• We published a post last month that was my vision for the perfect workplace. It was actually inspired by another post I read illustrating how there are 5 types of work that fill our workday (another popular link we shared). It’s pretty clear what type of work eats up our workday. We tend to spend most of our workday reacting to other things. I wondered in my post if we spent more time planning and problem solving we could head off all that reactionary work that eats up our time.
• We shared how to reward your employees. It doesn’t have to be lavish or expensive to make your employees feel valued.
• We also shared how to be more productive through the magic of doing one thing at a time. Many people will like to tell you that they are good at mult-tasking, but studies have shown that the human brain can only do no more than two activities simultaneously effectively. The ability to retain information from the tasks goes down dramatically the more tasks you add.
• Finally, we looked at how training impacts employee turnover.

Out of these items, which catches your attention? We always welcome your comments below and please take a moment to follow us at our social media sites on Facebook and Twitter.

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About The Blog

The PinPoint Performance Solutions Blog provides our readers with commentary and advice on how to improve performance in the workplace through training and development and performance improvement interventions. We strive to offer an unbiased, yet general view of workplace performance improvement that’s easy to comprehend and adaptable.

Industries and issues in the workplace vary so we understand not everything we discuss will match your workplace performance issue 100%. However, we encourage you to engage us through the comments section of each blog post or contact us directly to discuss your workplace performance needs. We love questions, especially ones that make us think, so ask away!

Topics

All of our posts are categorized and tagged for easy reference. They will either focused on Training and Development or Workplace Performance Improvement. Some of our more popular topics have been categorized and grouped into specific pages. You may find some of these category pages of particular interest:

• The Successful Workplace
• Business Communication
• The Economy and Training
• The Training Program Toolkit
• Gilbert’s Behavior Engineering Model

The Author

Justin Beller is the lead instructional design consultant and owner of PinPoint Performance Solutions. Justin is also the author of a majority of the blog posts found here.

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Thanks for visiting our blog. We hope you’ll take us up on the offer to become a regular reader by following us and engaging us.

You can review for yourself the author’s analysis of these five areas, but here’s my take of how it breaks down:

Reactionary work

Reactionary work is generally responding to events that are either internal or external to the organization. It’s the voice mails, the e-mails, the requests made of you by other co-workers or customers, and so on. It is virtually impossible to have a work environment where reactionary work does not exist. However, it takes up much of our workday and keeps us from other work we could be doing that would help the organization and ourselves perform better.

Planning work

Planning work is devoted to how we will carry out our work. We schedule and prioritize tasks and create processes to help us along with the hopes of developing methods that allow us to be a top performer in the workplace. Planning is personalized and what may work for you, won’t necessarily work for others. If you intend to apply your methods to other co-workers or the employees you manage, understand that you will need to be flexible to accommodate the strengths and limitations of others.

While planning ahead is a good thing, too much could lead to a term we’ve heard often called “analysis paralysis”. While we can’t accurately predict and anticipate issues that may arise and use planning to address them, over-planning will not necessarily free up the time and resources needed to address a issue when is arises (through reactionary work).

Procedural

Procedural work is the day to day routine work we do to make sure things are running smoothly. It is neither reactionary or strategic like problem-solving or planning work, but if we don’t do it procedural work will become reactionary work that will end up consuming our workday.

Procedural work is probably one of the better places to find that precious time we need to devote to planning or problem solving. By finding more ways to be efficient in our procedural work or automating certain tasks, we can free up time to do that strategic work that hopefully will minimize reactionary work.

Insecurity work

Insecurity work is the type of work we do to check and re-check our activities to make sure we don’t make any mistakes that could lead to potential problems at a later time.

We would be doing less of this if more effort was put into planning and problem solving. It seems much of the insecurity work we do is to check and see if we crossed every “t” and dotted every “I”. Less stress would be put upon us if we worried about those matters in while planning and problem solving.

Any insecurity work we do should be just to survey how the work environment is and finding opportunities for improvement, not to guard ourselves from the work we conducted.

Problem-solving work

Problem-solving work isn’t necessarily reactionary work in so much as it is creative work we do that requires our full attention. It’s brainstorming or developing new products, services and procedures. It’s the time to innovate.

I feel this is the most important work anybody can do with their day. It keeps you engaged, but it also contributes to the growth of an organization.

—–

So then, what would be the perfect work environment where an individual can perform to his or her greatest potential? It would be one that is proactive concentrating on planning and problem-solving work. Reactionary work would not necessarily be eliminated because it is necessity, but it would be minimized considerably. The same would hold true for insecurity work and procedural tasks would be automated (but monitored) to free up time to devote to planning and problem solving.

You may not necessarily have control over all work in your organization, but you likely have control over your own day to day work activities. From there alone, you could stand to make things easier for yourself if you analyzed what you do daily and how much of your activities fit within these five areas.

We know that all work is not created equal. Some jobs, of course, are more physical while others require a high-degree of mental concentration. Still, I would hazard to guess that the chart illustrating most work would not change drastically from one job to the next if it were analyze in this manner.

Do you analyze work, whether it is your own or in your organization, in this fashion? More importantly, do you think if we tried to create the type of work environment I illustrated we would be more productive as a workforce?

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• There was a fascinating chart I shared that showed how our workday breaks down. Most of our workday is expended on reactionary work. It made me wonder if we spent more time on planning – proper planning – we would have less reactionary work to deal with and therefore give us more time to dedicate to problem solving. I feel this would make for a workplace that would perform as it should. Am I wrong here?
• Published another post in our Behavioral Engineering Model series – this time focusing on the knowledge and skill of employees in the workplace as it relates to performance.
• A great article on training and how it can be used to reduce employee turnover. Do you think it is key to engaging a workforce so they become more committed and and productive?
• I took a departure from the Behavior Engineering Model series and provided tips on how to improve employee performance to avoid burn out in the workforce.
• Remember “Clippy”? Well, he served as a great example in a post I did about EPSS: Electronic Performance Support Systems. He actually served a purpose – really.

Out of these items, what caught your attention the most? Leave your comments below and please feel free to share some interesting items you found on the web about the worked of training and development and workplace performance improvement.

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We’re now at the final stop of our journey exploring the Behavior Engineering Model and it is perhaps the most subjective out of all of the model’s components. Motivation, when it comes to the workforce in general, is different from one person to the next. It is not necessarily consistent and what one person may consider important to their work and contribution to the workplace as a whole may be completely opposite of their co-workers.

Motivation in the Behavior Engineering Model is described as the following:

• Value
• Confidence
• Mood

While these may be good ways to describe motivation in the workplace, there is a better definition worthy of exploring if you intend to apply it to the Behavior Engineering Model.

What is motivation?

Motivation is that drive people have to satisfy basic needs. These needs can be individual or they can be more communal in nature where the drive to meet certain needs are mutually beneficial to everyone involved (like in the workplace). Mind you, that is in a more ideal situation. Most people will tell you that motivating circumstances in the workplace tend to be more self-serving than to help out fellow co-workers or the entire organization.

With that said, it lends more to the argument that motivation is more personal and therefore what one person is motivated by is not necessarily the same for the next person.

Why is motivation important?

Motivation has a significant impact on the performance of an organization because leaders rely on output of that action to make sure that goals and objectives are met, products are produced, or services are rendered in a timely manner. Lack of motivation on the part of the workforce can lead to consequences both for the employees and the organization.

Motivation has been studied for hundreds of years. Only within the last 50 years has it been so clearly defined for the workplace as with Herzberg’s Motivational Theory. The theory breaks it  down to two categories:

1. Factors that motivate – things that give employees an incentive to work resulting in job satisfaction, often referred to as motivators. Motivators that increased job satisfaction further increased efficiency in the employee.
2. Factors that prevent job dissatisfaction – things that remove the unhappiness out of work. If not removed, they result in reduced employee efficiency.

By looking at this theory’s model, you can actually use it to point you in the direction to where the root cause of the performance problem may lie.

Conclusion

Motivation shouldn’t be overlooked when addressing a performance problem using the Behavior Engineering Model, however measuring it should only be used as a barometer to evaluate the environment where work takes place. Motivation in an of itself must not be identified as a root cause to an organizational performance problem, but merely as a symptom to a greater problem that could be addressed by the other components in the Behavior Engineering Model.

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