SOME OF OUR DAILY BRAND FOOTPRINTS
Every day we leave our brand footprints for others to follow or wipe away. Do you leave footprints that others will follow to your next accomplishment? Or do you leave footprints that others prefer to wipe away from their futures?
Every action we take at work brands us to the advantage or detriment of our futures. Here are three common, daily office activities that leave brand footprints. Will others want to follow your footprints or wipe them away?
GOSSIPING
Tolerating negative gossip about co-workers is equivalent to management’s paying to have dysfunction spread throughout an organization. It steals time and money, creates distrust and suspicion, destroys reputations and chances, and embeds absenteeism and turnover. Most importantly, it comes back to bite the offenders, as their negative focus on others crowds out the potential of their minds.
PLAYING MUSIC IN AN OPEN AREA
Noise dramatically reduces efficiency. One person’s music is another person’s noise. No matter how low or loud, the rhythm of one person’s music can be irritating and nerve racking to another person. In the age of earphones and iPods, there is no need for anyone to have to tolerate another person’s music at the office, but management beware, listen up:
A sixteen year old, David Merrill, conducted an experiment to see how different music affected mice. He divided his mice into three groups: He fed rock music to the first group; Mozart to the second; no music to the third.
Three times a week, he put each mouse through a maze, which had taken all the mice an average of ten minutes to complete before the experiment.
During the period, the Mozart Group shaved its time by eight-and-a-half minutes; the No Music Group, by five minutes. The Rock Group added twenty minutes to its time.
But here’s the real kicker: he had to cut his experiment short, as the Rock Group mice killed each other off.
MULTITASKING
As Dave Crenshaw has pointed out so well in his book, “The Myth of Multitasking,” there is no such thing as multitasking; only switchtasking. Switchtasking sucks every ounce of efficiency out of an employee and an organization.
Switchtasking includes attending to e-mails while meeting with someone else, answering the phone during meetings, reading and answering e-mails as they come in, stopping a task to answer the phone, completing two reports at a time – you get it – a culture that is inadvertently glorified in most offices.
Switchtasking fractures concentration, diminishes excellent results, and sends a message that those subjected to it are unimportant. It is generally impolite and a classic symptom of disorganization.
Next time you gossip negatively about a co-worker, play your favourite music in an open area, or multitask, think about the brand footprints you are leaving behind.
I find nothing more irritating than attending a meeting where the participants constantly check their Blackberries and take personal phone calls or unnecessary calls from their staff during the meeting.
I worked with one woman who would have her off-site staff call her during a meeting when someone didn’t show up for work, even though supervisors were on site to call relief staff to come in. She would let her children call her during regularly scheduled meetings.
After having several one and a half hour meetings drag on to two hours and two and a half hours, I spoke to one of the other attendees about it and spoke to our mutual boss. Our boss spoke to the woman in question and meetings went a lot better after that.
I’ve worked with some people who have an open-door policy and as soon as you come into their office for a scheduled meeting it’s a trigger to pick up the phone and call someone. After this happening several times, I finally told this person that she had to come to my office for meetings as she is too distracted in her office.
If you have a regular meeting scheduled, then tell your staff and family that you aren’t available except in an emergency such as an accident or business that cannot be delegated, rather than business that you won’t delegate.
It’s just rude and a waste of everyone’s time in the meeting! And, with everyone having cell phones and Blackberries it’s getting worse and worse!