• Information overload. Today’s knowledge workers face an overwhelming volume of information and correspondence
• Interruption culture. Knowledge workers face interruptions every three minutes on average, leading to significant time loss for regaining concentration that total up to 3 hours daily
• Search time. Despite technological advance, we still spend between 1-3 hours a day searching for information
• Reporting. Compliance and reporting have grown significantly in recent year
• Unproductive meetings. Unproductive meeting time wastes about an hour a day
• Mass processing = knowledge-work drudgery. Tasks involving large amounts of repetitive activity, like tagging photos, handling mass inquiries or dealing with large volumes of text, should no longer be performed by human worke
• Discuss and agree among your team how to change information behavior, in particular how to respect others’ concentration time. Respect focus times in people’s diaries: Typically, 1-2 hours a day will be enough.
• egacy search tools (e.g., in Explorer or SharePoint) often fail to deliver useful results in an acceptable time frame, and their makers are aware of this shortcoming. Therefore, consider Enterprise Search with AI:
• Chat with your document. AI Summarizer tools like ChatPDF (as opposed to ChatGPT) and TLDRthis
• Delegate mass processing to AI: Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)
• Streamline reporting. Project-management software can be customized to handle reporting needs for collecting, consolidating, and analyzing Key Performance Indicator
• Enhance meeting efficiency. AI can summarize meetings, create minutes, and task lists. What it can’t do, however, is improve meeting culture.
• Let’s reclaim the time for meaningful conversations with clients and colleagues, the time to solve a problem instead of postponing it, the time to generate new business, to expand our network by attending an interesting conference, or any other productive use of our human time and human intellectual capacity.

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• Peter Drucker used the term “knowledge work” to describe the shift in the American economy from industrial manufacturing to service sector organizations.
• People were using their education and minds, not just their bodies, to produce
• The new knowledge workers were no longer employees needing direct supervision. Instead, they were independent, possessing specialized knowledge in areas outside of management’s expertise. Knowledge work was self-contained and portable. 
• Drucker recognized that knowledge worker motivation and productivity were the primary challenges facing us in the 21^st century.
• In many cases, contemporary knowledge workers no longer need access to organizations to be effective; the portability of Drucker’s knowledge worker (in the form of changing jobs) has morphed into the entrepreneur who can run her own business as a consultant.
• Drucker wrote a lot about this! He argued that, unlike manual labor, knowledge work typically was motivating in and of itself; knowledge workers needed little motivation to actually perform their work. However, the challenge was to align knowledge work with the organizational mission and to prevent siloing of specialized knowledge area
• some knowledge workers are reassessing the importance of work-life balance and resisting efforts to increase their workload. In response to the phenomenon of disengagement at work, some managers have increased their level of supervision, calling for more meetings and in-person gatherings. As a result, many knowledge workers feel that their productivity has suffered and that they are being micromanaged.
• While human connection is important, many knowledge workers are indeed more productive when they are freed from restrictive scheduling demands and constant check-ins. Knowledge-work productivity continues to be an area where we need improvement.

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• The rationale is that when employees are connected with each other, that connection drives greater innovation, collaboration, and engagemen
• In actuality, we’re seeing that productivity can drop when people are forced back, and many employees continue to reject the return to office, sometimes resulting in organizations losing their most tenured employees.

• Colleague Connection

   

  Imagine a time in your career when you worked with people you truly trusted and liked. More than simply enjoying each other’s company, you worked together to give and receive support. What you’re remembering is a strong example of colleague connection.

   

  Colleague connection includes opportunities for collaboration and interdependence with other employees, the social support that’s given and received, and the influence of these factors on team performance. This is arguably the one that most of us think about when we envision workplace connection. While it’s important (strong social support at work has many positive outcomes), it’s only one element in a larger conversation about workplace connections.

• Leader Connection

   

  Think about the leaders you’ve had during your career. Hopefully, you’ve had at least one leader who provided access to opportunities and a reasonable degree of autonomy for how to complete your work. This leader was likely a strong communicator, providing clarity around expectations and giving useful and balanced feedback about your performance and potential. Research has found that 70% of the variance in team engagement can be attributed to a manager, making it clear that leader connection is a critical component of the workplace connections conversation.

• Employer Connection

   

  You may or may not have worked at a place where you felt like your values aligned with those of your employer, your work richly contributed to the goals of the organization, and you found meaning in what you did. If you’ve had an opportunity to work with an organization that met those needs, you likely felt a boost of employer connection.

   

  When there’s low employer connection, going to work can feel like the proverbial “clocking in.” Lack of employer connection can not only influence an employee’s job performance, but it can also influence the talent an organization attracts.

• Role Connection

   

  Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi researched and wrote about the idea of “flow”: the experience of being so absorbed in an activity that other things seem to almost fade away. While most of us won’t find a role where we spend the majority of our time in a flow state, we can definitely gather insights about what motivates us and find ourselves in satisfying roles.

   

  When we experience role connection, we have a clear understanding of what our job is, we’re engaged in what we’re doing, and we have insight into how we can advance. When we have role connection, we are lifted up by the work we do.
• Early results suggest that different employees have unique needs surrounding each type of connection
• Our connection preferences can also wax and wane depending on what’s going on in our lives
• Colleague connection may increase, because employees are milling about the same office and benefitting from random and serendipitous interactions
• But at the same time, leader connection might decrease, because employees feel their supervisors don’t understand their motivations
• Employer connections can also take a dive as the desire to work hard to see the company succeed is undermined by a feeling of betrayal.
• Focusing on only one pillar of the CLEAR connections model, therefore, is clearly detrimenta
• As such, it’s crucial that business leaders move beyond a one-dimensional view, and get clear on what workplace connections really are and how to leverage them to create the best outcomes for their employees and business.

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