Bryan Collins, Author

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productivity

How To Motivate A Happy Productive Workforce

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A happy employee is a productive employee, but what does it take to create an enjoyable work culture? Mathilde Collin is the co-founder and CEO of Front, a San Francisco based company in business since 2013. Front offers an inbox for teams that replaces tools like Outlook, Gmail and instant messaging.

The company claims to have raised approximately $80 million in funding to date and have more than 5,000 customers, including Shopify, Hubspot and Cisco Meraki. Front company also claims a 100% rating on the employee satisfaction rating site Glassdoor.

“Expectations from people have evolved over the past few decades. And so people used to be very happy with just having a job. Then they were not happy anymore. They wanted a career that would make them fulfilled,” says Collin. “What people want is meaning, calling, purpose, being fulfilled, and I think companies should live up to these expectations.”

She believes happy employees demonstrate three traits.

Understands The Mission

A happy employee understands the overriding goal of their company. This step is easier for smaller business to get right because leaders are probably carrying out day-to-day work. When a company grows, effective leaders must shift from executing to hiring the right people for the right seats.

“I will always focus way more on whether the role that we’re thinking about is the right fit for the person versus whether thinking about whether the person is the right fit for the role,” says Collin.

Next, leaders should communicate the importance of the company’s mission clearly and often. Otherwise, a new employee might feel like they’re working in the dark.

Popular ways to communicate a company mission include sending weekly updates, sharing the results of board meetings and holding regular all-hands meetings. Collin also suggests leaders allow employees to provide feedback about the mission publicly or privately.

Uses Their Unique Skills

Every good employee wants to use his or her unique skills in a way that contributes to the growth of their company. “To me, the number one thing that every human being should do is [ask] ‘What am I uniquely good at?’” says Collin about this trait.

Unfortunately, employees don’t always get the opportunity to ask and answer this question at work because of overflowing inboxes or too many meetings.

After a few weeks of unfocused work, they might complain about feeling overworked and behind. A leader who wants to solve this problem must instill the discipline of time management in their employees.

“Every time is blocked for something, even if it’s not a meeting. But at least I know that at the end of the week, I have focused on the right things versus being [drawn] into what was urgent at that point,” says Collin. ”You can teach your employees to do that.”

Makes An Impact

A skilled employee might quit a company if he or she can’t see how their work affects the final product. This is a challenge for companies involved in information work whereby the final output reflects the contributions of many, rather than an individual.

In other words, a carpenter can craft and sell a table and feel like they did a good job, but a coder can probably point to only a single part of an evolving product. Often the coder’s work is built on, changed and updated.

According to Collin, transparency is a useful way of helping employees see their impact on the company. This might include sharing the latest results or key metrics on a dashboard that everyone can access.

“One thing that I will obsess over as the company scales is how I can make sure that anyone in the company knows what they need to know,” she says.

Work isn’t 100% positive all of the time, and even a motivated and happy employee must sometimes complete difficult, unpleasant or hard tasks. They might also have to occasional work late or harder when a deadline draws near.

“We are entering the last week of the quarter,” says Collin at the time of our interview. “People are going to work super hard [this weekend]. The goal is to say … Work is one thing you will care about, and your family and your health is another thing you will care about. And you will be disciplined enough to always know when it’s time to prioritize one or the other.”

What You Can Learn About Constraints From The Author Of Frankenstein

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English novelist Mary Shelley spent the summer of 1816 at Villa Diodati in Cape Geneva. Thanks to an unexpectedly wet and stormy summer, Shelley was trapped indoors. She had almost nothing to do but sit around the fireplace, read ghost stories and write.

This admittedly unplanned constraint encouraged Shelley, who was then only 19, to think more creatively and led to one of the most famous books of the nineteenth century. You might not care for creating Frankenstein, but you can still use constraints to become more productive and effective.

Time

Giving your team a deadline is an effective way of imposing this constraint. If you’re worried about letting people down, use an internal deadline for your team and an external one for customers. Elon Musk took this approach after he was criticized for missing deadlines at Tesla and SpaceX.

Alternatively, if you’re a solopreneur, assign set work hours for focusing on a particular project. For example, you could constrain yourself to creative work every morning between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m.

Money

In the book Profit First, author Mike Michalowicz explains how to use constraints to manage company expenses. He recommends setting up separate bank accounts for each expense category: salaries, advertising, taxes and so on. Each bank account acts as a constraint that prevents a business from using up its operating expenses on a single project.

Michalowicz told me, “With less money, I say, ‘How do I get the same results I’ve always had, if not better, with less money?’ And I start thinking outside the box.”

People

Jeff Bezos famously said a team is unproductive if two large pizzas isn’t enough to feed everyone in attendance. Applying Bezos’s approach, you might reduce the number of employees at your next meeting or simply decide only three team members should work on a particular project. Or your company might decide to include some short-term contractors rather than hiring more employees and growing too fast.

Tools

Today’s best productivity apps enable us to collaborate with others in ways that Mary Shelly couldn’t imagine. However, reliance on too many tools is often distracting. Instead, reducing your dependence on tools means fewer things can go wrong because of technical errors. You’ll spend less on subscriptions, and your team won’t have to worry about learning a lot of new tools at once.

Learning

Considering all the online courses, books and tutorials available today feels overwhelming. Instead, try just-in-time learning, whereby you study a particular skill from your discipline when you need it. In other words, don’t study Pinterest marketing until your business is ready for that social media channel. It’s relatively easy to apply this constraint too, as the bulk of what you need to know is readily accessible in online tutorials, books or courses.

Mary Shelley stayed indoors for a cold summer and produced Frankenstein. She said, “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.”

The right constraint will free you up to create from chaos rather than worrying about inconsequential problems. So next time you face a challenge at work, consider what you can remove, and the results might pleasantly surprise you.

Stop Trying To Cram So Much Work Into A Single Day

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Multitasking isn’t just a productivity-killer, it’s a recipe for unfocused and fragmented work. Focusing on a single project for an extended period is a skill that requires cultivation. Much like a ray of sunshine through a magnifying glass, this mindset concentrates your time, attention and resources.

In a recent interview, Bob Schafer, head of research at brain-training company Lumos Labs said, “If you’re truly trying to do more than one thing, you’re actually going to take a hit at everything that you’re trying to do. You’re going to do each of those things slightly less productively, and the key thing here is a concept called switch cost. It costs you…time and energy to switch your attention from one [task] to the other”

You can develop an ability to focus by giving each work day a theme. Assigning one means concentrating solely on one key area of your work or business, for as long as possible, without switching to another area.

For example, a CEO takes her executive team on a off-site retreat to encourage creative thinking away for the daily demands of email, meetings and phone calls. In doing so, she concentrates the mental resources of her leadership team on a single agenda and not on daily business priorities.

A solo-preneuer spends their entire day interviewing customers because they want to prioritise customer research before they dive into creating their next information product. Similarly, the business writer who checks into a hotel to finish her book without distraction relies on the theme of creative work. She wants to concentrate her creative power on a single project.

How To Pick A Theme For Your Day

You don’t need to spend the entire day focused on one task. If you’re working for a company, focusing on only one task is probably impossible, because you have meetings to attend, calls to take, and other people’s priorities to juggle.

Instead, consider the key themes forming your work life. These might include creative work, business development, sales, customer outreach, administration, marketing, design, etc.

Next, identify which themes are most important to your and your business’s goals. Now, while planning your week, map a theme to each day. During a normal workday, spend two-to-three hours on tasks related to your chosen themes. If you can spend longer or even the entire day (like the CEO above at an offsite), that’s great. If not, adapt accordingly.

Your new level of focus should reduce the cognitive overload that comes from switching from one task to the next. You’re not spending half an hour reviewing a marketing campaign, an hour on interviewing potential hires and thirty minutes writing an article, all before you complain about feeling overwhelmed over lunch.

Instead, you’re spending Mondays on marketing, Tuesdays on hiring, Wednesdays on creative work, Thursdays on business development and Fridays on administrative tasks. You could even plot these themes in your calendar and hold yourself accountable by tracking how long you focus on each theme.

After you’re comfortable with the concept, extend it by considering your themes for the coming month, quarter or year. What big project do you want to focus on for the next 30, 60 or 90 days? Break that down into sub-themes that you will work on during a themed day.

Say you want to write a business book this quarter. Creative work represents a theme for the next three months, so break writing the book down into smaller themes like writing, research and editing.

Similarly, if you want to launch a new product this Autumn, pick smaller weekly and daily themes. On Tuesdays, review your business’s advertising campaigns. On Wednesdays, gather customer testimonials. On Thursdays, plan an email campaign. And so on.

Ultimately, a theme for each day should help you gain momentum on key business in a way that 30 minutes of fragmented work will never achieve.