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Work-Life Balance &
Corporate Noise
How sustainable is your current pace? We know that many of us do, in fact, have satisfactory pensions and we'll probably live longer than our parents and grandparents - but it does raise the question of how sustainable is your current pace and style of work? And how do you achieve the right kind of balance without having to retire early, as is the continuing trend for top executives in the US and UK to quit their jobs for a 'more balanced' life? Last year the UK saw CEOs depart like Allan Leighton Wall Mart, Martin Taylor Barclays, John Birt BBC, and very recently David Verey Lazard, and Mike Grabiner of Energis. We know from media disclosures that these names have the financial rewards to make the break to a more balanced life. More focus on vital areas For most of us, life wouldn't be sustainable without work, so work is still by far the bigger factor in the equation of 'work-life balance'. Many senior UK executives work between 50 - 75 hours a week. That doesn't include travelling time. A lot of them tell us that their workloads could easily accommodate 100 hours but they have to 'draw the line somewhere'. Almost all managers will now work much longer hours than their predecessors. Why? Can we blame the 'Information Age'? Certainly the immediacy of electronic communications creates change at breakneck speed. And if you fit the profile of a modern knowledge worker, you probably have e-mail, voice-mail, a telephone, a cell phone, a fax machine, a personal information manager, a Filofax and an electronic diary - as a minimum. The problem becomes how to consistently reassert order... You also probably have more meetings than you're comfortable with and you sit in a matrix where you believe your reporting lines need modifying because of the stretch they put on you and your people. When pressed you believe that your attention should be going on areas more vital to you and your company, but you don't seem to get the chance or mental conditions to be able to focus on them. There is simply too much communication and too much information. But we can't entirely blame 'information'. Masquerading as part of your information stream, 'Noise' is the real culprit. Entropy In 1949 Claude Shannon published his book, 'The Mathematical Theory of Communication'. The US Army originally commissioned the work during World War II and one of the key insights of the work is the distinction and relationship between 'information' and 'noise' in a communication channel. Although we don't live in a corporate world of radio signals and Morse code, a simple example was what the head of finance for a specialist bank recently told me. 'I get 320 to 340 e-mails per day.' 'How many are vital to your daily operational activity?' was the obvious question. 'About 12' was the answer. The other 308 were 'noise'. They were pieces of research 'information', but they weren't all pertinent or useful. To trawl through 320 items to get 12 is not good use of energy and, more importantly, depletes the energy that is needed to act on the 12. If you look around you, you will find energy being dissipated in all areas of life. It is to do with what scientists have named the second law of thermodynamics. Our universe is continuously expanding and is losing heat. In the molecular sense, this represents disorder. The universe's tendency is toward disorder. The loss of useful energy in a system is called 'entropy'. It is the degree of disorder or chaos. And every system in the universe, according to the second law of thermodynamics, will be less than a perfect system, less than 100% efficient. Think of any physical circumstance you like and you will notice that you always have to tidy, repair, maintain or adjust - simply to try and keep things as they were. This applies to your toaster, your roof, your car, your relationships, your pet - and your own body. As anyone who has worked in one will know, an organisation is living proof of this law. To the degree that you have orderliness in a system, you have in a pure sense 'information'. To the degree that disorder, entropy, is present, you have 'noise.' And the degree to which you have true 'information' is the degree to which you can accomplish your goal - or successfully do your job. What is your noise to information ratio? What is less easy to see is that the organisation itself will generate disorder as energy is expended to accomplish things (the second law of thermodynamics). It doesn't matter how 'good' or 'bad' the organisation is or what type it is. Expending energy to get things done creates entropy. Disorder will be generated and you, its inhabitants, will experience the effects. So the problem becomes how to consistently re-assert order into the organisational environment. Most organisations will have a VISON, a STRATEGY, PLANS and PROJECTS to get the strategy done - and everyone's individual DELIVERABLES and OBJECTIVES would contribute to completing these projects and programmes. Personal conundrum If these elements do not align comfortably, top to bottom and back again, the 'noise', the entropy in the system will be high. You'll recognise it as overwork, re-work, duplication of effort and function, stress and frustration. How these Vision - Strategy - Plans -Objectives are aligned one with the other and communicated ('order' in the organisational environment) will have a huge bearing on the entropy generated and its effect on you. There is a conundrum in all of this, too. On a personal basis, you will feel as happy as you believe you are accomplishing your goals. 'Noise' de-rails your goal. Your 'noise to information ratio' dictates how stressed or distracted you are - but your goals dictate what is information and what is noise. (The 308 research e-mails don't get you to your goal, so they're noise. If your job changes to Head of Research - new goal - they may become information). If you don't have a clear idea of what your goal is (job purpose, deliverables, objective) anything could be information OR noise. Many people who don't have a crystal clear goal talk to everyone, open everything and try to read everything, 'just in case'. Purpose & payback 1. Identify truly and exactly what your current purpose is in the organisation. 2. Hone it to a precise statement that results in a firm deliverable, that you can measure. 3. Identify as best you can the current Vision, Strategy and Planning. 4. Check your goal to see if it really does fit. Modify it if it doesn't. 5. Ask yourself what is the biggest payback task that will most directly take you to your goal. 6. List the people, things, communications, information, information systems, channels and media that you currently interact with. 7. Side-line, delegate, distribute, cancel as elegantly and constructively as possible all those elements that won't deliver the goal. You do an intuitive version of this anyway when you have a crucial deadline or an emergency.
It may still not make you want to work 'till your 75, but this selective deletion process will make your interim work more focused, more rewarding, less time consuming and give more life to the work-life balance. Ron Hopkins, author of 'How to Survive the Information Age at Work' is a director with the UK Institute for Business Technology. Copyright © Ron Hopkins 2000 |
