In the 70s, only 5 percent of the population thought of themselves as chronic procrastinators. Today that figure has risen to 26 percent.
Based on this finding, business owners might be forgiven for assuming that at least one or two of their employees are chronic procrastinators, often dubbed creative genius. Because the telltale signs of a true genius are nothing but glorified flaws like trivial pursuits, laziness, procrastination, being scatterbrained, and sometimes having a checkered past.
In most tech companies, you will find one or more geniuses who come in around afternoons, roam aimlessly, stare into the computer screen, put off deadline after deadline, and hijack the project at the last minute with a genius idea. Their idea is so often groundbreaking that all their other flaws are quickly forgotten and forgiven. But the question is – is it a good practice for your business?
Let's explore if there exists an answer to that question.
Hard work vs talent
In his book Outliers, the now infamous Malcolm Gladwell (also called the "pop psych" writer) wrote about the 10,000 Hour Rule. According to Gladwell, everyone from Beatles to Bill Gates became great because they practiced their craft for a minimum of 10,000 hours. But a Princeton study tore down this rule, saying practice made only a small difference (12 percent on average) on performance. Here's a visual representation of the study's findings which shows how practice (hard work) affected performance in various domains like games, music, sports, education, and lastly, profession.
In a 2011 paper titled Limits on the Predictive Power of Domain-Specific Experience and Knowledge in Skilled Performance, David Hambrick and Elizabeth Meinz showed the intricate relationship between hard work and talent.
While in a real-world setting, less smart people with domain knowledge and experience are inclined to do better than the brainy ones who don't burn the night oil, general intelligence and working memory capacity are good predictors of success in problem solving, academic achievement, and job performance.
However, brilliance of mind or cleverness doesn't necessarily always equate to performance. Even the most talented artistes, sportspeople, scientists, and Nobel laureates consistently put long hours to hone their skills and acquire perfection. Indeed the authors of this study contemplated that working memory capacity might be more important for performance when someone is a beginner in a new or unfamiliar field but may decrease in importance with mastery of the subject.
The small issue of unfairness
Too many employees work their backsides off all year long, achieving targets set for them by their bosses, and end up with little to show for their efforts. Not being praised enough for extraordinary work done is a lose-lose situation for both the employee, who ends up feeling cheated of a good round of applause, and the organization, which loses respect and trust from within.
Let's say you're a line manager heading a team of ten workers, two of whom are procrastinators, who put in only a fraction of the time and effort compared to the others. If your work is delivered on time and required quality standards are met, you might never notice discrepancies in individual performance.
This is where it all starts to go downhill: the behavior of procrastinators worsens and they start free riding. An HBR article on "chronic time abusers" – or free riders, if you like to call a spade a spade – indicates that top managers group people without acknowledging their use or abuse of time, which affects employee morale, productivity, and eventually, profitability. In this sense, having procrastinators is not only unfair to other hard working employees but also detrimental to business goals.
Having established the fact that procrastination is bad for your business, let's move on and find a solution to this problem.
Defeating procrastination in the workplace
One of the root causes of procrastination is lack of discipline. Many companies unknowingly fester procrastination by not measuring employee productivity adequately. In the present day knowledge economy, this problem is complicated because of the lack of individually-attributable tasks such as production of assembly line or handmade goods. However, it can be overcome with the help of task management, collaboration and scheduling tools, which let you define and monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of staff performance.
Companies like Wells Fargo, Reuters, and Verizon use project management software called WorkZone to see where everyone stands on a project, leading to better work distribution, higher productivity and fewer missed deadlines. Managers might add up and track work hours by project, task, individual or time. Workload reports that add up planned or completed hours of work by person or group make it easy to identify if any entity has been over- or under-allocated work.
Project management and scheduling tools let you pick achievers or shine the spotlight on small individual wins and make them feel that their contributions are valued by the company. Performance reports with definite metrics allow you to offer an instant and uncontested pat on the back to employees.
Another tool to help lagging individuals take their performance up a notch is WOOP, an app that helps procrastinators to complete jobs on time with a 4-point strategy: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. WOOP is based on a behavioral technique called "mental contrasting" which has empirical evidence of being more effective than positive thinking and motivation in helping individuals conquer their inner demons and jump into action. WOOP helps employees regulate their own behavior and bridge the disconnect between intention and action.
If tools, apps and software don't work for you, you could try behavioral techniques. As people grow older, their habits are set in concrete. You can penetrate this concrete wall through behavior intervention or modification.
One of the best ways to go about this is to confront the employee directly about the problem. Explain to them how their tardiness, lack of discipline, and missed deadlines are affecting others working with them. Point out various occasions where their tardiness affected work and draw an actionable plan for them. For instance, Marty Nemko, the host of Work with Marty Nemko on KALW-FM for 25+ years, author of eight books, and a career coach, helped a distressed journalist struggling with procrastination to get him out of his spiral with a minor intervention tactic. You could scale the intervention method up or down based on how big or small the problem is.
Millennials – who form today's workforce and tomorrow's business leaders – are becoming increasingly unfocused because of endless distractions from social media habits. Social media also creates undue pressure on them with unrealistic and unachievable life goals which further takes them away from their career goals.
While the liability of understanding this problem and changing it lies on an individual, many a time, individuals are not receptive or mature enough to understand it. If you're seeing an increasing number of your employees fall prey to chronic procrastination, it might be time for you to get into the offensive and tackle the problem. With patience, behavior modification, and the right tools it is possible to help them achieve their best.