Time-Driven Performance

If you’ve been listening to the news out of Washington, D.C. lately, you would think that collaboration is a dirty word, a traitorous act.  This is especially disconcerting at a time when collaboration has become an imperative throughout the global business world.  For starters, let’s remember that collaborate simply means “to work together.”  And everyone knows that a business cannot be successful today without highly-effective teamwork and strong alliance networks — in other words, people working together.

But, collaboration has an even more valuable purpose for leaders in time-driven enterprises; collaboration is an effective means of managing increasingly complex tradeoffs.  These tradeoffs often involve multiple desirable paths or solutions, and even competing business interests.  Yet, senior leaders have to select the best option for the enterprise overall.  Under such circumstances, applying a single mind to finding the best tradeoff option typically is not enough.  A single problem solver may enable a faster choice to be made, but not a fast and sound decision.  Here’s why.

By definition, a tradeoff decision involves two or more desirable solutions or paths.  Most individuals, including many leaders, struggle to make any decision at all when all of their choices have some desirable elements.  The fear of not getting it “right” can lead to decisional paralysis.  And, even for those leaders who have no problem plunging in and making decisions, the best decisions are always the ones where full consideration has been given to the options available.  That’s where collaboration adds value.  And, if done well, a collaborative decisional process also leads to lasting solutions.  Moreover, effective collaboration fosters the timely use of divergent and convergent thinking, both of which are essential when weighing two or more desirable choices. 

Divergent thinking involves the use of imagination and breadth of vision to arrive at a variety of possible solutions to a problem.  For this reason, divergent thinking is the best first step in managing complex tradeoffs.  By exploring multiple options, each from different perspectives, and by comparing data from multiple sources, it is possible for leaders to tease out the relative degree of desirability for each path in the tradeoff match-up.  Moreover, examining each option from every possible angle often opens up a “third way” solution.  Divergence also is crucial when decisions involve parties with different viewpoints and different constituencies.  Divergence allows everyone’s perspective to be heard and respected. 

After surfacing and examining diverse options, leaders responsible for managing complex tradeoffs must engage in convergent thinking – using logical reasoning to decide on the best choice, the most desirable among all the desirables.  Often, the pace of business does not allow for complete empirical testing before a complex tradeoff has to be made.  But, during the convergent-thinking step, an effective collaborative process requires the use of rigor and discipline to fully vet each alternative and, in doing so, to find the best answer within the available options.  By first deploying divergence, convergence is easier to accomplish.  All parties to the collaboration have an opportunity to examine the same range and depth of diverse information, and to use that common knowledge to find points of agreement.  So, divergence coupled with convergence yields more effective evaluations of complex tradeoffs and a more robustly considered decision—without having to sacrifice speed.  By engaging collaboratively, rather than simply insisting on going it alone, leaders make better and more timely tradeoff decisions.  And the more Leadership Teams, and organizations as a whole, practice collaboration, the better and faster their divergent and convergent decision processes become.  

_____________________________________

As to my earlier challenge to identify the root cause of on-the-job sleepiness by the Air Traffic Controller at Reagan National Airport, the initiating causal condition was the staffing design.  Having one person on duty performing a continuous vigilance task during the circadian trough (midnight to 6:00 a.m.), and often in a dimly-lit work space, is a recipe for on-the-job sleeping.  If you want to learn more about designing work and work systems for high alertness and performance excellence regardless of time of day, contact me to discuss your situation in detail.

© 2011, Susan L. Koen, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved.

What does it mean for your Human Capital Management Strategy that Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Workweek, is so wildly popular?  This treatise on ditching the deferred-life model of work has been on The New York Times hardcover business best-seller list since it was first published four years ago.  And it was the #1 Best Seller on the Wall Street Journal book list for a long time as well.  So, if you haven’t already been asking yourself what this phenomenon means for your business and its People Strategy, now is a good time to begin considering this question. 

For those readers who are 50 years or older, you remember how your parents, grandparents and even earlier ancestors mastered the art of the deferred life.  They had no other choice because their wages (or salaries) did not afford much more than basic necessities, a home of their own and one short vacation per year, if that.  From their perspective, life was work and family, with very little time for personal relaxation.  Certainly, there were no opportunities for personal indulgences.  The Baby Boom generation brought the first wave of change in that deferred-life mindset, vowing not to be an “Organization Man” like their fathers.  And, some Baby Boomers did succeed in breaking the mold, getting rich from the dot-com or Wall Street bubbles and retiring early.  But, despite their talk, the vast majority of this currently-retiring generation have continued the deferred-life model that was followed by their forebears, with the possible exception of more overseas travel than any previous generation. 

Well, hold onto your hats, Chief Human Capital Officers, because the Tim Ferriss generation and the generation just behind his, known as Generation Y, have an entirely different mindset about time than any previous generations in the workforce.  In The Four-Hour Workweek, Ferriss advocates that employees increase their productivity in order to gain leverage for attaining “Liberation,” which he initially defines as a remote working arrangement.  Specifically, he says, “[Employees] need to Liberate [his emphasis] themselves from the office environment before they can work ten hours a week, for example, because the expectation in that environment is that you will be in constant motion from 9-5.”  And, “This [9-5] schedule is a collective social agreement and a dinosaur legacy of the results-by-volume approach.” 

Now, you can choose to laugh off the idea that the workforce of the future will be working 10 hours per week for a 40-hour-per-week wage or salary.  You can continue in your current direction in the hope that Generation X and Generation Y will end up conforming like Baby Boomers did.  But, I suggest you carefully analyze this “Liberation” message, and get out ahead of it, in order to win the race for Generation X and Generation Y talent, which is just beginning to heat up.  To tap into the best talent, you have to understand that these generations value—and expect—mobility, flexibility, empowerment, and what I call “Liberated Time” more than any previous workforce.  You might already have started incorporating the first three concepts into your Strategic HCM/TM Designs.   But, if you haven’t incorporated the fourth principle, now is the time to begin.  Time, more than money, is the currency of the new workforce. 

Developing a forward-leaning HCM/TM Strategy requires a business to re-think and re-design work, jobs, and certainly work schedules.  Whether you lead a global business team or a hospital or a manufacturing facility or an underground mine, the new workforce is going to demand that you design work from a results focus rather than a time focus.  That means really wrestling with the question they are going to ask: If I get my work accomplished with high efficiency, say, in four hours a week, who owns the time I saved?  How you answer that question for the new workforce will determine whether your enterprise is able to attract and retain top talent at every level of operation and in every role in the organization.  Are you ready to meet this challenge?

© 2011, Susan L. Koen, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved. 

Children alive today will still be living during the early years of the 22^nd century.  That’s a profound reality to contemplate, and it changes everything about how we currently make decisions, live our lives, and run our businesses.

The last 50 years of the 20th century were lived from a predominately Immediacy Time Force perspective.  Headlines and products focused on consumers’ needs to “Get Rich Quick,” “Lose Weight in Just Two Weeks” and “Lift That Stain Out Right Away.”  Wall Street’s elevated dominance over American and global business shifted the focus of C-Suite leaders to a quarterly time frame instead of a “Built-To-Last”[1] time frame.  Americans, Brits and many others across the world bought and borrowed like there was no tomorrow.  And, countless articles have been written about the escalation of an immediate-gratification focus among succeeding generations, and especially the current 30-somethings. 

But, the tide is changing.  The Time Force that is gaining strength and focus today is Longevity.  The Longevity Force is being compelled by three powerful trends in the global marketplace: 1) reducing risks of climate change; 2) the drive for reliability; and 3) the aging factor in developed countries.  Let’s explore each of these. 

Environmental sustainability is a form of Longevity thinking.  Customer concerns about long-term climate change, and the translation of those concerns into buying behavior, are the clear impetus for the sustainability movement in business.  Today, most major enterprises as well as many small and mid-sized companies have a sustainability policy and practices.  Interestingly, business leaders are catching on to the direct financial benefits of sustainability as well.  Companies are embracing renewable energy sources, “green” building design and other sustainable energy practices because they save considerable amounts of money over the long term, even if these practices cause a spike in expenses in the latest quarterly report.  Industry leaders also are focusing considerable resources on engineering waste reduction, because this and other types of loss elimination also save money over time.  This trend of investing now to save money and the planet into the future is gaining strong, sustained momentum—and, in my opinion, just in time! 

A second powerful trend that is harnessing the Longevity Force today is reliability.  Whether it’s reliable uptime for our IT gadgets, reliable products from our global supply chain, or reliable service from our points of purchase, consumers want to know they can depend on the products they buy and the people with whom they choose to do business.  And the operative word here is choice.  Consumers are rewarding those companies and entrepreneurs who deliver reliable products, reliable service, and ideally both.  Companies, in turn, are working hard to identify and retain reliable employees, reliable partners/alliances and reliable customers.  Building reliability into people, products and processes requires a much longer view on enterprise relationships and practices than has been the case in the recent past. 

And, the third and perhaps most powerful and longstanding trend that is giving strength to the Longevity Force is the aging of populations in the developed countries of Asia, Europe and North America.  This Baby Boomer population has no intention of going “gentle into this good night.”  Due to consumer interest, every effort is underway in the medical, food, pharmaceutical and self-help industries to find ways of prolonging life and simultaneously improving quality of life. Futurist James Canton of the Institute for Global Futures even outlines a trend he calls Longevity Medicine in his most recent book, The Extreme Future.  According to Dr. Canton, the secrets of the “age clock” in the human genome—those specialized nucleoprotein complexes called telomeres that are found at the ends of our chromosomes—are being studied and slowly unlocked.  Eventually, medicine will look at an individual’s genomic map from birth to death and prevent disease and distress along that path, elongating life itself while also enhancing quality of life across time. 

Longer life is causing humans to take a longer view when they evaluate choices, make decisions, utilize resources and manage relationships of all kinds.  Already I see companies starting to deploy this Longevity Force in their business strategy.  Take Franklin Templeton as just one example; their recent TV ads define them as a financial company focused on long-term investments rather than short-tem gains.  Or, consider the decision made by Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz, to invest some of the company’s profits to shine a spotlight on successful educators and to promote high-school graduation.  Instead of being locked into a Wall-Street timeframe, Schultz is demonstrating the importance of embracing a forward-leaning, future-oriented timeframe.  This Longevity Mindset™ will determine the success of all enterprises and individuals in the new Time-Driven Marketplace.  Those who embrace the Longevity Mindset™ and apply it to their business, operational and HR/talent strategies will build enterprises that last.  And those who maintain an Immediacy Mindset will soon fail. 

[1] This term is a referential adaptation of the title for the great book, Built To Last by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras.

———————————————————————————————————————

One more thing.  I’m sure you heard about the air traffic controller working on the midnight shift at National Airport (DCA) who fell asleep on the job, requiring pilots of two planes with 80-90 passengers each to land “blind.”  Well, I’d like to hear your comments to this question: Do you think the air traffic controller or the FAA and airport management are responsible for the workplace fatigue risk created here? Tell me what you think! Then, I’ll give you my analysis in the blog next week.

Longevity Mindset™ is a trademark of RoundTheClock Resources, Inc.

© 2011, Susan L. Koen, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved.

The Yawning of a New Era was the clever title of a December 2010 article by Michelle Rafter in Workforce Management Magazine. This article contained soundly-documented facts about the rise of human fatigue in the workplace and the consequences of that  fatigue.  I was especially drawn to the brief report of changes made in 2003 to nurses’ work hours at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA.  That hospital had gone through bankruptcy reorganization a few years earlier and had lost nursing staff.  In an effort to save money, as many businesses today are doing, Allegheny General routinely relied on its approximately 1,200 nurses to work overtime.  However, the workforce unhappiness and ongoing retention problems it experienced led this 661-bed facility to agree during its 2003 labor negotiations to ban mandatory double shifts, and to limit the number of patients monitored by a single nurse at any one time.  Both of these structural elements—work hours and work/job design—are critical organizational defenses for businesses experiencing workplace fatigue risks.

For business leaders today, what is most telling about these changes in operational practices at Allegheny General Hospital is the bottom line benefits that accrued to this previously-bankrupt medical facility.  Data from this hospital provide a clear illustration of the downward spiral—or “vicious circle”, as systems thinkers call it—created by the original bare-bones headcount approach, and what it takes to stop that negative spiral.  In 2002, Allegheny General had paid nursing agencies for 140,000 hours of temporary nursing labor.  Part of that temp labor was to cover for staff nurses on sick leave due to fatigue and job burnout.  By agreeing to limit overtime for staff nurses and to increasing headcount, that vicious circle of high overtime levels creating high sick leave creating even higher overtime began to disappear.  The number of temp nurse hours dropped to 34,000 by 2009, totaled only about 10,000 hours in 2010.  Allegheny General’s Vice President of Nursing, Judy Zedreck, is quoted as saying that these changes in work hours and work/job design “made nurses happier and improved the hospital’s bottom line.”  In fact, this hospital’s redesign of its operational practices generated a “virtuous cycle” of an energized, satisfied workforce delivering significant performance gains that translate into measurable financial benefits for the enterprise.

The reason that this case study caught my eye is that it is similar to my own experience in numerous industrial workplaces.  Early on in my career as an organizational consultant, for example, I worked at a paper mill that was spending $8,919,540 in annual labor costs for its 160 front-line employees, and $3,194,880 of those labor costs were for overtime.  In other words, overtime pay constituted a 56% added wage factor per year.   Company executives and Union officials all believed that this high annualized overtime level was the least-cost approach to human capital management.  A 24/7 Business Requirements Analysis conducted by my Company documented additional “hidden costs” linked to this high overtime rate that totaled an average of $1,966,755 per year, including costs of production incidents, accidents/injuries, absenteeism and employee turnover.  By redesigning the crewing model and shift schedule used at this 24/7 operation, which included 25% morefront line employees, this paper mill lowered its overtime levels and saved over $3 million per year.

I urge all business leaders, from operations to human resources, to challenge the conventional wisdom that bare-bones headcount is the best staffing design for financial profitability.  And the reason is that my Company has numerous documented examples, like the paper mill study cited above, which prove this conventional wisdom to be wrong.  When business leaders begin to make evidence-based, systems-thinking decisions about headcount, rather than decisions based on the single variable of labor cost controls, then companies will experience the same virtuous cycle of performance as both Allegheny General Hospital and the paper mill I assisted.  And, importantly, business will be eliminating one of the four deepest-level root causes of human fatigue in the workplace.

On a more personal note, I want to remind my readers that I have a one-week break next week.  I will be resuming my blog with a post on March 30th.  In the meantime, please let me know what topics interest you the most by emailing me at skoen@timedrivenperformance.com.   

© 2011, Susan L. Koen, Ph.D. – All Rights Reserved.

To read Michele Rafter’s entire article, “The Yawning of a New Era,” click here

To learn about RoundTheClock Resources training and consulting services for time-driven performance excellence, visit www.roundtheclockresources.com

.

The new Time Forces of speed, asynchrony, continuity and simultaneity are driving us more and more to mobile virtual work.  And the nature of organizations and work are changing rapidly, driven by this escalating emergence of mobile virtual work.  Mobile work, as I’m defining it, involves the movement of tasks and related documents, either physically or digitally.  And virtual work references work performed in an electronic or digital working environment.  Relative to traditional work, mobile virtual work is more geographically distributed, more asynchronous, more multicultural, and more likely to extend outside the enterprise.

Mobile work is not entirely new. Think, for example, of traveling salesmen or a long-haul trucking company or even an ambulance service in a large city.  What’s different and more complex today is that such work is no longer limited to individuals or dyads.  Today, more collaborative work involving ongoing groups or teams is being performed by dispersed and often mobile group members who have only virtual (online) interactions.

For this reason, mobile virtual work is increasingly focused on both the mobility and flexibility of the work, the workplace and the work organization, rather than just the physical movement of the worker.  The network—in both technological and human-dynamics terms—is becoming the working place.

I recently conducted an organization design consultation for a Fortune 150 company using only mobile virtual work processes.  The consultation started with mobile virtual interactions between me and one Corporate Director charged with leading this organizational effectiveness project.  As we progressed, we had multiple interactions with Corporate Vice Presidents and Directors.  We simultaneously engaged Site Leaders from 31 locations across North America.  We also worked with a smaller team of Site Leaders from California, Georgia and Massachusetts.  And, within an 8-week time period that involved no face-to-face interactions or travel costs, we designed a new, strategically-aligned Site Work System for this Company’s Supply Chain Plants, obtained executive endorsement for this new Work System design, and developed the presentation materials required to roll out this new Work System design to the 31 sites.  Using mobile work and a virtual workplace enabled fast, asynchronous and effective performance from a large cadre of people over a short period of time.  That’s the future of work in a time-driven world!

With the emergence of mobile virtual work, we are approaching the “global village” forecasted by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s.  Network organizations and distributed work processes now enable enterprises large and small to bring together and combine multiple knowledge disciplines and competencies in order to create innovative customer solutions, solve complex, large-scale problems, and even design whole new industries.  More mobile virtual work opportunities can help a business become more flexible—a key strategic requirement in today’s uncertain marketplace.  Similarly, mobile virtual work is a clear draw for employees seeking a more flexible integration of their work and private lives, or a more dynamic work environment than office cubicles provide.  For these reasons, time-driven organization designs with global MVW at their core will emerge to replace the frenetic face-to-face interactivity of the last decade.

Mobile virtual work also raises numerous questions for work organizations of all sizes.  How should work be managed?  What new skills and competencies will employees and leaders need to ensure productivity, quality, safety and health when employees are working in a dispersed and virtual manner?  What impact will mobile virtual work have on the social cohesion of an enterprise?  How do you generate high engagement among a dispersed and, perhaps, loosely-affiliated workforce?  How do you ensure knowledge sharing and organizational learning in a mobile virtual work (MVW) environment?  Answering these questions will yield completely new forms of organization design and changing standards of performance excellence. 

If you’re interested in exploring more about this emergence of mobile virtual work, I recommend an academic book entitled, Mobile Virtual Work, edited by Erik Andriessen and Matti Vartiainen, that explores European Union research on this topic.

© 2011, Susan L. Koen, Ph.D. – All Rights Reserved.

Organization culture will be an impediment to execution of business strategies unless it is aligned with those strategies.  That’s why it is critical for leaders to create and manage organizational culture—those deep-level beliefs and assumptions (theories-in-use) that are shared by members of an organization.  Culture is an organization’s collective response to its survival/adaptation challenges from the external environment as well as its internal integration challenges.  A strong, intentionally-shaped culture enables enterprise leaders to guide actions among large numbers of people, and across time and geographical locations, without having to be physically present.  For formal leaders who are asynchronous with – that is, operating at a different time than – most people in their organization, culture is the primary tool for ensuring desired behavior and achieving desired results.

Consider, for example, a Refinery Global Business Unit (GBU) in a Global 50 energy company.  This Refinery GBU is attempting to implement the American Petroleum Institute’s ANSI/API Recommended Practice 755 for Fatigue Risk Management Systems (FRMS).  They have just developed an enterprise-wide plan to change staffing, scheduling and employee support that complies with the criteria contained in this API guideline.  However, the Fatigue Work Group is apprehensive about rolling out their plan to the workforce across the U.S. refineries.  They remember the difficulty they encountered when they rolled out their Process Safety Management System, and want to avoid those problems again.  So, what new organizational levers should this Fatigue Work Group be considering as it plans for a successful rollout of its Refinery FRMS Initiative?

As an organizational change expert, I would ask this Fatigue Work Group:  “Is your FRMS Initiative an add-on program, or are you planning to change organizational beliefs and norms?”  And, the second question I would ask is this: “Has executive leadership in your GBU embraced the strategic value of fatigue risk mitigation in Refinery Operations?”  These questions are key, because the answers will determine whether or not the planned Initiative succeeds.

If you are rolling out an add-on Corporate Safety program, it will only have spotty success.  The prevailing organizational culture to act urgently and immediately, such as when work hours have to be filled or costs (like headcount) have to be cut, soon will overtake the best intentions of the FRMS Initiative.

On the other hand, if organizational leaders fully understand the causal link between fatigue risk mitigation and Operational Excellence, and have integrated FRMS as part of the GBU’s operational strategy, then the rollout of the Refinery FRMS Initiative has a better chance of success.  What will ensure success is taking a culture change approach to this Fatigue Risk Initiative. 

If the FRMS Initiative has strategic value, which it can if it is designed right, then the Fatigue Work Group needs to include within its scope changing the enterprises’ underlying beliefs and assumptions about time and human performance. Like an ordinary FRMS Initiative, a Strategic FRMS Initiative still makes changes in an enterprise’s structural and procedural designs and practices for staffing, scheduling and employee support, for example.  Importantly, though, a Strategic FRMS also focuses on aligning the organizational culture and business strategy, including leadership beliefs, modeling, messaging and behavior.

The reason is this:  no front-line employee is going to believe that an enterprise is serious about fatigue risk mitigation if Refinery Operations Leadership themselves exhibit high fatigue, continuously negate the importance of sleep and rest, readily sanction work-hours’ waivers and/or minimize the GBU’s ongoing investment in fatigue risk training and mitigation activities.  That’s because this behavior reveals the real cultural messaging from these Operations Leaders; namely, that they believe humans can perform perfectly safely and productively whether or not they are fatigued, if they just have the will to do so.  The science of cognitive fatigue to the contrary [see my recent post, Fatigue of the Brain], this belief is the operating assumption of many leaders today, and consequently, many current enterprise structures, processes and practices — and their organizational culture — are built on that premise.

If, on the other hand, Refinery Leadership fully understands fatigue science, recognizes the barriers that fatigue creates for individual performance excellence, and embraces the strategic importance of breaking down those barriers, then they will undertake the work to integrate fatigue risk mitigation principles and practices into every aspect of their Operational Excellence strategy.  Only then will front-line employees believe the enterprise is serious about mitigating fatigue risks and adjust their own behavior accordingly.

So, to quell their apprehension, the Fatigue Work Group in this case example must view their mandate strategically and adopt a culture change approach to rolling out the FRMS Initiative across their Refinery GBU.  The organizational levers for ensuring the success of their FRMS Initiative are the mechanisms for embedding a Fatigue Risk Mitigation Culture—beginning with changing leadership beliefs, priorities, messages and metrics.  Consistent and aligned leadership behavior is the first and most essential lever for any successful strategy execution, because it is the first step in building an aligned organizational culture.

© 2011, Susan L. Koen, Ph.D. – All Rights Reserved.

China is packing the changes of decades into a few short years, and in doing so, is causing a heightened sense of urgency [read fear] in the rest of the world.  But China’s pace is not one of immediacy, and certainly not urgency.  When you go to China, as I have done twice now, you instantly feel the vibrancy, the sense of possibility, and the clear intention of speed. China is a goal-oriented society, and one focused on getting where it is going… FAST!  But the Chinese understand that a fast, focused pace of work is not the same thing as urgency.

Take their race towards renewable energy.  Everyone knows that the next great global industry will be clean power and energy efficiency.  And China is intent on dominating that growing, high-technology industry, becoming the market leader in clean energy technology for the rest of the world.  They have recognized the market potential for clean energy and are putting their focus on speed-to-market.

While the U.S. is bogged down in political rancor and disputes over the validity of climate science, China has had a national renewable energy mandate for 5 years.  China’s target is to increase the use of renewable energy—particularly wind, hydro, and biomass—to 16 percent of total energy production by 2020.  At the China Power 2009 Conference, where I was invited to speak on Fatigue Risk Mitigation in Nuclear Power Plants, officials reported that China already had reached 85% of its target goal in three years.   So, they set a new goal of 20% renewable energy together with increased energy efficiency.  The state power companies in China now charge higher electricity prices to the least efficient industrial concerns and lower prices to the more efficient ones —  market-driven strategies applied in China to yield energy efficiency as rapidly as possible.

The story of one Chinese company’s race to crack the code on coal gasification is a lesson in time-driven business strategy.  At Zhenzhou Taida, engineers and scientists voluntarily put themselves on round-the-clock work teams while they endeavored to develop affordable coal gasifiers.  And by doing so, they succeeded in reaching their production goals more than a year ahead of schedule.  China has the third largest coal reserves, behind the U.S. and Russia.  Its need for energy and electricity is escalating daily, and with no oil industry or known natural gas reserves, it is racing to become the pre-eminent “clean coal” producer in the world.

Perhaps it is the horrible smog in eastern China that is a key driver for their entrepreneurial behavior in the clean energy market space.  But, in fact, the Chinese way of combining longevity-thinking and a fast pace of work simply is what today’s highly-competitive marketplace demands.  China clearly understands that being fast and forward-leaning is the right recipe for becoming a global economic powerhouse.

© 2011, Susan L. Koen, Ph.D. – All Rights Reserved

Instant messaging, radio exchanges and video monitoring—all are being done simultaneously by one person in thousands of workplaces around the globe, from control rooms in oil refineries and nuclear plants to television studios and air traffic control towers.  This complex information-processing role was being performed in February 2010 at a U.S. Air Force base in Nevada by an operator of a Predator drone in Afghanistan.  As reported by The New York Times on 1/27/11, this operator was under intense pressure “to monitor the drone’s video feeds while participating in dozens of instant-message and radio exchanges with intelligence analysts and troops on the ground.”  American forces were close to a village where a convoy of unknown persons was forming, and the drone operator and support team were trying to determine whether this convoy was friendly or hostile.

In this environment of fast communications and urgency-driven decision making, the drone operator ordered American helicopters to fire on the convoy.  When the smoke cleared, 23 Afghan civilians were dead, including children—one of the worst losses of innocent lives in this long war.  A senior military officer conducting the after-event investigation discovered that, amid the constant data stream, reports about the presence of children had come in to the drone operator.  Yet, in this truly urgent environment, such crucial information was overlooked.  The conclusion of the investigation was that the deaths would have been prevented “if we had just slowed things down and thought deliberately.”

Urgency-driven mistakes made in the life-and-death environment of war perhaps can be understood and forgiven.  But, what about our modern workplaces?  Have we created a false sense of life-and-death urgency at too many of our work sites?  Take, for example, the Connecticut gas plant under construction in 2010 that exploded, causing 5 deaths and 27 serious injuries. Some of the workers involved in cleaning the gas lines had worked seven consecutive 12-hour shifts because the plant was behind schedule and under pressure to complete the construction phase.

Or, look at the well-studied facts from the explosion on the Isomerization [ISOM] Unit at the BP refinery in Texas City in March 2005.   This workplace accident resulted in 15 worker fatalities  and 170 serious injuries, and also cost the company over $1.5 billion dollars.  There had been a one-month planned temporary outage on the ISOM, and the explosion occurred during start-up of this Unit.  Production Planning ordered the start-up, even though (as indicated by after-incident interviews) all instrumentation checks had not been completed by the Technicians on shift.  An Operator in a satellite control room, under instructions from the Night Shift Supervisor, commenced the start-up at 02:13 hours (2:13 a.m.).  At 03:05 hours, the base level of feed into the Splitter had risen and activated a high level alarm, which was acknowledged by the Operator but remained in alarm mode.  The redundant hard-wired high level alarm, set at 78%, did not operate even though the feed base level rose to 100% by 03:16 hours.  The Operator never noticed this failure. And, the night shift did not report the faulty alarm to the oncoming day shift, either in the shift log or verbally during their 4:59 a.m. shift relief.

A series of documented procedural errors subsequently were made by the day shift as well.  Additionally, there were several distractions occurring in the Main Control Room during the start-up process.  Records show that a safety meeting was being held in the Control Room, around the ISOM control board, and that several external phone calls also were being made from this Control Board extension.  By 12:40 hours, Splitter pressure had climbed to 33 psig (normal operating pressure is 20 psig) and base temperature had reached 302°F (normal is about 275°F).  Outside operators opened a vent valve to reduce the elevated pressure, but the pressure trend turned upward again rather quickly.  The Day Shift Supervisor, who had gone home to attend to a personal family matter, called the satellite control operator at 13:09 hours and recommended opening a different vent valve, which relieved the pressure temporarily.  By 13:13 hours, though, the Splitter base temperature was back to 304°F.  By 13:15 hours, the pressure had peaked at 63 psig and overhead relief valves had automatically opened.  At 13:19 hours, radio messages were sent across the plant by two witnesses reporting vapors and liquid emerging from the Blowdown Drum & Stack.  At 13:20 hours, a loud, powerful blast occurred.  This explosion damaged the ISOM, caused secondary hydrocarbon releases and fires, and caused the deaths and injuries previously cited.

Many business, technical and cultural factors have been identified during root-cause analyses of the Texas City Refinery explosion.  For example, in 2007, the famous Baker Panel rightly found the lack of a Process Safety Management System, including poor process safety leadership, as a systemic root-cause of this deadly explosion.  But nowhere in these competently-performed investigations have I seen any reflection on the decision by Production Planning to start up the ISOM on the Night Shift at 02:13 hours.

The 2:13 a.m. start-up of this unit was 9.25 hours into the Night Shift’s workday, most likely 14 hours or more into the Operator’s waking period, and the time of day when humans are physiologically at their lowest point in alertness and other cognitive processing. As the numerous investigations found, Day-shift personnel at this BP refinery made a series of errors in performance.  But the failure to notice and to fully understand the cause of the rapidly-rising feed and mounting pressure in the Splitter originated on the Night Shift.  The Operator’s cognitive fatigue at the 2:13 a.m. trough in human functioning, and the associated failure to communicate all relevant information to the oncoming shift, was the originating source of this deadly accident.  (For more information about cognitive fatigue, see February 9 posting, Fatigue of the Brain Affects Knowledge Workers Everywhere.] 

Knowing this, one has to ask: What was so urgent that this ISOM start-up could not be delayed five hours—a time of day when the brains of the Refinery Leaders and operators were more likely to be functioning at high states of alertness and cognition?  The start-up of the ISOM was not a life-or-death situation.  Unfortunately, the urgency-driven business climate turned it into one.  As you reflect on this deadly accident, ask yourself:  Is my company at risk from urgency pressures and immediacy-thinking?  Is that same urgency force about to cause a proverbial explosion at one of my enterprise sites?

© 2011, Susan L. Koen, Ph.D. – All Rights Reserved

The growing incidence of fatigue in the workplace is catching more attention in the business press.  Publications as diverse as SHRM’s online HR News and Nuclear Engineering International are eager to explore this critical human performance issue.  And, they should.  Fatigue, and the human, financial and environmental costs associated with fatigue, presents a growing challenge in today’s always-on world.  

Human fatigue is the primary cause of serious performance problems and related operating costs, ranging from industrial accidents and personal injuries to illness absences, quality errors and production incidents.  And fatigue affects all industries, from mining and manufacturing of all types to transportation, healthcare, data processing and even software engineering.  

When exploring this topic of workplace fatigue, it is important to define terms clearly and also use the science of fatigue physiology as a factual anchor.  Until recently, the textbook definition of fatigue was “the temporary loss of strength and energy resulting from hard physical or mental work.”  The growing body of knowledge on the human brain, from neuroscience and sleep research primarily, has resulted in a third type of  fatigue being identified — neurophysiological fatigue.  This type of fatigue affects brain functioning, and most especially the four lobes of the cerebral cortex.  These parts of our brain control cognitive processes like reasoning, planning, problem solving, pattern recognition, auditory discrimination, visual processing, memory and speech.  Because of its effects on the cognitive functioning of our brain, neurophysiological fatigue has come to be known as cognitive fatigue.

The increased incidence of cognitive fatigue can be linked directly to today’s time-driven world.  Global connectivity technology, 24/7 television and grocery stores, and an increased number of round-the-clock workplaces have expanded our waking time, robbing us of essential unrestricted sleep.  Immediacy pressures and the fast pace of work mixed with uncertainty, constant change, and heightened competitiveness in the marketplace have elevated human stress levels around the globe.  These realities of life are significant because sleep deprivation and high stress are both physiological root causes of cognitive fatigue. 

This recently-identified type of fatigue is especially crucial in the business world today, where all types of jobs are increasingly classified as knowledge work.  Like X-ray technicians, software engineers, and pilots, front-line employees in automated manufacturing plants spend more time evaluating data than performing physical tasks.  There are innumerable opportunities for fatigue-related errors in knowledge work.  If someone is even moderately fatigued, their brain is not fully functional.  They might literally not see what is right in front of them–even when they appear to be looking right at it.  They can miss patterns in data sets, fail to hear instructions, forget steps of procedure and fail to analyze and reason well or thoroughly. 

That’s why there have been more and more fatigue-related incidents over the past decade, including a rising number of workplace fatalities.  Over the past decade, fatalities from airline crashes in Mangalore (India), Buffalo (NY) and Lexington (KY), and from plant explosions at a fertilizer plant in France, oil refinery in Texas and gas plant in Connecticut, to name just a few, have all been linked to cognitive fatigue.

Unless our brains are fully alert and engaged at work, costly errors will continue to be made at escalating rates.  Every organizational leader needs to understand the facts about cognitive fatigue in the workplace, and begin addressing this rising source of workforce performance challenges.

 © 2011, Susan L. Koen, Ph.D. – All Rights Reserved

The fast-paced, uncertain and technologically-connected marketplace of the 21^st century requires enterprises to be fast, flexible and forward-leaning in all of their operations.  This post identifies the multiple drivers behind the three-part strategic framework for time-driven organizations.  Then, it explores the implications of this strategic framework for organization design.  I also have provided a “mini” case study of a flexible staffing model to illustrate time-driven design principles in action.

Strategic Drivers

Below is a graphic from an online seminar I’ll be presenting in May 2011, entitled The Marketplace & Organization Design.  This graphic shows the three key strategic requirements for business enterprises in the new Time-Forces Era, and the corresponding marketplace drivers behind each requirement.

Time-Driven Design Principles

Translating this three-part strategic framework into an effective organization design requires the utilization of four major design principles:

• Design for constant changes in all business factors and processes, including workforce size, job tasks and workforce capabilities
• Design for commitment and collaboration, not for command and control
• Design for timely intelligence and free flow of ideas and information
• Design for shared responsibility and accountability

Organization Design Case Study

Let’s examine a real-world case of this strategic approach to organization design, using one key component of organization structure in any business enterprise: the staffing structure.  This specific case illustration involved the design of a staffing model for a call center operation.

This 24/7 call center started with a staffing model that relied heavily on a contingent workforce, a common practice in many types of enterprises today.  Organization leaders believe that contingency equals flexibility, because they can change contingent employees’ work hours without any notice.  What they often don’t consider, as was the case with this call center operation, are all the other ways that contingent workers are not as flexible as permanent workers. 

For instance, contingent workers often receive less capability-building, in the form of training and coaching, which makes them less competent over time than a more trained and developed workforce.  Contingent personnel also have less access to business intelligence than permanent employees, so they tend to be less aligned with business strategies and goals.  A contingent workforce rarely maintains as much commitment and accountability as a permanent workforce, so they typically are less willing to “go the extra mile” in delivering quality and customer satisfaction.  And, finally, the hiring and on-boarding process for a constantly changing cadre of contingent workers can slow an enterprise considerably. In short, organizational leaders have confused work-hours flexibility with workforce flexibility. 

The new Time Forces drivers, coupled with the constant changes created by increased uncertainty and innovation in the marketplace, require true workforce flexibility.  And the full scope of needed flexibility can only come from a committed workforce, not a contingent workforce.  Only committed people with shared responsibility and accountability can translate timely business information and intelligence into fast, innovative responses to marketplace demands.      

In the case of this 24/7 call center, I enabled them to change their business model to a more time-driven organization design.  A core part of this new design was a staffing model that was anchored by permanent, full-time employees and had minimal reliance on contingent workers.  And, this new staffing model saved the call center $1 million dollars per year due to improved workforce performance.  The lesson to be learned: challenge your basic assumptions, and think strategically and systemically in creating a Fast, Flexible and Forward-Leaning Organization Design.

*************************

Update on Leadership Post 01/26/11

Those of you who read my January 26 post, Changing Leadership in an Always-On World, on distributed, collaborative leadership  will be interested to know that a prominent cross-industry study on Best Companies for Leadership, conducted by The Hay Group, reported the following finding on January 30:

“The Top 20 Best Companies for Leadership are at the forefront of a significant shift away from hierarchical organizational operating models,” said Rick Lash, Director in Hay Group’s Leadership and Talent Practice and co-leader of the Best Companies for Leadership Study. “Leadership in the twenty-first century is about leading at all levels; not restricting it to title.”

To read more about the Hay Group study results, go to 2010 Best Companies for Leadership Study.

© 2011, Susan L. Koen, Ph.D. – All Rights Reserved