The Optimum Manager

THE OPTIMUM MANAGER

A Strategy for Motivation, Alignment and Productivity of All Employees

Glen R. Andersen, Sc.D., P.E.

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Glen R. Andersen

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

OVERVIEW

INTRODUCTION

Overview to The Optimum Manager

Can You Imagine?

Some Basic Questions

What is Managing by Tasks-Completed-Correctly?

PART ONE – WHY MANAGE BY TASKS COMPLETED CORRECTLY?

Chapter 1 – Our Behavior Affects Our Employee’s Behavior

Unspoken Messages

What is an Ideal Employee?

What is the Value of an Employee?

Who then is Responsible for Employee Productivity?

Summary of Chapter 1

Chapter 2 – How Are We Really Motivated?

Basic Elements of Human Motivation

Compensation as Motivation

Self-Direction (Autonomy) as Motivation

Continued Improvement (Mastery) as Motivation

A Higher Calling (Purpose) as Motivation

Other Innovative Approaches to Employee Motivation

Summary of Chapter 2

Chapter 3 – IT for Business Advantage?

IT has Created a Pent-Up Productivity Reservoir

Reliability and Ease of Communication

IT Can Simplify Business Practices

IT for Managing by Tasks-Completed-Correctly

Summary of Chapter 3

PART TWO – HOW TO MANAGE BY TASKS-COMPLETED-CORRECTLY

Chapter 4 – Four Steps

Step 1: Clearly Define the Task

Step 2: Allow Employee to Accept or Reject the Task

Step 3: Let the Employee Work the Task

Step 4: Review and Accept the Task

Indirect Labor, Sales, Manufacturing, Public Sector, Manual Labor, and Nonbillable Tasks

Analogy with a Mini-Marketplace Inside the Business

Summary of Chapter 4

Chapter 5 – Nuts and Bolts: Performance Reviews, Compensation, Time Off, Staffing Levels, Overtime, Performance Metrics, and Accounting

Employee Performance Reviews

Measuring Competency

Measuring Productivity And Setting Goals

Setting the Level of Compensation

Raises

Paid Time Off

Staffing Levels

Employee Overtime

Employee Performance Metrics

Accounting

Summary of Chapter 5

Chapter 6 – Required IT Capabilities Where Necessary

Integrating IT Capabilities at Little or No Cost

Free IT Tools for Managing by Tasks-Completed-Correctly

Existing Packages Close to Meeting IT Requirements

Summary of Chapter 6

Chapter 7 – Implementation of the Strategy

Process for an Existing Business

Summary of Chapter 7

PART THREE – OUT WITH THE OLD IN WITH THE OLDER

Chapter 8 – Advantages of the Tasks-Completed-Correctly Strategy

Simplified Hiring and Layoff Decisions

Less Expensive Continuing Education and Just-In-Time Training

Assigning Labor Values Leads to Higher Productivity

Assigning Labor Values Leads to Higher Profitability

Decrease in the Manager’s Personnel Responsibilities

Employees are Focused on Creating Value for Customer

Managers and Employees Have More Control Over Schedules

Office Politics are Out

More Work With Same Number of Employees

Use Remote Employees With Equal or Higher Productivity

Sharing Profits Between Profit Centers

Clear Employee Performance Metrics

Clear Value of Each Employee

Simplified Change-Order Negotiations

Summary of Chapter 8

Chapter 9 – Resolving Objections

Not Enough Work to Keep All Employees Busy!

The Scope of Work for Some Projects is Too Uncertain to Manage!

Some Employees are Not Motivated by Higher Compensation!

Employees Will Game the System!

Managers must be Able to Perform the Tasks Themselves!

My Work Assignments are Too Complicated to Standardize!

When Productivity Increases, Managers Might Reduce Task Labor Values!

My Work Assignments are so Simple that this Would be a Waste of Time!

I am Selling Hours to My Clients, Not Tasks!

Summary of Chapter 9

Chapter 10 – Can Your Organization Benefit From The Tasks-Completed-Correctly Strategy?

Employee Self-Assessment Questions

Manager Self-Assessment Questions

Back to the Beginning

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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OVERVIEW

Employee motivation comes as a product of the work environment we create as managers. It is unfortunate that we send many negative unspoken messages to our employees daily that decrease their motivation and lower their productivity. These negative unspoken messages are rooted in an unfortunate reliance on managing employees by the quantity and quality of hours they work. The Optimum Manager has been written to help redesign a work environment so that employees will motivate themselves. The key to this redesign is to manage by Tasks-Completed-Correctly.

As an optimum manager, you will experience huge increases in employee productivity while at the same time huge decreases in management time dealing with personnel issues. An average employee will be working their assignments in less than half of their normal time, and will be actively seeking more work. While managing by Tasks-Completed-Correctly, your career as an optimum manager will become one of the most rewarding and satisfying aspects of your life.

Can you imagine a business where you spend all of your time producing for your customers and no time dealing with employee motivational concerns?

Can you imagine a business where every employee is singularly focused on meeting the customer’s needs and is directly rewarded for doing so?

Can you imagine a business where there is little uncertainty in labor costs and where your employees have every incentive to work efficiently and effectively to optimize their productivity?

The Optimum Manager provides a strategy for how to create such an environment in your business.

The Optimum Manager presents a simple and very basic approach to employee management that places responsibility for motivation, alignment and productivity squarely on the shoulders of those who are most qualified to control it; the employees themselves! They are rewarded directly for taking on this responsibility. The tools developed during the Information Technology Revolution make it possible to fully implement the Tasks-Completed-Correctly strategy in any business at very little cost.

Managing by Tasks-Completed-Correctly does not require the restructuring of an existing business. In fact, most of the processes required to carry it out are already in place and are most likely performed on a routine basis by your employees. These simply need to be reorganized around the proper strategy. The implementation of the Tasks-Completed-Correctly strategy comes through the existing employee performance management process. All that is required from an optimum manager is to redesign the process for making and receiving work assignments.

The Optimum Manager provides the rationale for why we should manage by Tasks-Completed-Correctly; presents step-by-step procedures for its implementation; discusses various advantages; and, resolves various objections to this new but yet very old approach. I draw upon examples from my experience as an employee, educator, manager and entrepreneur in order to illustrate various aspects of the strategy.

Based upon my personal career journey as an employee of small and large corporations, as an educator and motivator of students, as a manager in small, midsized and large businesses, and as a business owner, I provide a fresh perspective on how to accomplish one of the most important aspects of a manager’s responsibility; making sure that employees are motivated and operating at their own personal and optimal level of productivity.

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INTRODUCTION

My awakening to the business side of engineering began the moment I stepped out of academics. Prior to that point I had a very theoretical understanding of engineering practice and no business management experience. My first consulting position was as a senior engineer for an excellent consulting firm in Jackson, Mississippi. It was there I realized not only that I loved to solve real-life engineering problems but that I needed to do so profitably in order to stay in business so that I could solve more engineering problems. The challenge of being efficient and effective in the use of my time became as interesting to me as the technical challenges that were inherent in each of my engineering projects. I vividly remember when, after about 6 months of engineering practice, the president of the company came into my office and informed me that I had completed a $20,000 lump sum project for about $2,500 under budget. I was exhilarated and hooked on the business of consulting engineering.

However, it was in my next position as a regional manager for an engineering consulting firm in the Midwest where the initial ideas for the Tasks-Completed-Correctly strategy were born. I was running a regional office and had so much work coming in the door that we did not have enough local manpower to complete it. I worked closely with the firm’s president to identify employees throughout the organization that could help. I remember a deep feeling of frustration as I would give assignments to these remote engineers along with an estimated number of hours and a job number and then essentially lose control of my project budgets. Since these engineers were not reporting directly to me, I had almost no control over their efficiency and productivity. They weren’t bad or lazy employees. It was simply that there are a myriad of difficulties associated with motivating employees using common business practice; and these difficulties are exacerbated when making remote work assignments. They conspire to make it nearly impossible to control budgets under such circumstances.

During a particularly frustrating time, I was talking with the president of that firm when he said: Any time you take work out of one office and transfer it to another, you can count on at least a 10% increase in cost. Given that our profit margin was about 10%, it occurred to me that by sharing work remotely we were essentially keeping our people busy but not getting ahead financially and perhaps even operating at a loss on occasion.

Throughout my career as a manager, I have found that the process of managing employees and projects; keeping them on budget and on time; using limited local resources; and tapping into remote employee support to be far more challenging than getting a doctorate in engineering. I remember thinking early on: There has got to be a better way! There has to be an easier way to manage people locally or remotely and control costs!

It finally occurred to me that the key to effective employee motivation is to involve them directly in the management process so that they take responsibility for their own actions. I became very interested about how to motivate employees on a fundamental level when making work assignments. I began to identify various obstacles to profitability that exist in our current business practice and to look for strategies that would be simple and easy to implement. The solution did not come at once but evolved during my time at various companies and over a series of projects. The concepts presented in The Optimum Manager are a result of many trials and errors. Through all of these I came to understand that the best management approach is to focus on the tasks being worked and not on the time being spent.

The Tasks-Completed-Correctly strategy that has evolved from these experiences has had a dramatic effect on the total number of projects I have been able to manage. By using it, I have been able to focus all of my efforts on making sure that the work is done correctly and that we are meeting the needs of our clients. I have had no issues with runaway budgets or inefficient employees. I have not had to worry about any of the common employee performance issues that used to take so much of my time. It no longer matters to me whether or not an employee takes frequent breaks, surfs the internet or is generally lazy. I do not care when he actually works an assignment, so long as he meets his deadlines and his work is done correctly. It does not matter to me if a remote employee is inefficient. I don’t have to track down his manager in order to impose budgetary and time controls. What matters that he does the work correctly and returns it to me on time. It has been a true pleasure to manage projects using the Tasks-Completed-Correctly strategy. I am able to focus on the intrinsic joy of my profession and avoid the numerous obstacles to profitability that are present in our current business practices.

The Optimum Manager has not come from years of academic research, nor is it written from the perspective of a professor who needs to prove with incontrovertible evidence that a central hypothesis is correct. It is written from a practical perspective to managers or aspiring managers who are or may be frustrated with the level of engagement of their employees and who want to start enjoying their careers.

Management can be fun. Managers can focus on those things that are most beneficial to their clients and for which they derive their greatest amount of job satisfaction. Businesses can operate at levels of employee engagement and profitability heretofore unimaginable by simply making a fundamental change on a very basic level; where managers make and employees receive work assignments.

Overview to the Optimum Manager

Employees represent our single greatest resource. Many of them are truly outstanding, motivated and hard working. Their motivation comes from an internal drive for excellence and a true desire to be of service to our clients. They perform well regardless of the conditions in their work environment. Others that have the potential to be outstanding, motivated and hard working are held back by one reason or another. I have always felt that if somehow we could change the work environment to properly motivate all of our employees, we could experience unimaginable levels of productivity and profitability.

I have also come to believe that as managers we routinely underestimate our employees’ potential. We tend to view them like robots putting in their time at work rather than as creative and dedicated compatriots helping to satisfy our clients. Unfortunately, when we underestimate the productive potential of our employees we undervalue our greatest resource to the detriment of our businesses and our employees will perform to our lowered expectations.

Based upon my prior experiences as an employee and manager, I have come to realize that the single greatest obstacle to unleashing the creative and productive potential of our employees is an unfortunate focus on the quantity and the quality of time they spend at work. Perhaps we have maintained this focus because it is relatively easy and straightforward to measure time spent on the job. I have also come to realize that the key to unleashing the creative and productive potential of our employees is to turn our management focus away from the quantity and quality of hours worked and towards the number of tasks that they are able to complete correctly.

In order to understand the importance of changing our focus away from hours worked to tasks completed, we must first recognize that our behavior as managers profoundly influences the behavior of our employees. How we choose to interact with them on a day-to-day basis has a tremendous influence on their level of engagement and productivity. Subsequently it can have a significant impact on our profitability. The importance of this fundamental truth cannot be overstated.

The Optimum Manager is written to optimize the behavior of managers so that we can optimize the behavior of our employees. It proposes a simple strategy for employee management called Tasks-Completed-Correctly. These pages will demonstrate how a simple and straightforward change to the manner in which we