Changing bad habits at work

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I read this fabulous book recently titled – “Atomic Habits”, by James Clear, if you haven’t read it, I would highly recommend that you add it to your reading list.  This book addresses how to cultivate good habits and get rid of bad habits one day at a time.  After reading this book, I reflected on some practices I encountered in the workplace over the years.  Some of them appeared frivolous and a waste of time but perhaps there was a rationale to them after all.

A common practice in many companies that are injury prone is to have a safety moment at the beginning of every meeting.  In fact, some companies go to the extreme extent of ensuring that every employee has this as one of their performance objectives for the year.  My first exposure to this process was with one of my large utility clients.  I remember being in a room of 40+ people, several of them employees of the utility and about a dozen of them coworkers from the consulting firm I was working for at that time.   We had all geared up for a major presentation on the status of our project and we got waylaid when we entered the room and were told that an employee of the utility would start the meeting with a safety moment.  The meeting was in early November and this gent had prepared a 20 minute video on – “How to cook your turkey, safely?”.   We sat through the 20 minute video and 10+ minute Q&A as people shared their experiences, do’s and don’ts. I remember sitting in the room, estimating how much it cost the company to have 30+ employees and consultants sit through this safety moment.  It must have been one of the most expensive safety moments. Perhaps the company went overboard or the employees interpreted the request and went to an extreme.  But maybe it helped the 40+ people in the room that day to be more careful when they were cooking their turkey that Thanksgiving.  

A few years later I landed a job at a large oil and gas company that was extremely conscious of safety and had implemented many rules for employees to follow.  One of them was how fast you could drive in the parking lot, to eliminate accidents in the garage.   I remember going late to work two months into my new job.  I raced up the garage to find parking, so I could avoid being late for my morning meeting.   There was a garage attendant with a speed gun who clocked me driving up the steep ramp at the lower level at 30 mph (the posted speed limit was 10 mph).   There were no cars or people on the ramp and the attendant was hiding behind a pillar so I didn’t even see him.   They tracked my license plate down and sent my speeding violation to my supervisor who was visiting the US from the UK.   By the time I got to my meeting he had already received the email.   So guess what was the topic of discussion at the meeting that morning.  He also had to take me to a room separately afterwards and read me my rights and warned me not to speed anymore.  Considering that I was new to the job, it was a rude awakening for me.   But I always remembered that first speeding ticket at work for my long tenure thereafter with my employer.   Small steps go a long way in cultivating a habit and even though I was peeved at being given a speeding ticket in a parking lot, it helped inculcate a safe driving habit.   In a company with over 10,000 employees perhaps it is relevant to have such policies to foster good behavior.

My employer had another practice which required us to present at least one safety moment a month.  This was in each of our performance scorecards and each person and team were tracked and reported.  So if we didn’t meet our target we would be shamed and it would reflect on our annual performance.  I was in a functional role and not an operational role and so not involved with day to day operations.   So it required me to learn about our operations and identify safe behavior for there were only so many office safety behaviors we could all list.  For someone new to the industry it required me to spend additional time learning about our operations and some of the hazardous operating conditions and share some things that others in our industry were doing to enable safe operations.   Honestly,  I didn’t enjoy having to do these activities,  and did so because we were required to.  But reflecting on it now, I can see what the organization was trying to do.  Safety habits takes time to build and these were baby steps in helping build the habit in every employee.

Another habit I had to change was to adopt mobile phone free driving and not taking any meetings during my drive.   I had worked for many years before I joined the oil and gas industry and it was usual for many of us to take calls in the car or join meetings during the drive.  It provided immense flexibility especially when you worked with folks from across the globe in many different time zones.   It also made the boring commute go by quickly.  To my chagrin I found that taking calls whilst driving was verboten in oil and gas.   In face if there was an accident the first thing that was checked was the driver’s cell phone records, to ensure that the driver was not on the phone at the time of the mishap.   It seemed counter intuitive to me at that time when these new behaviors were forced on me by my employer, but in a hazardous industry where a small distraction could lead to a large industrial accident or loss of life these behaviors were important to inculcate.

As a supply chain professional, I got to be part of many supplier performance management meetings and had to sit through safety moments presented by our vendors.   Vendors felt obligated to have a safety moment in the meetings for they knew how important safety was in the industry.   I could understand the relevance when I was in a meeting with service vendors who worked in our facilities helping with drilling wells, installing equipment or servicing the facilities.  I used to be flabbergasted when I heard similar safety moments presented by our equipment vendors.  I would often wonder why our equipment vendors weren’t putting more focus on steps they were taking to ensure the quality of the equipment they were delivering to us.   Whilst safety in their operations was perhaps important for their employees, the quality of the equipment they were delivering to us (their customer) was more critical to us.   Again perhaps a small oversight here, but perhaps shifting the equipment vendors focus to quality over safety in this scenario would have been more pertinent.

As I engaged in reinventing and redesigning processes later in my career I discovered that it was hard to change habits in a large organization and often times bad habits were well established leading the organization to be inefficient.  Most organizations no longer have process owners who are responsible for defining how a task needs to be done.  When a new employee joins the work force, often times they are trained by someone who is on the job already.   More often than not the veteran employee transfers the inefficient process verbatim to the new employee who then takes that to be the norm for how that task has to be done.   No one questions the complexity of the task nor the rationale in the process.  When we brought an outside consultant who was well versed in SAP, the first thing he identified was that there was a much simpler way to do the task in SAP, with a lot less mouse clicks.   Since no one was sent to training and there was no documentation, no employee knew about this.   This probably is happening as we speak in many organizations.  Organization that are looking at becoming more efficient are hiring experts to automate current processes using robotic process automation, without realizing that there actually were simpler ways to do the task.  Optimizing an inefficient process is probably not the best approach.

James Clear’s approach of how individuals can cultivate good habits could apply to organizations as well.  Creating an inventory of current practices, identifying what to stop doing and what to start doing and what to do more off, could help organizations on their journey to become more efficient.   It was easier to illustrate this from a safety stand point but we can extrapolate this to every function within an organization from sales, to finance, to accounting to supply chain.  Maybe there is merit to appointing a champion within an organization to drive this sort of continuous improvement and then measure progress against set goals.  If you are working on a continuous improvement project in your enterprise you might want to consider making James Clear’s Atomic Habits required reading and designing your approach using a variation of Clear’s habits scorecard.