Smile-O-Matic

Chances are that between email, smart phones, instant messages, SMSs and company cell phones, your employees are essentially available to you 24/7. But that doesn’t mean, as managers, that we should be taking advantage of modern technological advances to invade people’s private time.

I promise you that there never was and never will be a true documentation emergency. Nobody will die, no lives will be ruined and no major documentation disaster will occur between Friday evening and Monday morning (or for those of us in Israel, between Thursday night and Sunday morning). We have a 40-45 hour workweek for a simple reason and that is because that’s all most people can handle and still be happy and productive.

It’s fine once in a while to call upon your team to go the extra mile and put in overtime during the weekend or late at night. But please, do not do it too often or your employees will resent both you and the job. In my time in this industry, the majority of the people I have seen burn out of a job have done so from the extra hours and non-stop “emergencies” dumped on their heads. Many leave the field or take extended breaks between jobs just to recover from a bad management experience. The added expense to a company of recruiting, hiring and training a new employee (not to mention total time lost) in place of keeping an existing writer happy and productive has got to be at least equivalent to 3-4 months of a yearly salary. Wouldn’t it be easier and more cost effective to simply respect boundaries and encourage your people to take vacations and time off? I am not suggesting that all burnout victims and all job hunters are overworked, but I do know that a good number of them are. Why are they looking for new jobs instead of taking breaks and taking vacations or just setting limits on extra work and night hours? It’s a question that we, as managers, need to be asking ourselves.

This concept might be difficult for those workaholic managers climbing the corporate ladder who literally live to work (rather than work to live):  your employees have families and lives out of the office. If you want more productive (and happier) workers, encourage them to take vacations, recharge over the weekend and turn off their company cell phones at night. Also, remind yourself that 99.9% of the time, it can wait for tomorrow. The documentation is not going to delay the release and cause your company millions in damages. But having a documentation department that is a revolving door of burnt out employees WILL cause real damage. You’ll have a hard time recruiting new workers, everyone that is left when someone leaves will feel like they missed out when they didn’t leave and overall production will take a nose dive.

My final message this week is be happy about work and your job and find ways to make and keep your employees happy and their weekends their own. You’ll see a world of difference with this tiny shift in attitude.