Archive for April, 2008

Statistics that Scream “FAKE WORK”

Over the years, we have done a lot of research and checked it against other research and the numbers don’t always look the same, but the look very similar. No matter how you look at them, they help explain why fake work runs rampant in many organizations and is a part of almost every work environment.

Simply, consider how workers feel. This is a small sample of our research results:

• 87 percent of workers are not satisfied with the results of their work.
• 56 percent of workers don’t clearly understand their company’s most important goals.
• 81 percent of workers do not feel a strong level of commitment to their company’s top priorities.
• 73 percent of workers don’t think their company’s goals are translated into specific work they can execute.
• 70 percent of workers don’t routinely plan how to support agreed-upon goals and tasks in their workgroups.

These are dominating fake work statistics. They tell you how and why fake work is infiltrating every work environment—even the best of them.

Written by Gaylan W. Nielson, co author of Fake Work

We hope this blog creates some interest in our book, Fake Work, but we are more interested in the concept of fake work and how it negatively affects lives and organizations. Fake Work:

• Creates an insidious and dangerous wedge that separates us from doing work that is productive and effective—the work itself.
• Keeps us from being appreciated, respected, and promotable—even when it isn’t our fault.
• Hurts our sense of worth, affects our happiness, and interrupts the joy in our personal lives.
• Promotes distrust and false competition, which disrupts teams.

Please Get Involved and Participate
We hope you will contribute to this blog. We will be posting “Your Fake Work Stories” that can be both about Fake Work or overcoming Fake Work in any work environment you are involved in. Look at the categories for our postings and you will see that, over time, we will provide interesting stories, stories from the news, funny stories, lists and tests that will help promote the ideas of fake work and real work. But, mostly, we hope you will grow more aware of fake work and be able to address the problems that are affecting you, your job, and the organizations that you work for and are involved with.

Make Fake Work a part of your Vocabulary
Finally, we hope “Fake Work” becomes a catchword for pinpointing and avoiding work that is wasteful and ridiculous. As one client told us, “We end meetings, emails, and discussions of all kinds by asking ‘so what of this will cause or contribute to fake work’.” Ultimately, that is the attitude that will build a new a more constructive dialogue and culture for real work.

Real Work is a Rare and Precious Commodity that Bridges the “Execution Gap”
Real Work is the antidote to Fake Work. Real Work is work that serves the strategic intensions of an organization. The real gap, that we call the “execution gap,” is the chasm between strategic intent and the actual work—which is ultimately the execution of those strategies in the workplace. Without closing the gap, fake work dominates the workplace by veering off at the point of work. The problem: far too many teams have no awareness of the cause of the gap or the solution.

Most People Want to do Real Work.
We have a very important mantra: almost all people want to do work that has value and is valued. We have worked with thousands of wonderful people who are working extremely hard and who are highly dedicated. But, way too many of those people find hard work and extraordinary effort being negated by the failure of them, their co-workers, project leaders, and managers because they don’t know or don’t understand how their work is linked to the focus of their organization.

Real Work Requires Commitment
To do real work and to ensure that it counts requires awareness, attention, commitment, and courage—perhaps, most of all courage—to struggle through the minefields of fake work in the organizational culture. Fake work starts with strategic planning and shows up in managers, teams, and individuals that don’t understand the importance of getting people aligned to strategies. The path to fake work isn’t always a big mistake, it is a subtle change in the wrong direction—then your journey leads you farther and farther away from work of value.

Fake Work is a Thief.
Yes, fake work is just what you’re thinking and a lot more. People tell us all the time: “That’s what I do. I spend my life doing work that seems fake.” Then, people share a litany of fake work problems like meetings that feel like life sentences, e-mail chains that run for days and never solve anything, and written documents that took weeks to write that nobody reads. Fake work is the thief of time, of value, of conviction, of the investment of our efforts.

Those are common examples of fake work, but they aren’t fake just because they seem like a waste of time; they are fake if they are disconnected from the most important goals of an organization—any organization from companies to government agencies to community groups.

Fake work is any work that is not aligned with and targeting the strategies of an organization.
Strategies are how organizations attack their mission and vision and their highest goals. So, if strategies are accurate and deemed important, they require a concerted effort to ensure that everyone in the organization is aligned to execute those strategies.

Fake work, at its worst, is when we are working long, hard hours with the very best of intensions and discover that our work has no value. Finding that several late nights and two lost weekends ended up in work that nobody cared about or that served no real purpose is like having your sculpture knocked over and broken into fragments.

The not-so-obvious part of fake work will be explored over the next few months and you will find it in our book called Fake Work, which will be published in October.