After the layoff: How smart managers lighten their team’s workload
Nobody likes layoffs; however, they’re a fact of corporate life. Sometimes these reductions in force (RIF) are targeted and surgical. But often senior leadership jettisons jobs across the board: every department gets the same 'haircut.' Either way, if you're a manager, you must deal with the fact that the people are gone, but the work is still there. So what do you do?
The simplest option is to redistribute the work among the remaining workforce and hope for the best. This approach can work in the short term, especially if the remaining employees lack alternatives, but is not sustainable in the long run. With more work than people, performance suffers, engagement drops, and turnover increases.
A better approach is to use the opportunity to renegotiate the work commitment. In some instances, that is quite simple. Take the case of an analytics department that just lost several data scientists. Having reduced resources means the team can take on fewer optimization projects.
But what do you do when work is not so discretionary? In that case, you will need a structured approach to find actionable opportunities to reduce the workload. Hundreds of managers have used the below method to eliminate 10-25% of their team's workload over the course of a few short weeks.
The first step is to list all of the tasks and activities your team currently performs. Make sure you get your entire team to review and refine the list. The final list should look similar to this:
Prepare implementation package
Assign caseload
Update case tracker
Create coverage certificate
Create first bill
Respond to customer service issues
Process census changes
Maintain quality scorecard
Update sales forecast
Performing all these tasks takes time, so you need to understand how much time you have available. The simplest way to do this is to multiply the number of employees on the team (prior to the layoffs) by the number of hours available for work. 1,800 hours per year is often a reasonable estimate. If you have a team of ten, your total capacity is 18,000 hours a year.
Next is figuring out how much time it takes to perform each task on your list. This step is best done as a team, involving those who do the work. Once you have an estimate for every single activity, add them all up. It is not unusual for that total to vastly exceed the team’s capacity – in that case, you might want to revisit the estimates. Remember to document the assumptions behind those estimates to validate them later. Below is an example of what your analysis should look like now:
At this stage, most leaders are surprised to learn how much time certain activities consume. There must be a better way, right? Eager to get rid of work, their first instinct is to streamline these processes. But by doing so, they often miss significant opportunities to eliminate work.
A better way is to think about your team’s workflow as a black box – and start outside the box. For each activity, starting with the ones that consume the most time, ask yourself: What outputs does the activity create, and who receives them?
The reason for starting outside the box is to ensure the output is still needed in its current form. Because if it is not, investing time to make your workflow more efficient is a waste of time.
Consider the quality scorecard listed in the example above. It seems to consume 200 hours a year. You could automate parts of the process and save some time, but what if the customer no longer needs it? The best way to find out what your customers do with your work product is to ask them. And when managers and their teams engage with their customers, they are often surprised to hear things like:
“What report are you talking about? The Quality Scorecard? Oh yes, I do get those emails, but I don’t really do anything with that.”
“I like this report, but all I need is the total on tab 14.”
“I wish that report was sorted by customer; it takes us hours to rearrange the data so we can incorporate it into the operations scorecard.”
These customer interviews often identify significant opportunities to eliminate the activity, reduce the effort required, or significantly enhance the work product.
Once done with challenging the outputs, look at the inputs . Are they exactly what you need? Often they are not, and your team spends significant time reworking those inputs into a form they can use. Reports need to be reformatted. Quality needs to be checked. Sharing with the supplier what you actually need often leads to real breakthroughs: "Oh, you need to get the data as a flat file instead of an excel table? Of course, we can provide you with that."
Once you explored the opportunities outside the box, it is time to go inside the box - and challenge how the work gets done. What should be automated or standardized? Where can you combine steps and eliminate hand-offs? Given the pervasive role of technology in the workplace, some of the opportunities you will uncover will require IT resources, which can take time to obtain in the short run. But even if you cannot get support in the short term, understanding where the opportunities are may become useful later when those resources become available.
Following the above mentioned approach can take as little as a few weeks and eliminate as much as 25% of the workload. More importantly, it shows those remaining employees you care about them and their workload. Many leaders repeat this analysis annually - the equivalent of pruning the garden and keeping the weeds out. Equipped with a deep understanding of where the time goes, they are well prepared when the next round of layoffs comes.