How To Delight Your Teams With No Meetings Days And Summer Hours

Does your company have summer hours? - What about No Meetings days?

When I worked at Land Rover’s British manufacturing plant, the benefit of summer hours had been negotiated by the labor unions many years before. It meant the work week finished at noon every Friday throughout the summer.  Those Friday afternoons were treasured by thousands of employees who got to enjoy the delights of a British extended weekend each summer. 

Why not introduce it in your company this summer?

Wondering how you will find the time to do that without a drop in productivity?

Here’s how:

I’ve guided hundreds of companies to introduce No Meetings days through my consulting work and in my books. This simple idea is needed right now in so many companies as research shows that burnout is increasing, Zoom/Teams Fatigue is real, and working from home actually means Working Endlessly at Home. 

It really is simple:

1. Pick a day of the week and declare it as a No Meetings day.

2. Give a couple of weeks notice to allow everyone to review and adjust their meeting cadence.

3. Question the value and return on investment of every meeting you currently attend and use this time to reset meetings to become more meaningful.

The time saved will allow everyone to actually do some work vs attending meetings to talk about doing the work. This will make a dramatic impact on your productivity and your teams ability to get things done, have time to think and create, and enjoy the summer ahead. 

I’d love to hear if you do this already or if you plan to. 

Dedicated to growing your business,

Val

P.S. I hope you enjoyed this week's VAL-uable Insights, sign up here to get them in your inbox each Monday morning: http://valwrightconsulting.com/newsletter-sign-up/

How To Avoid Metrics Manipulation And Make Them Actually Useful

“You are a machine Val- I can’t believe you Peloton every day!”

That’s what one of my friends told me a few weeks ago. Impressed by the blue circles on my profile that show I worked out every single day for the previous two months. ....Err. Nope. Not quite!

I quickly corrected him, shattering his illusion of my endless daily cycling. Because the secret is, Peloton tracks meditation as a workout. One of my daughters loves a 5 minute meditation together before she goes to sleep and many nights I also use a peloton mediation to calm my busy head. So the peloton metrics aren’t truly telling the story that you can easily be lead to believe if you look at a member profile on their app. 

It’s so easy to manipulate metrics and create an illusion far different than reality. Sound familiar?

Same applies in business. Are you truly tracking the right outputs and providing the scorecards/ visual representations of progress, and monitoring the right results?

You have to ask: what is the source, can I trust the inputs, and should I care what it is telling me. 

There’s a lot to be said for the hand painted thermometer that fundraisers use to visually show the target and the progress made. Sometimes simple metrics are best. Otherwise your team can have their eyes on the wrong prize. 

I’d love to see some of your favorite metrics and scorecards you use to track progress in your business. Have a creative solution you have designed? Remove the confidential numbers and send them my way, I’d love to see what works for you and share back what themes from what have seen work for the greatest impact in the most successful companies.

Dedicated to growing your business,

Val

P.S. I hope you enjoyed this week's VAL-uable Insights, sign up here to get them in your inbox each Monday morning: http://valwrightconsulting.com/newsletter-sign-up/

Might This Be The Fastest House Sale Ever Made?

If you know how you are going to decide, your decisions will be more thoughtful, intentional, and efficient.

For those of you who know me you will know that my impatience can be both my towering strength and the source of much annoyance for those around me! So when it was time for us to buy our new place we knew that we had to decide just how we were going to decide.

42 days after deciding it was time to start looking for a new place, we picked up the keys and walked through the door to our new home, knowing we had absolutely made the right decision and it didn't feel the slightest bit rushed.

The key? (I know, bad pun...) we had already decided just how we were going to decide.  I have been designing my weekend morning walks around the streets where we might want to live. We gave our realtor a map with the precise zone where we wanted to buy, because an essential factor was that our three girls could all easily walk to school. We knew our must-have and nice-to-have-features, and how much work and money we wanted to invest. Surprisingly, COVID lockdown actually also helped us, because there has been a boom of 3D modeled houses that allow for virtual tours using technology like Matterport that really make you feel like you are wandering around, getting closer to details, and even letting you measure every single dimension! All of this helped us be prepared.

Despite setting a new record for our realtor as his fastest ever close, we actually were in no rush. That allowed us to not feel pressured, but once we saw our new place, we knew it was quite special and we wanted to see if we could get it. 

I see thousands of wasted hours and painful amounts of dollars squandered on ineffective decision making. Meetings where no-one is quite clear if this is a debate or a point of conclusion, or just how to arrive at a decision. Individual leaders who are duplicating or dropping key work because there is confusion who is making the decisions. All of this contributes to what I call Decision Fatigue. If you want to receive my Decision Deciphering Guide for use with your Leadership Team - please reply with a challenge you are currently facing with decisions in your company and I'll send it to you as a gift from me.

Now, as we begin our remodel, if you want to know how quickly we bought a complete set of appliances, bathroom fittings, and tile(s)...we followed just the same approach saving us hours of indecision and helping sales associates in the stores we visited get an unexpected boost to their commission bonuses in rapid time!

Now maybe next week's VAL-uable Insights will be the story behind what exactly we are going to do with our four newly acquired giant chandeliers!

To your efficient decisions this week!

Dedicated to growing your business,

Val

P.S. I hope you enjoyed this week's VAL-uable Insights, sign up here to get them in your inbox each Monday morning: http://valwrightconsulting.com/newsletter-sign-up/