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.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all deadlines were met, all work was done well and right the first time and everyone always showed up on time? Sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t have a magical formula to make that happen. But when things do go wrong and you find yourself in the position of needing to give less than positive feedback to an employee, there is a right way to go about it:

Most people who read my blog regularly will probably have a pretty good sense of who I am by now. If you are a technical writer or doc manager and this is your first time reading one of my mid-week brain dumps, let me start by saying that over the last 10 years, I have sat in hundreds of meeting rooms, listened to lots of company pitches, watched a lot of companies succeed and even more fail. In all of that time, I learned to trust my instincts and some basic business principles I learned way back in high school. I have also acquired a number of great mentors (and friends) along the way. If you don’t have a mentor or someone you look up to, I recommend finding one ASAP.

Michael Eisenberg (one of my mentors) has published a Hummus Manifesto. Inspired by his take on things, I’ve come up with my own version -- one that I like to call “the banana manifesto.”

Many years ago, the original founder of Tech-Tav (another one of my mentors) remarked that “if a company is selling bananas, they better make sure they protect and nurture those bananas.” If they don’t, the company won’t last very long. Companies who operate according to the banana manifesto usually succeed, and if they don’t, at least they usually go down in style.

There are few, if any, people in the world like my rabbi, teacher and friend, Rabbi Ahron Batt (may his memory be a blessing). This past Friday, Rabbi Batt passed away  in the presence of his beloved wife, Ayelet, and his wonderful children. To my way of thinking, one’s true value in life can be measured by what one has left behind. Rabbi Batt’s legacy - his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren - all stand as a testament to the truly remarkable gift he left to humanity. Rabbi Batt was a man of amazing humility, compassion, knowledge and joie de’vive that made him the rare combination of wonderful. He has left an entire nation at a loss with his death.

Full disclosure: This is not a religious post. I do not intend to change your religious views in any way, but I will talk about religion and God. If that offends you, I am sorry.

What does any of this have to do with documentation management? I promise I’ll get to that in just a few more lines…

Is efficiency a dirty word in your company? If so, it’s time to start cleaning up. Highly driven and highly efficient workers are too-often told to slow down and stop working so hard. This may sound like a crazy idea, but it happens more often than you can imagine (and my friend Rose Zadik can back me up here).

Some managers explain that a too-efficient writer will destroy the morale of a team by making the others look bad. They claim that one superstar standout will raise the bar, skew the metrics and create undue and unnecessary pressure on the team. And it goes without saying that the boss is probably getting worried that his eager beaver may be out for his job.

If you find yourself managing one or more of these employees, consider yourself lucky to have found such motivated and intelligent workers. Manage them right and they can be your best assets. But manage them wrong and they will either find a new job or take yours. Harness their strengths, challenge them with higher level, more complex assignments. Give them opportunities to learn and master new skills and technologies. Imagine a sprinter swimming in the slow lane…he’ll have a less satisfying workout and probably annoy the slow swimmers around him. But in the fast lane with other competitive swimmers, he’ll rise to new levels of accomplishment without kicking anyone in the face. It’s no different for your employees.

I promise you that the ROI from your overachiever will be well worth the investment.

I would like to take this opportunity to also wish a heartfelt Mazal Tov to Rose on her upcoming move to lead the doc department at Discretix. She is one lady who really knows how to clean up a lack of efficiency mess!

So my vacation could have gone one of two ways: I could have spent 3 weeks in Southern California with my family sans cellphone and with intermittent email access and hated it, or I could have done it and loved every minute of it. I chose the latter.

For years now, my motto has been “work hard, play harder.” I am the first to admit that I don’t do it enough, but the truth is that all of us need to. Whether it is practicing an instrument, getting up at 5 AM for an early-morning run, twirling your kids around the living room to lively music before dinner or sitting near a fountain at your favorite park or outdoor mall and tuning the world out for 15 minutes while you catch some Vitamin D, I am convinced that the world would be a much happier and more fulfilling and productive place if we all spent a little bit more time doing the little things we enjoy.

I admit to having been that boss (before I had kids) who didn’t understand people’s innate need to take a great family vacation at least once a year and disappear for a solid week or two. I would always take a day off here and there and that would be enough for me. This summer’s adventure was our first family vacation (where I didn’t really work) in 10 years! Nightly family dinners are great, but a family vacation can be your recharge station away from the crazy world around us.

I am not a phone maniac anyway and don’t ever plan to have “Blackberry thumb,” but the past 3 weeks gave me perspective, rejuvenated my work drive and renewed my resolve for the things I love to do and those that I don’t (but that I must do anyway).