separate self--they require that we go beyond individual boundaries and merge with the work process. It seems we cannot reach this satisfaction we desire by approaching it as ego-bound individuals. Any efforts along these lines would be frustrated, since the level of fulfillment in work seems to correspond precisely to the degree that we are free of such separation.
Second, the objection that tracking involvement might cause a decrease in productivity may simply reflect business's tactical rather than strategic approach to progress. Business seems to be in such a hurry to produce, to improve this quarter's financial results, it can hardly see the possibility or importance of increasing employees' work capacity, the average rate at which tasks can be accomplished while maintaining one's level of well-being.
While it may be true that in the short run, focusing on improving involvement can lead to lower productivity, eventually whatever conflict preoccupied us at the transition points would be cleared up, and our work capacity--including our awareness, available energy, and level of confidence--would be greater, allowing us to accomplish everything from then on at a faster rate. So it pays to adequately handle our conflicts and improve our work capacity. Both we and the company will benefit in the long run.
However, often employees tend to be viewed mechanically, as if having a fixed work capacity. Workers are seen as capable of producing more for limited periods--while they are willing to put up with higher levels of stress, but they are often not seen to be capable of substantial changes in work capacity. Nevertheless, it may be that at this point in history, significant changes in our productivity will result only from improving the work capacity of individuals. The quick technological fix, reorg, or downsizing may not be sufficient.
So how can we optimize our work efforts? Probably not by focusing on results, which doesn't guarantee improvement of well-being and quality. By focusing on improving all aspects of involvement in our work, we can optimize productivity, well-being, quality, and work capacity all at once.
Copyright © 1996 by Steve Randall, Ph.D.
Twelve Questions
Peak performance research shows that optimizing your involvement in work will simultaneously optimize productivity, well-being, quality, and creativity, no matter what your task or environment. To foster optimal involvement, periodically consider the following questions that contrast various aspects of ordinary work from peak performance. These questions are related to the twelve dimensions of the Optimal Work circle.
1. Are you applying effort or control to something that feels separate from you, or is your activity flowing effortlessly by itself?
2. Do things feel familiar, somewhat predictable, or even habitual, or does each new moment, along with all that appears in the momentary scenario, seem spontaneous and fresh?
3. Are you looking forward to getting things done, or are you currently fulfilled within your work-in-progress?
4. Do objects and events take up space and appear to be separate and dispersed, or are do they seem intimately connected in and even as one space?
5. Is there a private space or personal world that feels separate from everything outside, or do inner and outer, subjective and objective appear to be inseparable facets of the same undivided space?
6. Is there a sense of self that stands apart from experience and externals, or do you feel identified with, or the same as, what's happening?
7. Is knowledge simply something that you or others possess or lack, or do you feel intimately part of what's around you, knowing things that are happening 'from inside' them?
8. Is knowledge identification, categorization, judgment, and detached observation, or an illuminating clarity merged with the subject being explored?
9. Are there boundaries and divisions among your self, mind, body, and personality, or is fulfillment and satisfaction being drawn naturally and directly from a sense of wholeness?
10. Are you driven by a desire for pleasure or a need, or is everything being found to be immediately and inherently fulfilling?
11. Do you notice a feeling of time flowing around you, or are you timelessly involved in something?
12. Does reality seem solid, fixed, and substantial, or does everything seem wondrously ephemeral?
Copyright © 1996 by Steve Randall, Ph.D.
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