HRpedia: 'EPDs'
Move over 'Working From Home' – EPDs are taking over. And according to a Harvard professor, they work wondersEnhanced Productivity Days, n.
Leslie Perlow, the ‘Professor of Leadership’ at Harvard Business School, is a global expert on why your spouse hates you.
Put in more academic terms, she specialises in (according to her TEDTalk bio) ‘what happens when organizations experience tremendous change in the workplace – such as globalization, 24/7 technology, and hyper-efficiency – but fail to consider their implications on how people work.’
Writing in the Harvard Business Review on the subject of time management, she posits how it should be a group endeavour rather than a top-down directive. Let teams organise their own time, recommends Perlow; the results will go beyond morale and retention and make measurable differences to productivity.
Perlow describes a pharmaceutical company she was studying, and their pretty dramatic time management crisis:
… I found that the company was inundated with meetings. An overly collaborative culture… meant that too many employees were involved in every decision… The only time people could do their actual work was outside normal office hours.
The team in question decided to work towards a goal of one meeting-free day per week, during which members worked from home. Conference calls and other interruptions were banned at these times, which became known (non-euphemistically) as ‘Enhanced Productivity Days.’
Why? Well, because the team reported a 55% increase in work/life balance satisfaction. A retailer that conducted a comparable project reported substantial gains in productivity too, calculating that end-of-month financial reports were compiled 38% quicker than had been the case previously.
It’s a good idea, the ‘EPD’– if, of course, the organisation is of the type that allows individuals to work from home. (Not sure the concept would work wonderfully in fire stations, or restaurants.) And that tying-in of work/life balance to a productivity argument is particularly good for those of us who need to present business cases in order to justify considerate working conditions.
How to use the phrase in practice:
What do you mean, the Ryder Cup starts on Friday? That’s really thrown my diary out of kilter. Tell you what, I’ll see if I can swing an Enhanced Performance Day on Friday, and see you and the lads down at the pub at lunchtime?
About the author
