Are You Too Good at Your Job?

SPEAKERS
Paul Harvey, Frank Butler

Paul Harvey  00:00
Hello busybodies. Before we start today's episode, we've been asked to read the following statement on behalf of our producer, Mr. Justin Wuntaek. And the Busyness Paradox policy is, or rather, was to promote only those products that meet our personal standards of ethics and social responsibility. These personal standards were regrettably insufficient to prevent us from endorsing the software application known as HR tracker in our previous episode. As such, we are announcing a change to our sponsorship policy effective immediately going forward. rather than relying on our own clearly inadequate sense of ethics and decency. We will instead rely on the infinitely higher standards of the greatest human being alive today. Keanu Reeves. Yes, the same Keanu Reeves, who routinely stops to help stranded motorists, pay strangers baggage fees at airports, and once pulled a blind kitten from the path of a speeding train while throwing a telemarketer in front of it. The what would piano do filter will help us to ensure that only the highest quality least stalkery product endorsements are aired on our show. Thank you for your understanding. And please continue to listen to the Busyness Paradox.

Paul Harvey  01:15
I think we missed one on that. And that's when Keanu actually gave up his salary at bleep during the writers’ strike or something along those lines.

Paul Harvey  01:24
That does sound familiar.

Paul Harvey  01:25
Overall, what we're trying to say is that Keanu Reeves is our bar for ethics on this show. And so we were going to do a lot more to ask ourselves. What would Kiana do?

Paul Harvey  01:39
What would Kiana do

Frank Butler  01:41
We're sorry for our missteps. In the past. 

Paul Harvey  01:43
We're sorry.

Paul Harvey  01:44
We hope you enjoy this episode.

Paul Harvey  02:03
Hello, busybodies. Welcome to another episode of the Busyness Paradox. I'm Frank Butler, here with Paul Harvey.

Paul Harvey  02:10
Good day.

Frank Butler  02:11
And on today's episode, we're going to discuss being too good at your job. Last week, we were discussing that idea of appearing busy at work, you know, and that's one of those things that was really fascinating. But it got me thinking about what if you're really good at your job, or at a specific task more specifically. So by that, I mean, you know, my wife is an Excel guru, and people seek her out because of her ability to use Excel. And I'm just curious as his work from home going to affect that, are we going to see some sort of impact on that? And actually, more big picture. You know, if it's not your job description, and it's taking your time away from your work, you know that that's not a great thing, either. So we need to think about how do we leverage people who are really good at something, because they're going to make easy work of it. But that's just sort of the things that I you know, I was musing in my head after our after our last week's podcast, and figured that it'd be a good topic for this week's.

Paul Harvey  03:10
So you get the question you're asking is, Can an employee be too good at something basically?

Frank Butler  03:16
Basically? Yeah.

Paul Harvey  03:17
It's an interesting question. Perhaps you can give us an example of how that might play out?

Frank Butler  03:24
Yeah, you know, so my wife, she was asked the other day to do this Excel thing. For a colleague, it was in something that's not even in her area of her department, while they're under the same umbrella, it was really something that would have taken her actually a lot more time Now, obviously, far less time than her colleagues. But it was so far outside of her wheelhouse. It was simply they came to her because they knew she would be quicker at it than they are. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the right thing to do. Right. It is truly their job. And it just, you know, they kind of coincide it with this idea of how do we continue to do this, or just in general, this is this is a thing, this is an issue.

Paul Harvey  04:04
Yeah, that's a good example. And it reminds me a lot of my first job out of college, my first real corporate job, I had a manager who was also an Excel guru. And she used to frequently complain that she would often spend most of her day say eight to five, helping other people with their problems, their questions, mostly Excel based. And then she would sit at her desk from maybe five to nine or 10 o'clock at night actually doing her own job. So you're right, when you become known as the guru of something, Excel and these two examples, but it could be anything else. People start going to you because it's faster for them to have you figure the problem out than it is for them to figure it out themselves.

Frank Butler  04:49
You know, and I think that's really interesting sort of phenomenon, considering the whole idea of feigning busyness the entire topic of last week's podcast well It's your opportunity to actually better yourself by trying to figure out these things. And instead of asking somebody to do it for you, maybe it's a great opportunity for you to either figure it out on your own or ask them to show you for future reference.

Paul Harvey  05:15
That's a good point. Now, I'll admit, I'm a little bit guilty of this in some regards. Because in the moment, say you're on a deadline, or you're multitasking, it's tempting to say, Yeah, I want to learn how to do this. But right now, today, I would like to just get this off my plate and move on to the next thing. And the fastest way to do that is to ask Frank's wife, Hey, can you do this for me?

Frank Butler  05:38
Right, so what's funny about is that you're busy in that moment, and you've got this deadline that you've probably been procrastinating to, to be honest. Right. And, and I think, I think a lot of people are guilty of it. I know I am, for example. But it's, you know, the same point is when she says like, I've pushed it off, or now I have to get it done the looming deadline. And I think what's really interesting about that is that this is the opportunity for us to truly take that downtime. So maybe that's something we need to figure out, how do we take this downtime phenomenon or this fake busy time and turn that into something really productive?

Paul Harvey  06:15
That's a real interesting point. So we don't have to spend or I shouldn't say have to, there's less social pressure to spend time looking busy. So we can take the time that we used to spend doing that, and become actually more skilled and more efficient ourselves.

Frank Butler  06:33
Yeah. And think about that, right? I mean, what doesn't every company really want their employees to be even better? yet? Wouldn't that make it you know, you just think about, if my employees are more efficient across the board, and they're building skills, not only is that going to make an individual more marketable out in the public market, so if they're trying to get a job, being able to do all these things is going to not only look good, maybe help getting a bonus or a raise or something, but at the same time, it's just a company is going to benefit from that skill development.

Paul Harvey  07:01
So really, that kind of ties back into something we were talking about in the last episode, where, you know, I think we can all agree that this fake busyness doesn't really help anybody. And less of that is probably a good thing. But here's an example of how we can really productively channel that the reuse of our time, kind of double down on that notion of real productivity versus fake productivity in a way that not only makes you more productive in the moment, but pays dividends going forward as well.

Frank Butler  07:30
Yeah, I think, you know, I think that's something that every manager or company wants to aspire to, is be able to truly leverage a person's time, you know, I can certainly see this idea of the challenge with last week's topic with the idea of busyness. And we spent, you know, average of three hours a day wasting time in an eight hour job, you know, eight hour per day job. But to think, hey, that three hours could be put to different use where you're self-improving, which is, again, good for you, good for the company, good for everybody. But it's a good option. There was another way I was thinking about this too. If we're not necessarily as keen on leveraging, or giving people that time to improve their skills, let's just say we're okay with the three hours’ time wasted. And we're cool with this person who's really great at a at something like my wife is at Excel, or, you know, somebody who's great at PowerPoint, why not create like an internal Uber style type gig economy type network, where a person who's good at something can actually get paid extra in house during that non busy time or that unbusy time or something along those lines?

Paul Harvey  08:37
That's a great point. Because my next question, or my next idea is going to be how do we avoid falling into the same trap again? So okay, we're gonna take this downtime, we have not downtime, but the time that we've recovered from not pretending to be busy or not acting busy, because we're working from home, and using it to better ourselves, how do we not fall into the same trap of going to, hey, Frank's wife, I want to get better at Excel, can you teach me same kind of issue. But if you're creating this, intra organizational, Uber dynamic, were showing other people how to get better at their job sharing their skills is something that's incentivized and rewarded, then we get closer to a mutually beneficial situation.

Frank Butler  09:24
Yeah, and on top of that, or on top of that, you could think of Sally over here, who happens to be an access guru. And so her skills are quite valuable. And, you know, I don't know about you, but access isn't necessarily the most user intuitive program. I would agree. Yeah, but it's incredibly powerful, right? Oh, yes. So going down that that train of thought maybe you need her for just a couple of hours’ worth of access work, you know, instead of just being trained on how to use it. You don't really have time because you're starting to get up against the deadline. Or you really just need the functionality. It might be a one off type situation, perhaps using Something that's like a fiverr.com idea, you know, something that you can go to and find people who have skills in what you're needing. Now, I do wish that Fiverr would sponsor us, but they're not a sponsor, don't take it as a sponsorship idea.

Paul Harvey  10:15
But give them time, they'll come around

Frank Butler  10:17
That exactly, I think they do have interesting service. And it could be something interesting for a company to want to imitate.

Paul Harvey  10:23
I agree. And I like this example a lot. In part, because I've been on both sides of that equation with access, in particular, to get to the part where I became the resource and not the person who is asking other people for help took a long, long time, lots of hours banging my head against the wall, until you get that like eureka moment, that 830 at night when you're the last one in the office. And like you said, oftentimes, it's a one off project that you know, you figure it out, you went through a learning curve. And now you're never going to need to do that. Again, that's really not an efficient use of your time of the company's time, if you want to look at it that way. So having a fiber type system makes a lot of sense in that regard, where someone who's been through the learning curve, can bang something out, without getting taken advantage of,

Frank Butler  11:11
I think that's exactly right. It's that idea of the learning curve, as we, as we know, early on, it's going to take you a lot longer to figure out how to do something. So why not go for the most efficient or effective aspect of it, right, which is getting the right people to do the job, and be able to then reward them with the appropriate incentives to use their time, manage their time effectively.

Paul Harvey  11:32
So I want to dive into that notion of a fiber intro organizational marketplace for expertise, if you will. But before we kind of jumped down that rabbit hole, as we are apt to do you and I wondering, is there a tradeoff that we should also consider in this? Where if you've got an efficient setup and functioning structure, where instead of going through the learning curve, you go to the person who's already been through it and can bang it out for you? Does that potentially stop people from developing new skills? And is that a problem? Or maybe can we address that through the use of a fiber system? Can we somehow incentivize people in certain circumstances to develop their own skills as opposed to going to somebody else? You know,

Frank Butler  12:27
I think that's actually a great point. And one that I hadn't really thought about in the process of how limiting is that to your own personal development. Now, I could clearly see it as a as an idea, for example, that access is something that I don't feel like he's going to create value for me to know. However, Excel should be something that I should know. You know, and I think that that could apply to significantly to a significant amount of other jobs, just because of the multifunctional aspect of it. But access in itself. While it is powerful, and can be a great tool, it might not be as important for me to be able to use depending on my job. So at the end of the day, I do think that there's got to be some skills that you want to be able to develop just for your own personal development. But I think there are certainly these one offs. For example, another example, how much do I really want to get good at developing a website? The whiskey wigs weren't great for me. But I don't know if I want to get into the weeds of Python or Java scripting to do certain things on there, or maybe even taking a movie file and converting it to a GIF. You know, I think that those are things that are good to know. But how often are you going to be able to apply that? And is that a good use of your own time versus maybe developing skills that are going to help you with your career path or develop or improve what you're already good at, or at least you have a good foundation to build from? So that might be the idea?

Paul Harvey  13:55
That's a good point. And, you know, even if it is something that you might use, again, this this skill that you spend time acquiring? Are you going to use it in a short enough timeframe that you remember what you learned, or you started back at square one again. So I think what we're kind of agreeing on here is that this is really a conversation between an employee and their manager and an employee and themselves, you know, did they feel that it's worth investing their time? Does the manager feel that it's worth that employee investing their time to learn a skill? Or is there agreement on both sides that now this is something that's more efficiently outsourced, to whoever your local expert is?

Frank Butler  14:36
You know, one of the things is that we need to think about how something like this might work or conceptualize how this intracompany marketplace might work. And I keep going back to this idea of these other gig economy style apps or something like Fiverr where you put yourself out there, you know, you say, Okay, this is a skill set that I have. I think I'm pretty good at it. So if you need That skill for a project you're working on or something that you might be working on, you would reach out to me. And then after we're done, you would be able to provide a rating for me, you know, one out of five star kind of thing, or five out of five stars. But, you know, that's another thing is that we have to think about the compensation aspect of it as well. How do you actually get paid? Well, I do think that internal invoicing is easy enough to do companies do this all the time. That's not the challenge in itself. But the reality is that who's going to be responsible for paying that and so ultimately, there's probably a layer of management involved, who has control over budget. So there's something to be said about that. Now, obviously, I think this sort of process would be more easily implemented in a projectized structured organization, some company that's already doing projects, and they're really good at it be much easier, but a more traditionally structured organization might struggle a little bit with finding how to properly implement it. But I don't think that's a real challenge, especially because you would really maximize the efficiency of it.

Paul Harvey  16:04
Right? I think you're right about that, that an organization that already has that kind of project based costing, an activity based costing model in place, would be able to adapt to this idea more easily. But that doesn't necessarily mean that another company it doesn't have that in place wouldn't benefit from doing so I kind of see this as really the essence of what activity based costing is all about. A big difference is that it gives more people in the organization more stake and getting the costing, correct, making sure that the allocations are going to the right places, because now the employees themselves are receiving some of this compensation.

Frank Butler  16:48
Yeah. And I think beyond that, to going back to our previous episode, you know, talking about busyness, right? Well, instead of feigning busyness, or pretending you're busy, why not just simply go down that route of saying, hey, you've got free time, we're going to encourage you to use that time in a productive manner where you can get something out of it, and somebody else can get something out of it. Now, obviously, I think there's a lot that can be done in there, there's a lot of things that could go or occur in that framework. But for the most part, it's a great mechanism to be able to leverage people's skills to help get things done more efficiently. And then ultimately, that will translate to better outcomes, right, better customer service outcomes, better products better, whatever, you know, and I think that's going to be one of these benefits of having something like this, or at least conceptualizing this in your organization. And that's something that I don't think a lot of companies may be considering.

Paul Harvey  17:49
You know, I think I hadn't really thought this all the way through before. But I think the potential benefits go even farther than that. So we keep coming back to this idea of incentivizing the behaviors that you want to actually see. You're not just incentivizing a more efficient use of free time, so to speak. So you've got people motivated to do productive stuff, instead of pretending to look busy, like we were talking about in the last episode. But if, if you have an effective version of this in place, employees might even want to get to where they have free time, and can engage in these intra company market activities. So that gives them incentive to get their work done. their personal work done more quickly, more efficiently, with less likelihood of having to go back and rework anything. So they can get to the point where they've got a block of time, they can go on their, whatever their system looks like and say, Hmm, are there any jobs for me today? So you're really getting kind of a dual benefit here? I think,

Frank Butler  18:54
You know, I didn't even think about that, you're absolutely right, there could be a dual benefit, you're gonna get your work potentially done more quickly, you won't procrastinate on it as much. Now, of course, then there's the converse of that, right? The people who do tend to procrastinate, who still do good work when they get to it, because they kind of have a good idea of how long they take. They work better under pressure. There could be a challenge with that, though, right? It could be that it causes people to procrastinate, because they're seeing the money come in from these additional activities. And then it starts to affect their regular job. And I think that's something that needs to be very strongly considered as well. 

Paul Harvey  19:31
That is a great point. This could work too well, where you're incentivizing what we call citizenship behaviors, where you're incentivizing employees helping each other so to speak more strongly than you are the actual job a person is hired and paid to do. That's obviously something you want to avoid,

Frank Butler  19:53
You know, in mentioning the citizenship behavior, I think that's something that's going to be of interest going forward. Anyway. Considering that transition from being in office to work from home, it's something that how do we continue to encourage these kinds of citizenship behaviors in this transition work environment? And that's going to be, I think, a topic for us in another episode, but certainly something to consider when you're trying to encourage certain types of behavior.

Paul Harvey  20:19
I agree with that. I think it's a topic worthy of a deep dive on its own. And I think what would be really helpful for us in doing that would be if anyone who's listening has anything resembling what we're talking about here, an inter internal fiver, Uber gig economy type setup that incentivizes employees to help each other with their jobs based on their expertise. It'd be really interesting for us and very informative to hear how that has been implemented in in your companies and how well it's worked. What are the problems? And what are the benefits you've seen so far.

Frank Butler  20:56
And it would be great to just have a conversation, even if it's offline, to really understand the evolution of it right to get from the start of how this was conceptualized in the company to then implemented to figure out the challenges to me, it would just be fascinating to find out that story. So yeah, I agree. If there's a listener out there, whose company does something similar to this, we'd love to hear from you reach out to us on Twitter, or our email address, finding our website

Paul Harvey  21:23
Absolutely we'll keep you anonymous, if you want, we won't share anything you don't want us to share. This is just, you know, this isn't a new idea that has, there's not much data out there to go on either anecdotal or otherwise. So we're kind of at that stage of the scientific process here of seeing what is actually out there, and how is it working? So we would, we would certainly appreciate any insights you all can share with us,

Frank Butler  21:49
We, we're looking for the hipsters of business practice, 

Paul Harvey  21:52
Well said Frank, the hipsters of business practices. That's kind of true, actually. So even if you know,  if you're working at a company that doesn't exactly do what we're talking about, but has another way of getting at the same goals, we'd love to hear that too. 

Frank Butler  22:05
Absolutely. You know, this is sort of what this is about, you know, we want to be able to share best practices with others really get out to the ideas of what other companies might be doing. In to some extent, it's also Paul and I just discussing workplace practices that we know are challenging and trying to help improve those. I think one of the things that that I always tend to say is that there's a lot of mediocre companies out there. And they're mediocre for typically all about the same reason at the end of the day is they just sort of don't really focus in on the people as well. And that's not saying it's bad. I mean, they're out there, they're doing okay, but I think it disadvantages a company, especially during this downturn economies, if they're not really focusing in on the people, whether it's the customer or the employees really both at the end of the day, I think that they find that they're more likely to struggle during these times. Whereas those companies that are really good at focusing in on our employees, and on the customers tend to come out of these situations far better off, right. And we see that with Apple, we see that with Disney, even though Disney's not having the parks open, and they're losing money, they're actually still chugging along pretty well. 

Paul Harvey  23:15
Yeah, it's economies and business environments like this, that separate the companies that are coasting on momentum, versus those who are fundamentally sound and how their employees are being treated, and how efficient their workflows and their organizational relationships are set up.

Frank Butler  23:36
You know, one of those things, though, that's concerning, or at least needs to be considered is whether or not this should be a requirement. And My take is that you should not be required to do so this is simply voluntary. You have time that's in excess, you have slack time or surplus time, why not be able to just go out and do a little bit more to contribute to the company and to your own self right to help build your internal resume and strengths and develop yourself?

Paul Harvey  24:04
Yeah, it might sound a little bit counterintuitive, at first to think that you would set up a system like this, and then have it be an opt in voluntary thing for employees to do. But I think it has to be that way. Another theme we always come back to is you want employees to want to do the things you want them to do. You want to be on the same page with them. This is a particularly apt example of that, I think, where if you're forcing people to engage in this type of gig economy system, it's not going to work. You're going to have people going through the motions, not signing up for any jobs, not giving it a full description of their own skills and what they can contribute. And if not working to actively sabotage it or at least preventing it from working as well as it could. Which works against the employees who are interested in doing it and then in the end, it fails, never loses.

Frank Butler  24:58
You know, building off of that you said something That that just triggered a thought in me. And that's that notion of the idea of having to contribute or put your skills up there. Or not seeking jobs, I could see, I could easily see this being an opportunity for a company to exploit their people in a way that's not conducive by actually saying you have to, as part of your evaluation, do four jobs a quarter or per evaluation period. And that's really what we don't want to do. Right? That is, that would be one of those that it just ruins the entire benefit of something like this to create added value and turns it into another I must do it type situation,

Paul Harvey  25:39
I'm going to say that might be the most important criteria for something like this to succeed, because it is so easily quantifiable. You know, a lot of modern jobs, by their very nature are difficult to quantify. It's not like everyone is producing X number of widgets per hour, those jobs still exist. But in many jobs, you really can't do that. So this potentially gives us something that makes the unquantifiable more easily measured. And, ironically, we don't want that in this case, as soon as it becomes you must do five of these things. Or even if it's less formal than that, if it's not explicitly part of your performance evaluation, but it is noted that, you know, you engaged in five of these activities, and your coworker did seven. So we really, really don't want that. So I think the only way this can work is that it has to be voluntary. I don't think there's a

Frank Butler  26:36
no Yeah, no, I think there might need to be blind to your own manager, right. They can't see what you've done. And so getting access might be one of those that you can't see your own employees.

Paul Harvey  26:47
Like, it's tricky, because if we're working with departmental and project budgets, the manager needs to have some awareness of what's going on. But that doesn't mean that your idea is not feasible. That's just a complication that needs to be addressed. Probably could write with cryptocurrency. Only bad back, don't let me go down that rabbit hole.

Frank Butler  27:10
That will be certainly for another episode. I think the talk about smart contracts and crypto. It would be obviously a great fit for this environment. But I think that's one of those that might make people go cross eyed.

Paul Harvey  27:25
Yes, it would. But I think the logic is there, that you've got a system that has its own boundaries and limitations built in, that are pre-approved by a manager, whoever controls the budget. And then employees are free to do as they wish, blindly, with or without, with varying levels of transparency to the manager based on what they feel is appropriate. And I think that that's a workaround for, for kind of solving that paradox. paradox. So it's not blind to the manager, in the sense of they have no clue what's going on. But they don't necessarily know the precise details of who's doing what, at least on a day to day basis, allowing for more of that voluntary helping behavior that we're looking for, we're trying to do is incentivize good, helpful citizenship behaviors. Anything that makes it not voluntary, by definition makes it not a helpful citizenship behavior.

Frank Butler  28:33
Exactly. That's the key is that this is supposed to be the bonus. For everybody the bonus for the employees who are able to do more, you know, and I was even thinking about it. Think about some of these seasonality jobs, right. Some jobs are just naturally busier at different times of the year. You know, accountants, for example, are really busy around tax season. But that's not you know, that's true for a lot of other jobs. I know, for example, in the university system, people tend to be very busy at the start or end of the semester, depending on their jobs, whereas others are going to be busy more during the semester. And so there might be some more downtime in there. And so these are great opportunities are really, not only are you already incentivizing people to do their regular job by paying them their salaries or hourly rates. But now you're giving them the ability to actually add more value to the company, which has a lot of different implications, it could be able to be used as a way of keeping your employee growth in check. So you're not just hiring somebody to work on a job that's really only need to be done for two, three weeks out of the year or something like that. And you'd have to keep on my payroll for a year. There's just a lot of potential benefits to something like this.

Paul Harvey  29:41
I think you're onto something there. Frank. Going back to the topic we're just talking about in a lot of jobs, it's probably feasible for a manager to set parameters on what amount broadly speaking quantity of these behaviors employees are facing. To engage in using your accounting example, for a second, it's relatively easy to imagine a scenario where a manager sets limits or at least certain parameters on how many of these gig economy behaviors are allowed. And what types are allowed at any given point in time. So during busy season, you're not designing access queries for the intern or something. But in the offseason, yeah, sure, go wild. And again, the parameters regarding the type of voluntary behavior, if it's a behavior that is immediately helpful to someone else going through the busy season, that probably makes sense. If it's not, then this is not the time for that, then we wait till the offseason and then employees get more freedom to do more of this kind of stuff. What do you think about that?

Frank Butler  30:50
Yeah, see, I think that's, that's a great way of putting it at, you know, having the manager having some level of control over or, or even the employee at least being able to set parameters around when they would be able to do it themselves. Yeah. So by that, meaning, I know that I'm going to be busy at the start of the semester. So therefore, I'm going to block myself out from being unavailable from August 1 until August 31. 

Paul Harvey  31:15
And, you know, we kind of do this anyway, right? Naturally say, yeah, I'm really bogged down right now. Come back to me in a week, and I'll help you. We're taking things that are relatively normal and desirable human tendencies. And again, incentivizing the ones that help everybody, and not the ones that are unproductive.

Frank Butler  31:35
I don't I don't know if we have much more to deal with on that.

Paul Harvey  31:37
I think we're good. I think we've solved the world's problem in that regard.

Frank Butler  31:41
I think you're right, man. I think we got it. Again, everybody. Thank you for listening. Please do reach out to us. Thank you, and we look forward to having you continue to listen to our upcoming podcasts.

Paul Harvey  31:53
Thank you for listening to the Busyness Paradox. Our show is distributed by Paul Harvey and Frank Butler. Our theme music was adapted from its business time by Jermaine Clement and Bret McKenzie. Our production manager is Justin Wuntaek. We all hope you enjoyed this episode. We'd love to hear from you. Please send questions, comments or ideas for future episode topics to input at Busyness. paradox.com, or find us on Twitter. Also, be sure to visit our website, Busyness, paradox.com to read our blog posts, and for links to the articles and other resources mentioned in today's show. Finally, please take a moment to rate and subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Spotify iHeartRadio, Google podcasts, or wherever you found this episode.



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