by Kevin Kruse
While asking “Are there any questions?” is acceptable, remember that people may be wary of speaking up in a public setting. One technique to overcome this is to hand out index cards prior to the meeting and invite people to write anonymous questions on the cards, which are then passed forward to be answered.
Individuals will be less likely to walk in unscheduled to ask you about the latest rumor or the status of a specific initiative if you are already addressing these types of issues on a regular basis.
THE TAKEAWAY
Communication and problem solving are admirable goals but the traditional open door policy is a passive effort, utilized by only half of all workers. It can also discourage autonomy, empowerment, and reduce the productivity of managers.
A more effective solution is to schedule more limited “office hours” and weekly one-on-ones, to proactively solicit the opinions of quieter team members, and to actively foster an environment of trust.
The bottom line: the more frequently you communicate and ask questions of your team members, the more they’ll come to believe that you care and it’s a safe environment to bring things to your attention.
In case you still have reservations about shutting your open door, perhaps you should consider this feedback from Melinda, a very astute manager, who sums it up best:
I prefer my boss and even my colleagues to keep their doors closed when they are so busy they don’t have time to talk. I would rather have their wholehearted attention when I have something to discuss with them than feel that their door is “open all the time.” Open doors do not equal open minds.
HOW MIGHT YOU APPLY THIS IF YOU’RE A:
MANAGER: Consider scheduling fifteen-minute one-on-one meetings with each member of your team, once a week. Make them recurring appointments on the same day each week so you, and your team members, can rely on the cadence of communication. If you have more than a dozen direct reports, meet with each team member every other week. Let them know that with this added meeting rhythm, you are reducing your “open door” hours to just an hour a day. Remember to frame the change in the spirit of enhanced communication and empowerment.
SALES PROFESSIONAL: It takes a lot less time and effort to sell more to existing customers than it does to find new customers. Whether you are an account director with multimillion-dollar corporate accounts or a network marketer supporting downline associates, consider establishing a monthly or quarterly account review. For smaller transactional-type sales, this might consist of a simple email. For large corporate accounts, it might consist of a full-day on-site meeting. Remember, about half your customers will answer “fine” if you just ask them how it’s going. You need to ask smart, probing questions. You want to find the pain points they’re experiencing so you can assist before the problem gets bigger and they start buying from someone else.
SPORTS COACH: Given the culture of athletics and the traditional coach-athlete relationship, it is especially rare for players to proactively go to coaches with problems or ideas. During team meetings at practice or after games, consider calling on each player to contribute ideas on what the team did well and what areas should be worked on in the next practice. Consider meeting weekly with the team captain(s) who is likely to know the real issues on the minds of the players.
MILITARY OFFICER: Use a policy memorandum to make explicit your expectations on the open door policy. Let those under your command know that you expect them to first try to resolve any issues with their senior noncommissioned officer and that you require they notify their chain of their desire or intent to meet with you. Practice an “active open door” by walking among those you command.
PARENT: Ideally from a young age, create the habit—the tradition—of eating dinner together each night at the table. Impossible? How about a big, long family dinner each Sunday. Game night once a month. Minivacations each quarter: a day of fishing, a baseball game, a father-son shopping spree. Become adept at asking questions that elicit actual responses. Teens can be especially challenging. If you ask, “How was your day?” You’ll surely get the “fine” response. Try instead, “Tell me about the best part of your day.” Or, “What happened in the book you’re reading for school today?” And I’m surprised how often I strike gold with, “So what’s the friend drama and gossip this week?”
INDIVIDUAL: Who are family members and friends whom you love the most? Do you communicate haphazardly whenever you remember? Consider establishing a consistent rhythm of communication: midday text messages and weekly date nights with your spouse, monthly “first Sunday” brunch with your siblings or parents, quarterly BBQs or parties with your friends from college. Ask the probing questions you really want to know about. Don’t assume they don’t want to talk about it; they might be assuming you don’t want to hear it!
2
SHUT OFF YOUR SMARTPHONE
Be honest. Do you check your smartphone for text messages or emails during business meetings?
If you do, according to researchers at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, you are probably annoying your boss and peers (Washington, Okoro, and Cardon 2013). Their study looked at the views of 554 full-time working professionals who earned more than $30K in income and were employed by companies with at least fifty employees. They asked participants about the use of smartphones in formal and informal meetings to uncover attitudes about answering calls, writing or reading emails or text messages, browsing the internet, and other mobile-phone-related behaviors. Key findings included:
86% think it’s inappropriate to answer phone calls during formal meetings.
84% think it’s inappropriate to write texts or emails during formal meetings.
75% think it’s inappropriate to read texts or emails during formal meetings.
66% think it’s inappropriate to write texts or emails during any meetings.
At least 22% think it’s inappropriate to use phones during any meetings.
Furthermore, the research indicates that older professionals and those with higher incomes are far more likely to think it is inappropriate to be checking text messages or emails during meetings of any kind. In larger organizations, this means that the “higher-ups”—you know, the ones who hold your career in their hands—are the ones who are likely to be most critical of your phone behavior.
While workplace etiquette and civility are important, when it comes to smartphones, these issues are dwarfed by the problems related to focus, attention, and productivity. We routinely take these little disruption devices and put them in our pocket, walk with them in our hand, and set them within eyesight on our desks. How did this come to be?
WHY FACEBOOK DOESN’T HAVE A PHONE NUMBER FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Have you ever wondered why there is no technical support phone number for Facebook? You know, you’re trying to figure out how to change your privacy settings but it’s too complicated, or you want to upload several photos into an album but don’t know how. Why can’t you call up a customer service agent?
There is no phone support for Facebook because you are not the customer. You are the product they are selling!
If you just had an OMG reaction like when you found out Bruce Willis was dead in The Sixth Sense, you’re not alone.
Facebook has customers, of course; they have four million of them. Four million advertisers from Coca-Cola and Walmart to your local pizzeria. Your little phone screen is the big TV screen of old. According to a report by eMarketer, annual spending on digital advertising worldwide is $224 billion, and most of that is advertising on mobile phones (eMarketer 2017).
To be fair there is no phone support for Google, Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter, either. They all make money when they get your attention—that’s the only way you’ll see an advertisement on their platform. And they—and all the other “free” app makers—all employ a small army of supersmart
people who are paid to get your attention as often as possible.
These are the people who run thousands of behavioral experiments to discover the things that increase your engagement with your phone: push notifications, little numbers in red circles indicating new messages, never-ending scrolling feeds, leader scoreboards, and even swipe left or swipe right. Some people call this work “user experience design” (UX) and some call it “gamification.” Still others refer to it as “brain hacking” or even “mind jacking.”
THE BIOLOGY OF ADDICTION
What do gambling, sex, drugs, and smartphones have in common?
Dopamine.
It’s been called the love drug. Dopamine is a chemical released in the brain to reinforce pleasurable activities. And it turns out we get a dopamine response from the simple activity of checking our phone throughout the day.
Many make the comparison to pulling the lever on a slot machine. With every pull—every phone check—we’re wondering, what are we going to get this time? And the fact that you don’t win every single time is what makes it fun. It makes it addicting.
Psychologists refer to this as the effect of variable rewards. It’s the anticipation. Maybe the last three times you looked you only got boring pictures of other people’s food, political rants, and other people’s kids doing supposedly cute things. But every now and then…jackpot! Goats doing yoga! Your joke got five more likes! Your sister left a comment, “LMAO”! A baby elephant chasing some birds! Dopamine dopamine dopamine, yay!
More than 40 percent of people check their phones within five minutes of waking up. Then we check our phone on average forty-seven more times throughout the day, and 30 percent of us check the phone right before going to bed. Young adults use their phones eighty-five times a day, over five hours of total time. All these findings are according to survey research conducted by Deloitte in 2015. It kind of makes you wonder what we did all the time before smartphones were invented!
SMARTPHONES DISTRACT AND DIMINISH BRAINPOWER
In March of 2012, Bonnie Miller was enjoying a stroll with her husband and son. She remembered she needed to reschedule an appointment so she used her phone to send a three-word text message and promptly walked right off a pier into Lake Michigan. Her family jumped in to help keep her afloat and within minutes the Coast Guard arrived to help her out of the water (Flacy 2012).
Our addiction to our phones can be seen daily. Cars swerving in the lane ahead as the driver checks her smartphone. The couple in the restaurant looking down at their phones instead of at each other. People staring down instead of up at concerts, parties, and sporting events. People walking into objects and each other on city sidewalks. It’s kind of funny except when it isn’t. Like when a woman who was texting fell off a cliff in Alaska and died in 2012 (Flacy 2012). The man who was distracted by his phone before falling to his death in San Diego on Christmas Day in 2015 (Quinn 2015). The woman who almost died falling off California’s highest bridge while taking a selfie (Preuss 2017).
Half of all managers believe smartphones are the number one killer of productivity, and fully 75 percent of managers believe that their workers are losing two or more hours a day because of distractions according to a survey conducted by the Harris Poll (CareerBuilder 2016). In the same survey, the majority of employees reported that they didn’t even have work email on their phones. So what are they doing on their phones during the day? Sixty-five percent admitted to personal messaging, 25 percent admitted to playing games, and 4 percent even admitted to watching porn (who admits to that?).
It turns out even if you don’t pick up your phone to take a call, read a message, or (ahem) watch porn, just getting a notification of a call or text is enough to distract you. Cognitive researchers at Florida State found that people were three times more likely to make mistakes in their work if their phone notified them of calls or text messages—even if they didn’t pick it up (Stothart 2015). This decline in performance was similar to those who actually took the call or read their new message. The researchers described their findings as “shocking” and explained that, “Although these notifications are generally short in duration, they can prompt task-irrelevant thoughts, or mind-wandering, which has been shown to damage task performance.”
That’s why I always silence my phone and even flip it over on my desk when I’m working.
But it turns out that’s not good enough. Even having our phones near us is distracting—even if it’s turned off!
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin conducted a study with 548 undergraduates to find out if just having your phone nearby was consuming some of our cognitive resources (Ward et al. 2017). All the participants were instructed to “turn your phones completely on silent; this means turn off the ring and vibrate so it doesn’t make any sounds.” Then the participants were randomized into three groups: one group kept their phones facedown on their desks, another put their phones in their pockets or purses, and the final group had to leave their phones out in the lobby. Participants then completed a series of tests on a computer that are designed to measure cognitive capacity.
The group that had their phones out in the lobby performed significantly better than the group who had their phones in their pockets or purses. And the phones-in-the-pocket group significantly outperformed the group that had their phones on their desks. Professor Adrian Ward, lead researcher, explained that “as the smartphone becomes more noticeable, participants’ available cognitive capacity decreases. Your conscious mind isn’t thinking about your smartphone, but that process—the process of requiring yourself to not think about something—uses up some of your limited cognitive resources. It’s a brain drain.”
SMARTPHONES CONTRIBUTE TO STRESS
Biologically, dopamine is only half our addiction equation—our craving for pleasure. The other half comes from cortisol, known as the “stress hormone.” It is released by the adrenal glands in response to fear or stress; it is considered a crucial part of our primal fight-or-flight mechanism.
When it comes to smartphones, many of us have FOMO, or “fear of missing out.” Even if we aren’t using social media for fun, we relentlessly check our email inbox, text messages, and Slack channels because we’ll feel anxious if we don’t. In 2017, the American Psychological Association released a study, Stress in America, showing that “constant checkers” were about 20 percent more stressed than those who don’t check frequently. Those who check their work emails on the weekend were about 50 percent more stressed (American Psychological Association 2017). You may be tempted to check your inbox at night and on the weekend to relieve stress, but the “check-in” just reinforces the habit and anchors a never-ending cycle.
For a news segment called “Brain Hacking,” journalist Anderson Cooper got wired up with electrodes to measure his physiological state, and while wired up, researchers were sending him text messages without him knowing it was part of the experiment. He could see his phone, and every time it pinged with a new text message, not only was he distracted, but his stress response spiked on the monitor (Cooper 2017).
And we don’t need to be seeing our messages to feel the stress spike. Not seeing them can be just as bad. I can remember my fifteen-year-old daughter, Natalie, stressing out while on a family vacation. We were on a cruise ship heading for Bermuda, unlimited drinks, food, games, movies—a massive ship to explore! So what could be the problem? No Wi-Fi. There is even a term for this: nomophobia (from “no mobile-phone phobia”). Research conducted by the UK Post Office discovered that 53 percent of mobile phone users feel anxious when they can’t find their phone, can’t connect to a network, or when their battery runs out.
The specific problem for my daughter Natalie was that without Wi-Fi she couldn’t use Snapchat, putting her “Snapstreaks” in jeopardy. The brain hackers at Snapchat cleverly created a feature that tells you how many consecutive days you’ve chatted with someone o
n the app. If your friend doesn’t respond to a message within twenty-four hours, the chain is broken. Maintaining streaks is totally meaningless, and totally addictive.
I exaggerated when I said the cruise ship didn’t have Wi-Fi. It did. But it cost an extra $25 per day per phone to access it. With myself and three kids I made the decision to only get Wi-Fi for myself. (You know, um, because I needed to check work emails once a day. Yeah, that’s why.) Once Natalie discovered this, she immediately came up with a solution to her Snapstreak crisis. “Dad, I need to borrow your phone and log in to Snapchat…” In doing research for this book I learned that kids often solve this vacation problem by giving their log-in credentials to friends who can log in on their behalf and keep the streaks alive. Natalie hadn’t thought of this idea prior to our trip, and I shared my phone with her once a day to keep the streaks alive.
Psychologically, maintaining streaks of activity is a relatively easy way for us to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment. They take some time to build, are easy to compare and to brag about, and are easily broken (thus the stress and fear triggers). The fear of breaking a streak can be used to keep us addicted to our apps but can also be used to help us maintain healthy habits like going to the gym on a string of consecutive days.
This story about Snapstreaks on the cruise ship happened two years ago. Yesterday my thirteen-year-old son, Owen, came back from a week of sleepaway camp. “How was it?” I asked. “Do you think you’ll keep in touch with some of the kids you met?”
