If you ask average employees what percentage of their time they spend “doing what they do best,” most answer a disheartening 30%. If this was baseball, and you had your pitcher playing first base two-thirds of the time, everyone would think you were crazy. Well in business, it’s no different. If you want to retain employees and increase productivity, there are some basic approaches that make a big difference. One of them is a simple as the proposition above: make sure that your top performers spend most of their time doing what they like and what they do best! A major study by Gallup has confirmed what should be common sense – a key retention factor is letting people work on things that they do best. But take a minute and ask yourself… what part of your job duties do you enjoy and do best? Then ask yourself what percentage of your average day you actually spend on those tasks. Scary, isn’t it? It makes logical sense to let people spend most of their time doing their best work, but few managers even know what employees do best. If they do know, they often want “control” over the employees, and won’t let them do it. Of course, you can’t let all employees do what they want, but managers do need to make sure that people in key jobs, and all top performers, spend most of their time doing what they do best and what they enjoy doing. Unfortunately, when you survey key employees, they are often not happy with the current mix in their job. Finding Out What They Do Best Here are some questions all employees and managers should ask if they wish to increase the percentage of time employees spend doing what they do best.
List your best skills and competencies.
List the parts of your job that relate to the original reason you took your current job.
List the parts of your job that frustrate you and make it less fun.
Conclusion Letting top performers do what they do best will excite them and increase their productivity. Now you might ask, “Who will do the unwanted tasks?” First, maybe someone else prefers to do those tasks. If so, give it to them. If not, give those tasks to low performers, part-time employees, interns or even temps. Or outsource them. Just be sure to let the star pitchers pitch… all the time. It’s that simple!
