Creating a Culture of Reliability in the Workplace

[Do you prefer to learn with your ears instead of your eyes? You can check out episode 14 of our podcast on this same topic.]

Sheila, a leader for a team of project managers, has a tight deadline to deliver on an important client project. Her back is against the wall. She is getting a lot of heat from the client. Sheila grabs one of her employees, Anthony, and tells him, “I need you to put together an up-to-date expense report for the project and send it over to me. It’s important that we have all the information ready for the next time I see our client. Please get this to me ASAP.” A week later, Sheila is preparing for a big meeting the next day with the client when she realizes Anthony has yet to get her the report she asked for. What the hell! She thinks to herself. I was clear on how important this meeting was and that I needed it right away. Sheila gives Anthony a ring but he doesn’t pick up. It’s after work hours. Sheila is not a happy camper. She spends the rest of the night putting together this darned report that Anthony was told to do, and her negative feelings towards him only increase as the night fades into morning. Her trust in Anthony has dramatically eroded.

Of course, when people don’t follow through on their commitments, others start losing trust in them. If you have an entire work team (or workplace) that has a generally low level of follow through, you will inevitably have a low-trust culture. A low-trust culture can swiftly degenerate into a low-morale environment, which turns into a disengaged workgroup. This is where teams can fail.

However, in this case, who’s at fault? Anthony didn’t deliver, right? But did he miss a deadline?  Not at all. In this case, Sheila is the one who’s mostly responsible for diminishing trust between the two, and she doesn’t even know it. Why? Because she didn’t give Anthony a “by-when.”

OK, enough with the doom and gloom. We come bearing good news! There is a simple nuts-and-bolts kind of management tool that will help your team avoid this common pitfall. (And trust us, it surely is common.) The tool is called – you guessed it! – “by-whens.”  

Here’s how it works: when you give someone an assignment, you must give them a specific due date/time. Additionally, if you’re given an assignment without an accompanying by-when, you must ask for a due date/time. OK, so maybe this isn’t exactly quantum physics. In fact, it’s really simple. And let us tell you -  if this simple “rule” becomes part of your cultural operating system, trust in the group will increase and things will get done. Sounds pretty good, right? It is.

Here are some guidelines for establishing a culture of by-whens in your workplace:

1. Give a by-when whenever you give a task or assignment. (Yes, like, every time.)
One of the main reasons people aren’t following through is because a by-when was not established. This was Sheila’s first mistake. She assumed that because she told Anthony that this was “important” and that she needed it “ASAP” Anthony would interpret those words the way she did. He didn’t, and people rarely do. Most of us are endlessly busy and have a gazillion “important” tasks to do that all need to be done “as soon as possible.” And most of us mortals aren’t mind readers. Shelia needed to give a specific date and time that she needed the report, and it would have removed all ambiguity. And this is important: if you aren’t given a by-when by your manager (or peer), ask for one.  
 
And by the way, if you as the manager say you’ll get something done, you should tell your employee (or peer or boss) when you’ll get it done. This rule applies to everybody.
 
 Oh, and ASAP is not a by-when. Period.
 
2. Negotiate the by-when until it works for both parties.
Researchers at Harvard conducted a handful of experiments and surveyed nearly 10,000 employees and managers and they found that, overall, asking for more time on an assignment was perceived positively by managers. They also found that employees worried that by asking for a deadline extension, their managers would think they were incompetent or unmotivated. You combine these findings with the fact that humans are reliably bad judges of how long tasks will take us (psychologists call this the planning fallacy), and you have a strange dichotomy: managers want their employees to negotiate deadline extensions and employees are afraid to do so, yet we are all guilty of underestimating how much time we need to complete tasks. This disconnect can be bridged by simply letting your employees know that you, as their manager, want them to negotiate their due dates. And here’s a cool tip for leaders: Start with negotiation when possible. (“When do you think you could get this done?”) This is a great way to give employees autonomy. Giving a by-when is not some autocratic ruling. It’s a chance for an open dialogue about what kind of deadline is reasonable.
 
3. Meet your by-whens. (Take them seriously!)
This should speak for itself. If you agree on a by-when, you need to meet it. That being said…
 
4. If you’re going to miss your by-when, renegotiate it as far ahead of the deadline as possible.
Waiting until the due date to say you’re not going to make the due date is called “missing your by-when” and is a big no-no. However, renegotiating the due date way ahead of time actually builds trust. “I need more time on this project – can we move the due date to next Friday?”
 
5. Follow up on by-whens you have given. (Don’t let missed commitments go unaddressed.)
What you allow, you teach. If you give a by-when but never say anything when deadlines are missed, the whole thing falls apart. This applies at the level of manager to employee, employee to manager, and peer to peer. Everyone should be holding each other accountable. That’s what will make the culture of reliability actually work.
 
6. Be truthful about your by-whens. (No arbitrary or artificial deadlines.)
Have you ever had the experience of getting a hard set “due date” from a manager or peer, so you work really hard to get it in on time only to find out they didn’t even look at your finished work until days after you turned it in? Yeah, don’t do that. You’ll lose trust. If you give a deadline, be honest about it. That said, it’s OK to tell people you need something before you actually have to publicly do anything with it in order to give yourself a chance to review the work, bounce it off a few people, etc. The key is to be transparent about why a due date is the due date.
 

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This right here will help create a culture of accountability, build working relationships based on trust and, ultimately, help your system function at a greater level of efficiency. Sure, there are some more nuances with this (and we discuss many of them in podcast episode #14), but if you get your team onboard with these six key components of deadline-management, you will see a tangible difference in your team’s effectiveness. Start practicing this today.

Have questions? Have suggestions or comments about our proposed approach to reliability? We’d love to hear from you! Shoot us an email at contact@nashconsulting.com.