PETER DRUCKER once observed that, “Much of what we call management
consists of making it difficult for people to work.” Nine years after
the management guru’s death, his remark is truer than ever: employees
often have to negotiate a mass of clutter—from bulging inboxes to
endless meetings and long lists of objectives to box-tick—before they
can focus on their real work. For the past 50 years manufacturers have
battled successfully to streamline their factory floors and make them
“lean”. Today, businesses of all types need to do the same in their
offices.
The most debilitating form of clutter is organisational complexity.
The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has been tracking this for a
representative sample of companies in the United States and Europe since
1955 (when the Fortune 500 list was created).
BCG defines complexity broadly to include everything from tiers of
management to the numbers of co-ordinating bodies and corporate
objectives. It reckons that, overall, the complexity of organisations
has increased sixfold since then. There has been an explosion of
“performance imperatives”: in 1955 firms typically embraced between four
and seven of them; today, as they strain themselves to be kind to the
environment, respectful of diversity, decent to their suppliers and the
like, it is 25-40.
A second form of clutter is meetings. Bain & Company, another
consulting firm, studied a sample of big firms, finding that their
managers spent 15% of their time in meetings, a share that has risen
every year since 2008. Many of these meetings have no clear purpose. The
higher up you go, the worse it is. Senior executives spend two full
days a week in meetings with three or more colleagues. In 22% of these
meetings the participants sent three or more e-mails for every half an
hour they spent sitting in the room.
These e-mails constitute the third form of clutter. Bain estimates
that the number of external communications that managers receive has
increased from about 1,000 a year in 1970 to around 30,000 today. Every
message imposes a “time tax” on the people at either end of it; and
these taxes can spiral out of control unless they are managed.
Some clutter is inevitable. The point of companies is to get people
to achieve collectively what they cannot do individually, so some
meetings and memos will be needed to co-ordinate them. Complexity may
often be the price of success: companies that have grown to great size
and operate in many markets face far more complicated problems than
smaller ones operating on home turf. But Drucker was surely right that
co-ordination has a tendency to degenerate into clutter. Meetings
multiply. Managers build empires. And clutter feeds on itself. Bain
calculates that adding a new mid-level manager creates enough work for
half an assistant. Adding a new senior vice-president creates enough
work for one and a half assistants.
Clutter is taking a toll on both morale and productivity. Teresa
Amabile of Harvard Business School studied the daily routines of more
than 230 people who work on projects that require creativity. As might
have been expected, she found that their ability to think creatively
fell markedly if their working days were punctuated with meetings. They
did far better if left to focus on their projects without interruption
for a large chunk of the day, and had to collaborate with no more than
one colleague.
One solution to clutter is a periodic spring-cleaning to sweep it
out. Big companies need to have campaigns against internal complexity:
Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric’s boss, is seeking to introduce a
“culture of simplification”, as part of a plan to cut the giant
conglomerate’s overheads from a peak of 18.5% of revenues in 2011 to 12%
in 2016. Joe Kaeser, his counterpart at GE’s archrival, Siemens, is
abolishing a whole management tier and reducing the number of divisions
below it. When Ford’s previous boss, Alan Mulally, took over in 2006, he
called for an audit of all its meetings. He replaced “meetings
week”—five days each month in which executives held non-stop
gatherings—with one tightly scheduled weekly meeting at which managers
are under orders to cut the crap. Mr Mulally’s successor, Mark Fields,
had to prove himself first by chairing those meetings efficiently.
Spring-cleaning needs to be reinforced by policies to stop clutter
accumulating in the first place. Though it may seem obvious, Intel, a
chipmaker, felt the need to impose a rule saying: no meetings without a
clear purpose. Lenovo, a Chinese computer-maker, lets its staff halt
meetings that are going off-track, in the same way as Toyota, a Japanese
carmaker, gives production workers the power to stop assembly lines
when they spot problems. Bain says a manufacturer it studied made
savings equivalent to cutting 200 jobs by halving the default length of
meetings to 30 minutes and limiting to seven the number of people who
could attend.
Some employers are seeking ways to let staff at least manage the
clutter, if not reduce it. Intuit and Atlassian, two software firms,
offer workers a regular quota of clutter-free time. Volkswagen has
spared its German staff from having to read work e-mails after hours—and
even BCG has introduced rules on when its consultants are entitled to
go “offline” in the evenings.
Wasting time, wasting money
The best way to institutionalise decluttering is to force managers to
justify any bureaucracy they introduce. Seagate Technology, a
data-storage company, and Boeing, an aircraft-maker, both hold their
executives accountable for the “organisational load” that they impose on
their subordinates in terms of meetings, memos and initiatives, and
measure them against their peers. As Bain points out, the most valuable
resource that many companies have is the time of their employees. And
yet they are typically far less professional about managing that time
than they are at managing their financial assets.