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Is your work team suffering from overwhelm? It’s likely not because they don’t have enough time. There’s a good chance they’re drowning in unnecessary activities and inefficiencies that prevent them from focusing on the real work that drives real results.
According to studies by research firm IDC, inefficiency costs companies anywhere from 20% to 30% of their revenue each year. And a lot of those inefficiencies are hiding in plain sight.
Nick Sonnenberg has some tried-and-true ideas that can help. He’s founder and chief executive of Leverage, a leading operational efficiency consultancy that helps companies implement smart business practices. His book is Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work.
For robust efficiency, Sonnenberg advocates a framework he calls CPR—Communication, Planning, and Resources. He says the framework was born out of necessity.
“At one point when I was building my business, my co-founder left with two minutes notice and the business was in rapid decline,” he says. “We had massive inefficiencies that were holding us back, and I saw a path forward if I could just fix them. So that’s what I did, and I developed the building blocks of the CPR Framework in the process.”
Some of his clients saw the results and asked him to help with their businesses. What he soon noticed was that every company he worked with was struggling with the same issues he had faced. Those issues all fell into three buckets—Communication, Planning, and Resources: CPR.
“Every company needs to communicate internally with their team and externally with customers, partners, vendors, and more,” he says. “Every company needs to plan and manage all the work that needs to get done. And every company needs to keep track of all the resources and assets that keep the business running.”
Sonnenberg says there’s been a lot of testing and tinkering with the CPR Framework, and it’s now been successfully implemented in thousands of businesses.
He quotes work-life management expert David Allen as saying, “Your brain is for having ideas, not holding them.”
So how does that view apply to personal and organizational efficiency?
“If you’re constantly trying to remember past ideas or keep track of ‘mental notes,’ you’ll never be able to focus on what matters most,” Sonnenberg says. “So, you need to develop systems to not only hold those ideas, but to easily retrieve them in the future.”
On a personal level, he says, this might be accomplished with a to-do list, a spreadsheet, a calendar, etc. But on an organizational level, it gets a bit more complicated.
“A big part of the CPR Framework is aligning teams on when and how to use common tools in the workplace to solve this exact problem,” he says. “When teams get aligned on where certain information should live, everyone can adopt David Allen’s philosophy. But more importantly, everyone can easily find that information later, even if they didn’t initially store it themselves.”
When implementing new tools or processes, what questions should be asked by leaders and team members?
“Tool overwhelm is a huge problem, so it’s important to think carefully before adding a new tool to your tech stack,” Sonnenberg says. Adding something that isn’t necessary could cause more problems than you had to begin with.
Any time you’re implementing a new tool, he says, it’s a good idea to get clear on some basic questions, like: Why are we implementing this? How will it benefit our team? Which goals will it help us to achieve? What behaviors do we need to encourage to adopt it? This will then help clarify whether the tool is the right solution to your problem, and whether it’s going to be worth the time and effort to implement it and train your team.
Nick Sonnenberg
What pro tips can Sonnenberg offer for improving the quality—and reducing the frequency—of meetings?
”There are many, he says, but the most impactful is to shift your thinking around when meetings need to occur and what they should be used for. “Meetings should be used for collaborative brainstorming and discussion,” he says. “Most other things can be handled asynchronously.”
One example is what he calls “report-outs.”
“Any time someone is giving an update or reporting on stats in a meeting, that can be done asynchronously through a message or video recording in advance of the meeting. Everyone can then review that information on their own time and you can either cut down the length of the meeting or have more time for meaningful discussion.”
Sonnenberg is a big fan of work management tools, with special affection for one called Asana.
“Honestly, I can’t imagine trying to run a business without a work management tool,” he says. “These tools are like to-do lists on steroids, and they’re used to organize all the work that needs to be done at a company.”
He says most work management tools have a similar format allowing the users to create “projects” and then fill them up with “tasks” that have assignees and due dates”. This means you can chart out all the work that needs to be done to complete an initiative, and each step is assigned to someone with a due date and the information they need to complete it,” he explains. “Work management tools ensure work is always being done in the right order, by the right person, on time, and without duplicating efforts. Plus, they make work more transparent as anyone can go into the tool and see what anyone else is working on or monitor the progress of projects.”
Before adding a task to their work plates, what questions should people ask themselves?
Sonnenberg says he finds a lot of people get into the mode of doing everything they’re assigned without ever questioning it—and that can lead to drowning in work unnecessarily.
So he suggests three questions:
1. Does this need to be done? (Maybe it’s irrelevant, unnecessary, not a good use of time, or not in line with your organization’s goals.)
2. Does this need to be done by me? (Maybe there’s someone else this is better suited to, or it could be automated.)
3. Does this need to be done by me now? (Is this important enough that it needs to be done now or can it be pushed back?)
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These questions can help you to avoid wasting time on things that are either unnecessary, better handled by someone else, or not an immediate priority.
Are you frustrated by the time it sometimes takes to track down that one piece of information you need so you can proceed with your work? Maybe it’s an email. Or a Slack message. A Google doc? And where’s that link you need?
Sonnenberg feels your pain. He refers to that time suck as “the scavenger hunt.” Suddenly, what should have taken a few seconds is taking five, ten, maybe even 15 minutes. Perhaps you can’t find the information at all. So then you have to pull in someone else to look for it. Now their time is being wasted, too.
“This is an all-too-common phenomenon in the workplace, and it happens when people do what’s easiest in the moment without thinking about the long-term consequences,” he says. “It might be easiest for you to email those meeting notes to a coworker, but if someone else needs to find them in the future, they’re going to end up on a scavenger hunt.”
The solution, Sonnenberg says, is to optimize for the retrieval of information. In other words, align as a team on where certain information should live and take the extra time up front to store things in the right place. That way, everyone else can find them later. “This might cost you some extra time in the short term,” Sonnenberg acknowledges, “but it will save many hours in the long run when spread across an entire team.”
As his book’s subtitle says, it's all about leveraging systems and tools. And using common sense, which sometimes doesn’t seem all that common.
