Episode 126: How To Save Over 4 Hours Per Week
How to Save Over 4 Hours a Week
Stop Wasting Time on Workplace People Problems
Time is one of our most precious commodities.
So how much time is your workplace losing because of people problems?
Not just minutes.
Hours. Days. Weeks. Dollars.
When people get angry or defensive, productivity goes down. Engagement drops. People stop participating. They stop bringing all they’ve got to work. Collaboration suffers. Resentment goes up.
And then it spreads.
People start talking to coworkers about the problem. They gossip. They complain. They plot. They send Slack messages and personal text messages. Other people get pulled into a problem that wasn't even theirs.
And a lot of this happens on work time.
So here's the question:
When your people are spending work time managing conflict, defending themselves, gossiping, complaining and dealing with people problems, what are they not doing?
They're not doing the good work of the company.
They're not helping the company grow and improve and survive.
The Real Cost of Wasted Time at Work
When fear is high, the cost of time is high.
And when the cost of time is high, the cost of dollars is high.
A correction can turn into defensiveness.
Defensiveness can turn into anger and resentment.
Resentment can turn into gossip and conflict.
Conflict pulls more people into the problem.
And if leaders don't do anything, it continues to fester and grow.
That's what they call a toxic workplace.
And it doesn't take very long for it to happen.
How the Worth Work System Saves Time
The Worth Work System starts with a simple principle:
Judge the Work. Protect the Person.
Work matters. What you do matters.
But we judge the work, the job. Work can be done well or need improvement, but we don't judge the person.
When people understand that their value is not on trial because of what they do, the whole conversation changes.
Feedback can be about the work.
Correction can be about the behavior.
Accountability can remain high.
And people don't have to spend their time defending themselves.
Less Drama. More Trust. More Work Getting Done
When this is done right, people stop taking things personally.
Communication improves.
Cooperation improves.
Productivity goes up.
And you spend a whole lot less time managing people and problems.
That is the real savings.
Less wasted time. More effectiveness. More profitability
In this episode, Shane Jacob takes a hard look at how much time and money people problems can cost a company and how separating behavior from worth can change the way people work together.
If you're responsible for the results of a team, this is about more than workplace culture.
It's about getting your time back and getting the work done.
Shane offers Keynotes and trainings. Find him at shanejacob.com
Episode 126 Transcript: How To Save Over 4 Hours Per Week
Welcome and Today's Topic: Saving Time
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of The How People Work Podcast. My name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today. Today we're talking about saving money, and who the hell doesn't want to save money by saving time. And time, they say, is our most precious commodity.
And people take time. Yeah, I'm gonna talk a lot about time today. Because a lot of times we don't think about it in context of of relationships at work and the workplace and culture and all that, unless you're in the middle of it, and then you know how much damn time it takes, and it's enough to wear you out. It's a, it takes a lot of time.
People Are Complicated Creatures
People in the workplace combined as a complicated situation. Human beings are just, you know, complicated. We are complicated creatures as it is, just to begin with. We're very sensitive, some of us, we're all very sensitive.
Okay, and why? Because we we all want to believe, we want to know and to believe that we're acceptable, that we're acceptable to ourselves and to the world. We want to know that we belong. We want to know we're loveable.
We do, I mean we do. That's the human, it's a, it's part of the human experience. It's an emotional need to know that we belong, to know that we're significant, and that we know we're important. So you know, you put different people from different environments together in a workplace, in a group, and a in a group of people, just hard enough to manage is to start with just a group of people, okay?
I mean, a group of people in a marriage is two people, and that's complicated. So you put many people from many backgrounds, many, much diversity all together. Combine that with the high stakes of a workplace, okay? You got it's your livelihood, you know, it's your money, it's your food and shelter, it's your family's well-being.
The High Stakes of the Workplace
And this company, in the in the middle of it, this company has to make a profit if it's gonna survive, because if it goes broke nobody has anything, it's not gonna, you know, and you combine all of that into this play thing we call a workplace, and it's a miracle that anybody can get anything done. Truly, so what I want to talk about today is how to, how to have a time savings, how to seriously have a measurable real bunch of time. When I say a bunch, I said measurable, but have a substantial amount of time that you could save on a consistent basis based on how you deal with people by using The Worth Work System.
People do take time. There there's always gonna be, it's gonna be that. I mean, people it takes time to people take time. It's just gonna be that way. We're just talking about conserving a substantial amount of of time, you know, when things don't go well in the workplace.
The Real Cost of Conflict, in Time and Dollars
When we have conflict and disruption and disengagement and gossip and drama and back channeling and resentment and defensiveness and so on, when you have all that, it costs a tremendous cost in time, and therefore in dollars. People, we consume so much time. There's a statistic I just looked at on our website, we just posted recently, that says each act of incivility in the workplace costs nearly 34 minutes.
I mean, that's one disrespectful exchange, costs 34 minutes of time that somebody's paying for if you're in the workplace. You know, if you're in a leader or management position, you know that managers spend so much time, they estimate more than four hours per week just dealing with conflict. Okay, and that's 26 full days every year. They estimate, another statistic from our website homepage is, is that each disciplinary action case costs about six days of management time. Six days of management time.
And I'm going to give you an example of why, what, why that doesn't have to be. Because in the most recent example, I had a disciplinary action case, didn't cost five or six days. It cost not even a couple hours, maybe, in total time.
The statistics on our website are proven amounts of time that these situations cost, but the bottom line is, yes, it's gonna cost time, and managing a bunch of different people inside of a high-stakes situation is intense and it's complicated, okay. But it's certainly doable. It's doable and it doesn't have to be ugly, you know, it just doesn't. It can be a prettier picture.
A Real Example: The Written Warning
So I was gonna tell you about an example from my own company last week. I had a manager, our yard manager, needed to talk to me about a written warning for an employee, so we talked about that. And then he completed that, my manager completed a disciplinary action, a written disciplinary action form. He met with the employee.
The written warning laid out what our expectation was, what the company's expectation was, where it wasn't met, what the consequence was, it had an improvement plan and a time to go back and review the progress. Okay, so after this meeting that they had, and he signed that he had received, the employee signed it, he'd received a copy of it. Well, he wasn't very happy, the employee, that he had been quote unquote written up.
So he called and wanted to talk to me about the written warning. And one of the things that struck me, one of the first things that he said, this was, well, he got written up, and that he didn't, he didn't, he wasn't happy about it, it didn't feel good and it was a negative thing. His words, if this is a negative thing. Now, that's meaning that he's making about it, but that's a pretty understandable meaning to make out of getting a written warning, because we're all conditioned to believe that what we do determines who we are.
Why a Written Warning Feels So Personal
We we base our worth and our value based on what we do. And that's the way that we're conditioned to believe and to accept and to accept as reality, as a fact. That, and so therefore, when you get, when somebody corrects you with a written warning and says, hey, warning, that means that you are, you're not doing well. You you're not very good. You're not good at your job. It means somehow you're gonna make a meaning out of that, it's gonna mean that you're deficient in some way.
I would not expect normally for a written warning to feel good. Now it's, you people can make meaning and people can make things mean whatever they want to. I mean, maybe if you could choose, if you were the employee that got written up, you could choose to make that mean that you had a perfect opportunity to see where you could improve and, you know, move up in this company to where you could make progress. He didn't look at it that way, and that's understandable.
So it's very easy to make something like this mean, when we get corrected at work, when we get a dis, when we get a disciplinary situation, when we, when somebody has given us feedback, it's just so easy to look at the situation and to be able to think about the situation that something is wrong with us. And when something is wr, when we believe that something is wrong with us, this, it's not like a conscious thought. The more of the conscious thought is the reaction to the, we think something's wrong with this.
So in the back of our mind we're going, something doesn't feel good and this is wrong, and we get mad and we try to justify it. We get defensive, we get angry, we fight it back, we, you know, we start all kinds of disruption. Disruption that most of the time doesn't serve us or the company. It doesn't serve the employee or the company most of the time, hardly ever.
Separating the Work From the Person
Okay, and that's, you know, we can we can say and we can tout and we can present the idea that here that we separate work from value, and that's easy to tell somebody when it's not about you personally in that moment, okay. And we do, we say that. We say, hey, and he was, the this employee in this example was told, it was prefaced, hey, this isn't about you. Just want you to know we just need to look at the work and we need to change what you've been doing.
We still hold you in high regard, you know, but asking somebody to understand that separation, that, hey, the separation of your behavior from your value, is a lot if you haven't laid a proper foundation and if you don't have a track record of being dependable to that, to being true to that concept and and and and living it. You know, and it's how you come through. People know what you believe, just like a horse, you know, they know what's inside of you. It's coming out. So they've got to to believe it based on what is actually inside of you and based on your track record.
And you know, for people, all of us that have been conditioned to think opposite, it's, this is asking a lot, okay. And you can't tell people, you know, not to feel the way that they've been feeling or not to believe what they've been believing, okay? It's just because people are gonna, we don't have any control over that, in, it's just not gonna work anyway.
Building a High-Trust Relationship
But this has to be a high trust relationship. So how do we get a high trust relationship? Well, how we get a high trust relationship, if we want people to believe what we're telling them is true, we have to live that it's true.
We have to hold people in high regard. We have to look at human beings and say to the people that work here, regardless of what you do or don't do, I'm not gonna make that mean anything about you. I'm always gonna hold you in high regard, regardless of what you do or don't do. I'm gonna judge the work and we must, and that's what we do here, but I'm only gonna look at the work.
And I'm gonna hope that you do the work well because I want everything well for you. And when you don't, I'm still gonna hold you in high regard and high respect at all times, even when you're not doing well in your work, okay? So the foundation has to be there. If you've laid the foundation, established a high trust relationship, you can judge the work without damaging the relationship, without damaging a person.
The Payoff: Time and Dollars Saved
And what this equals out to in the end, is what I'm getting around to, is a hell of a lot more time lost, and therefore fewer dollars lost. Really, and that's important, because that's why we're here. I mean, that's why we're in the workplace. That's why we come to work every day, because this company needs to be profitable, it needs to prosper, it needs to be productive, it needs to be efficient.
Otherwise you're not going to get any of the stuff you need as an employee, and the company isn't even going to survive unless it's profitable. So the person, we hope, what we want the person to know, if we've laid the right foundation, is that these situations aren't about you personally, just something about your work needs to sh, to to to change. And since that we had already established this because we practice The Worth Work System here in my company.
And since we had spent time, and yes, it does take time to establish that, but compared to how much it cost you on the other end, the time spent up up front is minimal. It actually saves you mu time on both ends, okay. And so we had the foundation already set. When it came time for this individual that I'm talking about in this example, when he got his written warning the other day, a couple days ago.
Living the Worth Work System Every Day
We'd already done all the pre-work. We've been practicing The Worth Work System here for a long time, which means that we we we not only we we talk about how we do things, but then we live to the best that we can. We respect people all the time, we regard people all the time. When we don't, we are required to apologize and repair immediately. We have normalized bad decisions. We equalize people's value and worth.
In other words, nobody's more important than anybody else. And we're constantly working, we we lay the idea that we're gonna constantly be working to improve the work, so that it's never gonna be perfect. And so when it needs to be improved, that's just normal. We try to normalize failure and not getting everything right all the time, and we try to really establish the habit of respecting and regarding people regardless of what they do, okay?
The Conversation That Changed Everything
Now, yes, all that took time in the beginning, like I said, but nowhere as much time as not establishing, so what h, establishing it to start with. So what happened in this example, this guy calls me after his meeting, and he says he doesn't feel good and this is a negative thing, and he wanted to talk to me about it.
But because of the foundation that was laid, I was able to talk to him, and in a very short period of time he see that neither I nor his serpent supervisor were judging him. And I was able to to protect him and separate the work and talk to him about the work and what he could do to make this well and still be able to thrive at this company. And I let him know that we cared about what was important to him, and that's protecting the person.
And that was true, and I, and he knew that. He didn't just know it because I told it to, because I said it in that conversation that day, he knew because of the foundation that was been laid, and through, you know, basically the conversation was, basically the conversation was, he, I I listened to him tell me a lot of explaining about what had happened and making excuses and not taking responsibility for what he had done, he made tons of excuses and I listened.
I took the time to honor his perspective, that's number one, I listened. I swear I listened for ten minutes. I was getting, that's about all I could listen to, because he listed, he listed so many excuses of why it wasn't really his fault, or reasons according to him, of why he couldn't do his job right.
Listening Without Agreeing
But I listened and I honored his perspective, because that's where he's coming from, and that was what's important to him. And so whether I agree with his perspective or not, I have to value his perspective, meaning that if I value him, I value his perspective. I don't agree with it, I just recognize that it's important to him.
Then I explain to him that that the the bottom line here was there was a clear violation of the way that we do things. He needed to do X amount, this clearly defined job and this clearly defined amount of time, and he hadn't done it. He had like doubled the amount of time that it took to do that, and he hadn't communicated anything to the supervisor in the process, and this wasn't the first time, and that all that he needed to do were, you know, here's what you could do to avoid that in the future.
And then I told him that, you know, that I had all the good hopes for him, that he could still be able to, you know, do well here and improve this and repair this and move forward. And I told him that, you know, that I I I cared for him and I was hopeful and I didn't want him to take this as a as a negative but as a learning thing, and when he, I just talked to him and he could feel that I cared about him, 'cause I did, 'cause I do.
The Outcome
And because of that conversation and because of the foundation, he could accept what I was telling him and he could see it, and he decided to accept responsibility for his work and work on changing his the way that he did things. And so the time lost in this, there was some time lost in in repairing this situation and making him feel okay about his disciplinary action.
But because I protected the person, and because of what we've done leading up to this, he didn't end up making it mean that something was wrong with him, okay? He could see that we simply needed the work to change.
That we still accepted him, that he was still an acceptable human being, okay? And because of that, he stopped making that mean something negative about himself. And when he did that, he was able to look at the work objectively, and he was able to change his work and his behavior. His attitude changed like that. He went right back to work and he had a great attitude for the rest of the afternoon.
What Usually Happens Instead
Now, let's look at what could have happened and what happens damn near all the other times. And by the way, according, if you would have lived my life, what used to happen all the time forever here, and that is when people don't meet the expectation. I ask somebody to make a change, they get defensive, they get angry, I get angry, people don't change, they complain to all their other co-workers and their family and all the customers, and eventually they get a written warning.
And then the rewritten warning is a personal indictment about them, and there's nothing I can do about what they think, and they get it, it escalates, and they think something's wrong with them. And then they think that I think something's wrong with them, and my behavior isn't really, doesn't indicate necessarily that it's not. And so they think that there's a conspiracy against them and that life's unfair and this is a horrible job, and that they have a bad boss and a bad leader and a bad company, and they get it, just goes on and on.
And your turnover stays high, and this costs you so much time. It is a tremendous amount of time, okay, because you know, at the root to this, people are just trying to prove that they're okay to themselves and to the world. And all of this, it is possible to avoid, damn near all of it, okay.
It Doesn't Have to Escalate
There's so much that we can do. There's so much that we can do to avoid these things from escalating. And to be able to have people actually, it begins with ourselves, but to be able to have people objectively look at what they do and not make it mean something about what who they are, okay. And that begins, like I said, with ourselves.
But that's not how people normally think. It's actually backwards. So that's why this, it takes practice and it takes effort. But the reward, one of the biggest rewards of the, what this podcast is about today, is the tremendous, that such a savings of time. Hours and days and weeks and dollars, so many dollars in the cost of, in the savings of time.
How a Toxic Workplace Forms
When people get, are getting, you know, defensiveness, when people get angry, when they get defensive, they start blaming your work, and the productivity goes down because they're thinking about the situation and they're getting angry. And when you feel bad, you know, your feelings drive your actions, and so when you feel bad, you don't operate as well, your productivity goes down, your engagement drops, you stop, you know, you start participating, you start, you're not bringing all you got to work, you're just doing the bare minimum to get by, you, so you're not really collaborating, your resentment, your anger is up, and all this perpetuates the original problem and it just continues to intensify and escalate.
And then other people get pulled in. You know, you gotta talk to somebody about it. So you call your coworker, you're talking to him about it while you're at work. And you're trying to get the whole rest of the company to line up with you and commiserate and, you know, realize that this is a horrible place, and we'll all get together and we gossip and complain and plot, and you know, we send horrible Slack messages and personal text messages so the company won't know what we're doing, and we're, you know, messaging outside of the normal company channels, and a lot of this has happened, and a hell of a lot of this is happening on work time, okay.
And when you're doing all that on work time, guess what you're not doing, you're not doing the the the good work of the company to drive the company forward, you know, you're not helping the company grow and improve and survive. So, you know, now you're involving another person who wasn't even, isn't gonna get their work done either, 'cause they're listening to you complain about whatever your problem is. Now you got in trouble for it, or you got corrected or got a written warning, and then it, they start to think that they start buying into your story and thinking, then they start feeling bad and their engagement drops, and it just goes on and on and on, and where the hell does it end?
If leaders don't do anything, it just continues to fester and grow. And that's what they call a toxic workplace, toxic workplace, and it doesn't, it doesn't take very long for it to happen, okay.
More anger, more wasted time, a lot of time, and there's just no, it doesn't, it doesn't recover, and and it began with a written warning where you're trying to let somebody know that, hey, I need you to change, okay.
Feedback and Psychological Safety
But it doesn't even have to be a written warning. It can simply be just a an or a verbal warning or a correction like, hey, I need you to do something different. And people can make feedback mean like, they don't like me, or they think something's wrong with me. Or, you know, they can make it mean something negative about themselves, and that is what's normal thinking, okay?
And so when psychological safety is low, meaning people don't trust that they're safe from value judgment, they think that what they do is going to reflect on the kind of person they are, of what you're thinking about them. When people think that and psychological safety is low, the fear is high, and the cost of time is high, and the cost of dollars is high because the cost of time is high.
And none of this is doing anything to help the company be profitable. And actually it's doing, you know, it's hurting customers, it's hurting everywhere, okay? A lot of times it'll even involve the customers. Like I said earlier, fear's the opposite of trust, you know.
And it comes so easily at work because, like I said, the stakes are high. It's your livelihood. It's how you provide for yourself and your family. And people become fearful that they'll lose their position.
They start to hunker down. They're gonna lose their job, their position, their authority, they're gonna start losing their their income, all the things that are important, and they're tied up in that that position and that income, okay? And they can just start thinking all this stuff even if there's no evidence that it's true.
And what happens after that? People get quiet. Like I said, their engagement goes down, they don't participate, they start looking for another job, and they don't, turn over, you tell you, your turnover goes, starts to go up and up and up. And as all this negative information spreads, the gossip increases, and people talk negatively about their managers and their leaders, and and it just all this perpetuates itself unless you do something different about it. And I'm suggesting the thing to do different about it is The Worth Work System, because all the rest of this is a huge time suck.
Back to the Example: Jacob Livestock
If we just go back to the example, to the employee here at Jacob Livestock, my feed company, who got the written warning a few days ago, okay, and he called me and asked him, he called and and he wanted to talk to me, okay. When when I reminded him and he accepted that I hold him in high regard and high respect, and I have the best hopes, and I care for him and I like him and I hope he does well.
The conversation worked, even though I needed him to change what he was doing, even though he just was on the, you know, right in the middle of just barely getting the heels of getting written up on the, the conversation worked because the foundation of The Worth Work System had been established, okay.
The Time Investment Is Worth It
So I just want to be clear, takes some time to establish The Worth Work System, but the meetings that we have, people can look at me and our leaders here and say, well you have these meetings and they take time when we're, you know, establishing, putting down the foundation, and that is true. You can look at that and see that we do invest time in this. And you're you're right about that.
But people are gonna take time, because if you don't take a some amount of time, and if you let people do their own, you know, there's the term, conflict is just really, it's through the roof when I haven't even mentioned potential lawsuits, right? All the labor law business and, you know, that that costs so much in time and money, you know, and then that's a whole nother thing.
The Math on the Example
So in my example, one conversation changed his attitude, and instead of having six days, like the statistics said, he went back to work. By the time the entire process, my conversation, his meeting with his manager, the time it took to do the written warning, and him stewing about it until his conversation with me, the whole thing probably took maybe a couple of hours instead of six days, okay?
And he was recommitted to doing a good job. He changed his work pattern and he is going for it today with a good attitude, cause he no longer made it mean anything negative about him.
And so basically it wasn't much time at all in comparison to what it normally is in these situations. And so the biggest benefit, I believe, of The Worth Work System is the amount of time, okay. And you know, if you're in business, how much time it takes managing the conflict, managing the people friction.
Closing Thoughts
And how much time leaders and managers spend in just dealing in that people issues, okay? They can't get any different work done because the only thing they're doing is trying to get people to get along in this group. And we've talked about how sensitive this situation is and how difficult and complex it is with people.
And you know, I've talked previously in this podcast, I've talked a lot about implementation. So today I just wanted to take a look at the really at the savings of time, and kind of go through the of what can happen, because it is so substantial and there's so many dollars on the line.
And I believe that that is the one, if not the biggest benefit to The Worth Work System, is just this, it's just so much time, man, and I I don't want you to burn it. By the way, speaking of time, I appreciate you taking your time to be here with me today. If you got nothing else for me ever, besides one thing, I would hope it would be this, that you would know deep inside you for real, and truly come to know and believe that regardless of what you've done or not done, or what has been done to you, your value is non-negotiable. Nothing can change your perfect worth.
Stay with me, my friends.
Questions this episode answers:
Why does workplace conflict cost so much time and money?
Why does a written warning feel so personal to an employee?
How do you separate a person's worth from their work performance?
What does it take to build a high-trust relationship at work?
How do you respond when an employee gets defensive after being corrected?
What happens when psychological safety is low at work?
How does a toxic workplace form?
What is the biggest time-saving benefit of The Worth Work System?
Transcript Summary:
Shane Jacob explains why workplace conflict is so costly in time: each act of incivility costs 34 minutes, and each disciplinary case can cost six days of management time. Using a real written-warning example from his own company, he shows how The Worth Work System judging the work while protecting the person turned a potential multi-day conflict into a two-hour conversation, because trust had already been established beforehand.