Ways to Get More Work Done?

MeyerFire University | BS103.05

By Joe Meyer, PE

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TRANSCRIPT

HOW TO GET MORE WORK DONE? 

INTRODUCTION

Yeah, you heard that title right. The thing we all really want to know. I’m so stretched as it is – I’m stressed – I don’t have any extra time – how can I get more work done so I don’t have to live life this way? 

I hear you – and I’m serious. Let’s talk about it.

THE PROBLEM

Our principal problem in a service role is time.

It’s our fundamental limitation.  

You could extend that to say that time may be our greatest limitation as human beings, but I’ll stick more of my terrain here in this segment. 

If we’re in plan review, or we do inspection, or we supervise installs, or we design, or we manage people, or we do technical reviews – in all of these roles our fundamental limitation is time. 

Ever thought – if I could just clone myself I’d be able to get all of these things done? 

Or if there were just two of me? Four of me? 

We can’t do that, and we can’t add more time in our day. 

We also don’t want to compromise the rest of our lives. We don’t want to sleep less, or spend less time with our family, or watch less tiktok while on the can.  

We’d love more time to get things done, but we don’t want to sacrifice our personal lives. 

OWNER’S PERSPECTIVE

Think like a business owner for a second about your own time. 

If you want to get more work done, how do you go about doing that? 

If you need to deliver in greater scale, how do you fundamentally make that happen? 

I’ll bring this back to an individual perspective, but for now, think of yourself as a business owner who needs to deliver more output. 

There are a few options to do so. 

OPTION #1: HIRE MORE STAFF

First – you could hire more staff. 

More people – more capacity, right? Well, that’s one way.  

More people can help deliver more, but it comes with a host of issues. 

Perhaps the most glaring is the upstart time. At the immediate point in time you decide that you want to hire more staff, you’re still very very far away from getting productive help from your future hire. 

In most cases, you don’t just have people knocking on the door each day asking to be part of your team. Many organizations have to have some kind of pipeline – some lead for finding new talent. Online, on campus, wherever.  

Then there’s recruiting. You can just post a job in the classifieds anymore and expect a host of great candidates. You have to talk and bump around and build relationships and do a lot of work to get your visibility up and get talent to pay attention. 

MORE TO JUST HIRING

Then there’s a host more. Actually making the offer, getting through rejections, and then actually making a hire. Then introducing that person, developing and supporting them in their new role. 

And so after all this time and all this effort, you still might be months before you finally are getting someone that can help your team increase capacity. 

So hiring is one option to increase your output, but it’s difficult. It takes time, it takes a lot of effort, and it costs a lot of money. 

That doesn’t even speak to keeping the work coming in high and doing your best to retain your own staff. That’s a wild challenge in itself. 

So yes, hire on more staff is one way to increase output. There are others too. 

OPTION #2: HIRE OUTSIDE HELP

A much faster way is to hire outside help. You can subcontract work or partner with someone to help you deliver more.  

This might be much more common than you’d think, especially when you work with small or micro businesses. Small shops do this every day. Small contractors may not even carry a design department at all, and hire out all of their design work. That’s very common for small shops. 

Jurisdictions do this every day too. Need third party plan review? There are plenty of places that can help supplement workload or even bring in a different area of expertise.

This is a viable approach, and personally I think a lot of small and midsize organizations that don’t consider this option that should. Especially, especially MEPs. Small and midsize MEP firms can subcontract or partner with specialist groups or freelancers that can help supplement and deliver work and possibly bring a specialized area of expertise that the larger company may not already have. 

DOWNSIDE TO OUTSIDE HELP

What’s the downside? 

Well, when you don’t have someone working directly in your group, then they could already have other preexisting priorities. They may not always be available, or may not always be able to prioritize your needs if they’re already busy. 

They also can potentially be more expensive than hiring in-house on an hour-for-hour basis. There’s a lot to unpack there. Supplemental or subcontracted help can actually work off a fixed fee and remove risk of losing money on a job, and they can only work when there’s work to be done which limits paying for idle employees, so there’s upside there too. My point here is just that the outside hire brings about both opportunity and potential cost considerations when that’s set up. 

OPTION #3: AMP YOUR TEAM

Option number three – amp up your team. 

I don’t know a good way to describe this without making it sound like I’m trying to turn ever person into Ironman. I don’t actually care all that much for Marvel movies because I’m a total snob and nerdy in the wrong ways, but what I mean here is this option is making your team awesome. 

Amp up. 

Make each person superhuman. 

This concept is very often misunderstood.  

We tend to think of “I need more output, so how do I motivate my team to do more work?” or “how do I beat them with a stick until they do more?”. Ok I don’t get asked that second option, but that’s just what I think of when I get the first question. 

True motivation – true leadership – doesn’t threaten or motivate by beating. That could be effective in the short term – but in the long run, it doesn’t help build a solid team or good morale or retain good people.  

How do we get more work done by amping our team? I don’t mean negative punishment, I mean working to make each person far more capable and far more effective than where they are today. 

DELEGATION

Also, many leaders simply think that the answer to making your team output more, or being more personally effective, is just delegation. “If I just delegated more then I’d have more time” or “I really just need to be delegating more”.  

That sounds good in theory, but if you’re obsessive over control like I am then delegation in itself can be problematic. Also, just moving work to another person can allow you to be more effective, but it might not make your overall team more effective. 

So I’m going to talk less about delegation as the answer to all our time woes, and instead focus on areas where we might not think to look. 

And – this – all this concept of improving ourselves and improving our team - is achievable. 

In fact – in this series – this Option #3 was really the sole-area that I honed in on. 

AMPING UP YOUR TEAM

There were two situations where I came to obsess on just this topic. 

The first was when I ran a very small fire protection team. It varied in size from two of us to four of us. When I led that team I was not in control of hiring more staff, and I also wasn’t in control of hiring outside help. Those weren’t in my purview. 

It could advocate for either of those outcomes, but it wasn’t the most immediate thing under my control. 

What was? Our own effectiveness – amping up our people. 

How do you do more, by making yourself or your team extremely effective?  

Not just a little more effective, but extremely effective? 

I read a lot of books, did a lot of theorizing, thought about it for many different Saturdays while lawn mowing. And I really concluded five ways of improving effectiveness. 

I said we would think about this on the personal level and not just from a team perspective, and that’s here. These methods really apply from a team level and from an individual level. 

FIVE WAYS TO BE MORE EFFECTIVE

What are the ways to boost effectiveness? 

For our industry I found Elimination, Automation, Equipping, Training, and Supporting are fundamentally the five ways we can be more effective.  

I experimented with each of these in different capacities, and what I found is really the focus for the remainder of this series.  

These words in itself honestly don’t carry a whole lot of meaning to me. “OK great Joe, I should equip myself to make myself more effective. Real genius there.” 

I get that. But as we get further in this series I’m going to share actual examples of some breakthroughs we had, and I’m hopeful that after you see the process and get a feel for the questions we asked ourselves – that you also will come up with some breakthroughs of your own. 

TERMINOLOGY

So what do you mean by these fancy titles? 

Elimination – are there parts of role that we can eliminate and still be just as effective? 

Initially my answer to this was adamantly no; what I was doing was what had to be done, but that changed after going through this process. 

Automation – so something needs to be done. Can it be automated? Are there tasks that I’m doing that I could have automated instead? 

Equip – So I can’t eliminate or automate some part of my role. What resources can I surround myself with that can help me be far more effective in what I do? Is there software that can help me? Are there pre-built resources that can help me do more? 

Training – beyond just software, what about knowledge? What can I learn to help me be a more knowledgeable or more apt person? Are there YouTube videos? College courses? What can help me to change and adapt and be better? 

Refining – how can the process be adapted? Be updated? Be refined? Is my method, my process, ideal? This is essentially looking at our workflow and adapting it in a way that is much better overall. 

Support – finally – where can I go when I need help? Where can I turn? Are the templates and starting points that I use the best they can be? 

SUMMARY

We’re going to cover all of these in more detail, and cite specific lessons learned from doing a two-year time study in looking at each of these areas. 

That’s going to be the direction for the rest of this series.  

If these words sound hollow; hold on. We’re going to give some context and hopefully spur some ideas on what you can think about to amp-up your own capabilities. Man I sound like a Red Bull promotor.  

What are the ways we can get more work done? 

Well, principally three ways. Hire internal help. Hire external help. Or really make ourselves superhuman. 

If we’re looking specifically at Option #3, which is more often than not the only thing we control, there are ways of really stepping up our effectiveness. And that is elimination, automation, equipping, training, refining our process, and supporting ourselves. 

In our next segment, we’re going to define the end goal by talking about being effective, overall, versus being efficient. There’s an important distinction to be made there. 

I’m Joe Meyer, this is MeyerFire University.