Family getaways and hot dog barbecue holidays lure employees away for long periods. Even when out-of-office responses are turned off, daydreaming can make it difficult for anyone to focus on work.
Want to fight the summer slump? Research from the Kellogg School explores how organizations can keep staff motivated and on track year-round.
1. Offer the right incentives
The lure of career advancement can keep employees working hard when they’d rather be at the beach. But what’s an organization to do when there aren’t plenty of deals to hand out?
Michael Powellassociate professor of strategy and his colleagues created a mathematical model to explore how companies facing this constraint can better use incentives to motivate employees.
In larger companies, for example, which tend to have many entry-level employees per executive, it is difficult to land one of the few top positions. Since workers are less likely to get a promotion, the model revealed, the company must dangle a more attractive carrot—in this case, a much larger salary—to keep them working hard.
Similarly, in flat organizations, with very few opportunities for promotion between entry and top jobs, financial incentives can help motivate employees. However, while a one-time bonus may lead to short-term improvements, research has shown that offering benefits such as stock options can help ensure that employees remain productive in the long term.
Additionally, when using promotions as an incentive, it’s important to plan ahead.
“If you’re going to promise people that if they work for you for three years, they’ll get a promotion, you have to make sure you need people at higher levels three years from now,” Powell says.
2. Review the workflow
Simply changing the way tasks are organized can help employees achieve more in less time.
Case in point: Italian Labor Court Appeals. These courts, which handle cases dealing with dismissals and pensions, are notoriously slow, with cases taking 4.7 times longer than the average for cases in other developed countries.
Robert Brayassociate professor of operations, and Nikola Persiko, a professor of administrative economics and decision sciences, found that much of this inefficiency results from the way judges schedule their cases. Judges usually put each new hearing at the end of the queue, finding the first open slot on the calendar and filling it.
Bray, Persico and colleagues worked with appellate labor court judges in Rome to implement a new scheduling method over three years. They assigned six judges to estimate the number of hearings the case would require and schedule them all in advance, leaving enough time between them for lawyers to prepare for the next hearing.
This new method reduced the time it took to resolve a case by 19 percent compared to judges who used the traditional method. The gain in efficiency comes from the fact that when hearings are scheduled in advance and clustered together, a case moves quickly through the system once it reaches the first hearing.
“If we can teach these Italian judges to do it better,” Persico says, “then there’s probably work to be done to teach clerks to plan their own workflow better.”
3. Keep the Free-Riders at Bay
The temptation to avoid work can be particularly strong in a team project, where others may step in to pull the load for a colleague who is freeloading.
George Georgiadisassociate professor of strategy at Kellogg, has proposed a clever way to overcome this free-rider problem: When teammates have to put something tangible on the line—like cash—it can encourage everyone to behave in ways that benefit the entire team. team, and not just for themselves.
Georgiadis and a co-author formulated a theoretical situation in which everyone working on a long-term project contributes additional fees to third parties until the project is completed. These accumulated fees act as a tax or penalty for freeloading, forcing individual teammates to internalize the cost of team inefficiency.
The exact amount teammates contribute can vary from person to person, based on factors such as the size of their role or their productivity.
Importantly, each teammate’s contribution increases as the project nears completion. This, Georgiadis explains, is because the temptation to freeload increases the closer you get to the finish line. “My temptation to free ride, to skip an hour of work, when we are nearing completion is great, because I work so hard.”
4. Leave Training to the Experts
When trying to master a new skill, it’s tempting to speed up the learning curve by studying a colleague’s work, rather than discovering it yourself.
But that strategy can sometimes slow you down, according to research from the surgery professor Jan Van Mieghem.
Van Mieghem and his colleagues analyzed the behavior of thousands of eBay data analysts. They wanted to know which method improved an analyst’s programming skills faster: writing code themselves (“learning by doing”) or looking at the work of other analysts (“learning by viewing”).
They found that viewing the work of veteran developers actually helps analysts code faster. But viewing the work of inexperienced coders—even those considered programming superstars—can actually be detrimental to productivity, perhaps because amateur code can confuse analysts or lead them astray, wasting their time.
“There’s huge value in experienced people showing and sharing their work, especially with people just starting out,” says Van Mieghem. “But maybe we should say to the beginners, ‘You can see [others’ work]but you don’t have to share yours yet.”
5. Create a better schedule
Scheduling difficulties can make even a highly functional workplace. So it might be worth reconsidering if your scheduling system needs updating.
One study simulated how hospitals can better schedule their operating rooms and found savings of about 20%.
Surgeries and related hospitalizations generate about 70% of the hospital’s total revenue, but surgeries are expensive ($1000 per hour is typical). Optimizing OR scheduling is therefore a top priority for administrators.
“They have to make rooms available while at the same time meeting surgeons’ requests and keeping costs under control,” he says. Chaithanya Bandiassociate professor of Liturgy.
Bandi and a co-author found that hospitals generally keep more ORs ready than they might need at any given time to accommodate unexpected requests from surgeons.
Using 18 months of surgical scheduling data shared by a large hospital, researchers developed an innovative algorithm to improve OR procedures, minimizing the number of ORs hospitals had to keep open while meeting surgeon requests.
The optimization algorithm could also be used in other facilities where capacity is requested at unpredictable times and where it is not clear how long a given task will take.
