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July 23, 2012 Q&A

Summer doesn’t have to mean losing productivity

Randy Harrington

Q&A talks about beating the summer doldrums with Randy Harrington, corporate leadership consultant and author. Harrington is co-founder of Strategic Arts & Sciences, a national strategic planning and management firm.

Q: You have an interesting perspective on how to take advantage of the summer doldrums when attendance and productivity drops. Share the details.

A: Management needs to understand that people are creatures of culture and environment; we shouldn't be surprised that what people need and want changes from one season to the next. Smart managers are going to flow with the seasons and seek “wins” in all three categories: service quality, growth, and employee development. Summer is a natural time to change up processes and set the stage for a more aggressive fall push. You just have to be ahead of the seasons in your planning.

Q: One of your recommendations is not to make employees choose between family and work during the summer. How can that be accomplished? Don't work problems sometimes require extra hours, even in the summer?

A: When the kids are suddenly out of school and relatives are coming and going, life can get a lot more complex. While not every business can manage allowing employees to actually adjust start and finish times, every business can be empathetic to the challenge of parenting and working in the summer. It can be as easy as allowing or encouraging quick check-in phone calls. If your business relies on the committed and talented people (and I bet it does), a little summer-empathy can go a long way toward building loyalty and commitment in your staff.

Q: You advise having people work on personal professional development during the summer. Why is this a good time if workers are distracted and less focused? Won't personal development efforts not be as effective?

A: One of the places our economy is missing right now is that we are not providing for the development that our people need to “make the turn” in this digital economy. People need to understand more complex analytics; they need to be able to blog and tweet and manage social media; they need to work strategically with outside partners. All of these skills require an opportunity to step outside of the day to day “task saturation” and get strategic education and support. It may be an online course; it may be a seminar; whatever, summer is a great time to start and finish an intensive experience in personal development, even if the company isn't sponsoring it for you.

Q: You have a great reference to “fake fun” events. What are those? And, how does a company avoid them?

A: We see it all the time. Management knows that morale is low and that people are taking long lunches and the like, so they conjure up some pseudo-event for “fun.” I saw an internal memo about a “lunch luau” that said that “HR does not approve any limbo contests.” Fun is key, but if you have ever watched an episode of 'The Office', you know how awful fake fun can feel. There is a simple recipe for real fun:

1) Keep the activities focused on relevant parts of the business; have a competition on the cleverest 60-second pitch for the new product; write a country and western song that makes it easy to remember the 20 important attributes of your new product. The key is to make the actual act of work more fun, not to just “have fun” on the clock. People will see that as a waste of their time and the company's resources.

2) Allow people lots of ways to opt in to the activity. Keep it “Challenge by choice.” Voluntary. The words “mandatory and fun” never play together well.

3) If you are doing real work with the fun activity, offer real incentives and good prizes. This doesn't mean expensive things. I once saw an incredible competition to memorize all the names of every person in the new company (about 200 people) and people who completed the task got a Yoda bobble head for their desks. So in summary: Fun must be business relevant; voluntary; and supported with incentives.

Q: As you observe, everybody needs a break and company leaders need to understand the 'rhythm of the business' and leverage the calendar all year round. What's the best way to accomplish this?

A: The best companies in the world spend a lot of energy creating and managing their annual and strategic calendars. Starting from the first minute of their fiscal year, they establish the key dates for big events — strategic planning, budgeting, board meetings etc. Then they add more and more detail including key conferences, customer service surveys, important IT upgrades. Then they ask every department to develop their own calendars based off of the primary corporate calendar. This exercise will call out what it is going to take for you to be successful. This is a very powerful strategic management technique.

Q: You mention experimenting with motivation techniques. What experiments have you seen work and which have failed?

A: I am a fan of competitions. I love Iron Chef and other “fun” competitions. There is an art to managing competition in an organization. All I have to do is say “you folks are on the Red Team and they are on the Blue Team” and you will have a feisty competition on your hands. The question is: Will the competition actually help your business results or will it be a damaging distraction? I like to brainstorm a few ideas for fun (see my recipe above) and then invite a few key opinion leaders in the company to modify or veto the ideas. If you can put it out on the calendar, (talking about a summer activity in January) it will work a lot better. I am also a fan of spontaneous niceness by managers. In this case, the niceness must simply be fair and it shouldn't come with expectations for better bottom line performance. Buying pizzas, coffees etc. are great gestures that signal awareness and caring. Great managers can get a tremendous amount of goodwill out of $100 worth of good pizza.

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