What’s your Return on Energy?

“I can’t believe it’s already mid-February,” said the client, predictably, rolling her eyes skywards. “I don’t know where the time goes.”

Being busy is arguably the defining cliché of modern times. Like all clichés, it has its roots in truth: a toxic combination of saturated markets, attention-sapping technology, and a lack of visible symbols to denote professional status have conspired to make industriousness (or the appearance of it) the price of survival in most organisations. It’s rarely a recipe for happiness.

The problem itself is common knowledge. And many leaders try to address it by way of another cliché: “We need to work smarter, not harder”. Yeah, let’s do that… Erm, sorry to bother you with this, but how? And how will we know it’s working?

This latter question merits examination. The question of how to measure activity has troubled the business world since the Industrial Revolution. In the 1950s, time and motion studies became the fashionable route to process improvement (so fashionable, in fact, that they regrettably helped to accelerate the growth of an entire industry: management consulting). The principle behind them was simple, and in fact had been around since the turn of the century: study the production line, determine where inefficiencies exist, and identify ways to optimise the workflow. It’s a sensible approach — for businesses that are built on task repetition. Unfortunately, it’s almost wholly counter-productive for those whose success relies on their ability to innovate.

It’s interesting that, while the working world has moved on, to all intents and purposes activity measurement hasn’t. No replacement has emerged for the time and motion study; there is no contemporary equivalent that seeks to quantify how well individuals and teams function in workplaces that rely on knowledge exchange, collaboration and creativity.

In such businesses, energy that is directed towards innovative thinking tends to generate the biggest rewards. Yet it gets so easily sapped by an almost infinite number of distractions. Think about how you spend the majority of your time. Quavering over gruelling presentations to senior people, in order to obtain ‘buy-in’ to your ideas? Grinding through endless coffees in meetings that (ironically) seek to improve ‘ways of working’? Obsessing over the minutiae of political management? Keeping score often reveals a depressing truth: in many organisations our work lives amount to a zero-sum game, sometimes for years at a time. We’re all so busy that we get nothing done.

In any business, people are an investment. Human capital costs a large amount of money. Yet many CEOs and MDs obsess over quantifying and improving their ROI except when it comes to their own people — which, in most instances, are by far their biggest asset, and biggest liability. This is manifestly bonkers.

So let’s frame a question that might prompt a few thoughts about how activity could be measured in the 21st century workplace. It starts with an understanding that energy (rather than, say, capability) is the most valuable resource that people bring to work each day — and that leadership is really the job of channelling this energy so that it’s consistently creatively generative.

It’s our view that every leader should ask him or herself on a daily basis one simple question: ‘What’s our Return on Energy [ROE], and how can we improve it?’.

It looks easy enough at first, but answering this question is a complicated undertaking — one that will tax even the best leaders. The devil is in the detail. 

For instance, all businesses have politics, and they can be healthy. ‘Politics’ can be shorthand for reconciling naturally competing agendas in a way that drives better outcomes. Similarly, ‘politics’ can also refer to dealing with the conflicts that inevitably arise when ambitious, energetic people work in close proximity. 

Again, if the situation is well managed, the generative benefit will usually outstrip the managerial cost. In both these circumstances, the ROE is likely positive.

But let’s not breathe too easy. The scary thing is that these factors often become hidden from view at the precise moment that they start to drive negative ROE. It’s hard for those working inside an organisation to diagnose and treat political and cultural problems — for the simple reason that their very nature makes objectivity difficult. How many induction processes promise a ‘happy culture’ only to reveal a seething mass of vipers hidden beneath the surface? How many CEOs have you met who seem blissfully unaware of the political toxicity of their organisations?

If politics and culture seem like huge hurdles on the path to positive ROE, they’re not the only ones. Eddie Izzard once joked that the reason Britain lost its Empire was because the leaders stood around glorying in their own self-image, humble-bragging their way to oblivion: “Ooh, do you really think?” Ego is another huge potential trap; leaders often need to overcome it to see what ROE they’re really managing to achieve. Indeed, are your senior people actually focusing on managing you? And what sort of return is that activity delivering?

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