It’s probably not unusual for your boss to add something to your already full plate. A study from Gallup found that 58% of employees have been asked to take on additional responsibilities in response to the current labor market.
But what if you could get your boss to do the opposite? What if they removed things from your to-do list? And what if subtracting work from your plate actually boosted your productivity and the company’s bottom line?
“The biggest problem in organizations is time poverty,” says Huggy Rao, coauthor of The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. “People just don’t have enough time. Bosses need to have a mindset where they feel they’re the trustees of other people’s time. Once they see themselves as a trustee, it means naturally they value [it] and don’t want to waste it away.”
Start by Removing ‘Stupid Stuff‘
Companies are made up of processes, systems, and rules. Often, these practices have been in place for years, and their relevance has gone unchecked. Start the subtraction conversation by identifying obstacles baked into the organization that get in your way. By identifying cogs in the wheel, or what Rao calls “stupid stuff,” you can help your boss better understand what and where to simplify.
“The boss’s responsibility is to mow the lawn of obstacles that create bad friction,” says Rao. “But they need the help of employees to do that. You’ve got to make mowing the lawn a big part of the organization. The problem is mowing the lawn is an orphan. It’s nobody’s responsibility. Instead, it should be what everybody does.”
While employees can start the conversation, leaders should regularly ask, “What are the rules that frustrate you or slow down your efficiency”? For example, Rao says an administrator at a healthcare network in Hawaii asked its workers to nominate anything poorly designed, unnecessary, or just plain stupid in the electronic patient records system. The request generated 188 targets for subtraction.
Define Your Best Day
Another way to identify things to remove from your plate is to describe what a productive day looks like. Most of us say it’s one that is interruption-free. However, it’s essential to define “interruption.”
Meetings, for example, often interrupt our day, and usually, they have a low return on our time investment. Employees can start a conversation by suggesting less time-consuming methods for transferring information, such as an asynchronous review of content, or even a simple email.
To sell the subtraction to their bosses, employees need to understand the most important thing from the customer’s perspective. Anything else is negotiable.
“For any low-level employee, your biggest ally is the customer,” he says. “Great leaders are very aware of what’s the psychological magnitude of an obstacle and also the economic magnitude of an obstacle.”
Address the Addition Bias
Perhaps the biggest challenge to subtracting work is innate. Rao says humans suffer from addition bias. “We love to add things, and we rarely like to subtract,” he says.
A simple fix is to subtract something whenever anything is added. “Everything becomes a replacement,” says Rao.
Another way to address the addition bias is to introduce good friction that makes addition harder. Rao gives the example of a venture capital company that created a rule that slows down their teams.
“They have an investment committee of five people, and they have a ruling that if all five people agree on a venture capital pitch, they would never invest in it,” he says. “If all five agree, it means somebody else is doing it and they just don’t know about. Their view is if there is disagreement, there is better due diligence. They also believe that innovative ideas are controversial.”
Rao says that when you add good friction, you’re preventing your employees from choosing an overconfident and myopic version of themselves.
Why Subtraction is Powerful
Rao says choosing subtraction over addition can deliver benefits to an organization and to employees. For example, meaningful work is often difficult and time-consuming.
“Subtraction clears our minds and gives us time to focus on what ought to be hard, inefficient, complex, and frustrating,” he says.
Subtracting unnecessary distractions and burdens also creates time employees need to develop the deep relationships with their peers, which is essential for doing great work.
Subtraction can also foster creativity. “When you remove things that enrage, infuriate, and overwhelm people, your employees are able to recruit a more curious and generous version of themselves,” says Rao. “Because if you’re overwhelmed, there’s no way you’re going to be curious. If you’re slammed, you’re not interested in asking questions.”
Subtraction can add so much value if you change how you view it.
