How You Can Boost Employee Morale in Your Workplace? Boost Efficiency by Purging Your Workplace Baggage

How You Can Boost Employee Morale in Your Workplace? Boost Efficiency by Purging Your Workplace Baggage. Here’s an excercise:  Sit down with your team and have them write out answers to each of the following questions. The only rule here is to take it one item at a time. Do not skip or jump ahead. Read full details below. 

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Last week, I went through my closet to do a little spring-cleaning. I had just tossed some old clothes into a 30-gallon bag to donate when I decided to turn the task into a challenge. I told myself to go through my closet one more time. Would you believe that I ended up with another full 30-gallon bag of clothes?

It wasn’t easy to purge two bags of my belongings. I had to continually repeat the phrase, “if I haven’t worn it in a year, it’s time to donate it to someone who will.” At the end of the exercise, I realized that I disliked the clutter more than I liked the clothes.

A similar phenomenon happens in business when we hang onto waste within our organization. Actions that once made sense can become obsolete, but we keep doing them out of habit (or stubbornness). These practices are energy vampires that suck up your time.

When I work with business leaders, they love to learn about maximizing their performance by eliminating wasteful resources. After all, decluttering is less expensive and more accessible than bringing in new costly procedures.

I like to teach this introspection-based technique to help them eliminate at least 20% of their organization’s baggage from the get-go.

Exercise to Purge Your Workplace Baggage

Sit down with your team and have them write out answers to each of the following questions. The only rule here is to take it one item at a time. Do not skip or jump ahead.

• If you had a list entitled “To Stop Doing,” what would that include? Consider activities that no longer align with your regular work day or your company’s purpose.
• Where do you feel like you are going through the motions vs. seeing progress in your work?
• If you had a list entitled “To Start Doing,” what would that include? What do you need to do to see real traction in your daily work? What can you incorporate to make a more significant contribution to your company?
• If it were totally up to you, what changes would you adopt in your job duties to make the biggest impact towards reaching your company’s goals?

This exercise should take about 2-3 hours of collaboration with your team. After they set their goals, please encourage them to create a peer-to-peer accountability system to support their path to success. Perform 15-minute check-ins every week for three months to make sure that they have the tools that they need to adopt new and efficient behaviors.

Sundar Pichai – CEO Google, recently was asked:  Who do you see as your biggest Competitor.

“I’ve always worried as a company at scale your biggest competition is from within, that you stop executing well, you focus on the wrong things, you get distracted.  I think when you focus on competitors you start chasing and playing by the rules of what others are good at rather than what you makes you good.”

Many times we are looking at our competitors for answers, when we should be challenging our internal processes.  This not only will this  get rid of baggage in the company, it will win the hearts of your people as it shows that you care and want to make them more productive.

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