If you don’t have the money for significant pay raises, don’t offer other growth opportunities, and have a toxic workplace that doesn’t offer the opportunity for folks to have something that looks remotely like work-life balance, you should prepare yourself to replace everyone. Can you really afford to do that?
The article below mentions something we’ve all seen way too many times. The manager who gets promoted, but never developed any of their reports to do their job, and winds up having to continue doing it. In the worst-case scenario, since the culture was not to develop people to replace you, that person is probably also learning the new role from scratch while still doing a large chunk of their old role.
What a waste of time and talent.
That’s no way to be effective, though, and it’s well beyond the time our work and personal cultures started recognizing that, and it’s beyond time we made changes to stop giving away our focus like that instead of keeping it where it matters. That can look like blocking time out on our work calendars for focused work, ignoring emails and other distractions during meetings, or ignoring our devices when trying to be fully present with our friends and families. Multi-tasking doesn’t work. If you’re being distracted, you are not keeping your focus on what is essential. You’re letting everything else steal your focus. That’s not a good way to be successful in any area of your life.
This is where having a lot of meetings becomes a problem. When you need to do focused work, you wind up doing it after hours. That’s not sustainable. The other thing that this constant multitasking does is it feeds on itself. Picture this, if you will.
You schedule a meeting to discuss the project status. Half of the people at that meeting are squeezing it in between other meetings and thus are multi-tasking during the status meeting. You can watch them on camera answering emails while the discussion is going on, or they are wily enough to do it off-camera but aren’t engaged.
After the meeting, someone sends an email summarizing the conversation, which is responded to by one of the people who were multi-tasking with questions they didn’t ask during the meeting. This prompts another meeting to go over those questions.
Might it work better if the project status was done in writing, asynchronously, and the meeting never needed to happen?
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More importantly, consider what you communicate in your actions when someone does take PTO. Does everyone on the team email them while they are out so they can get a response as soon as they are back? Do you cram in a bunch of meetings or work they need to do before leaving?
Do you think this helps them feel less stressed?
It’s much more likely that they’ll take PTO but not get any benefits from being away from work. That’s missing the point entirely.
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