After five straight quarters of productivity decline, return-to-office (RTO) is expanding its focus beyond improving collaboration, connection and retention. We will remember 2023 as the year when leaders got serious about RTO. We will remember 2024 as the year they got serious about return to productivity (RTP).

Now is the time for learning and development (L&D) leaders to help shape the RTP strategy and incorporate learning that delivers specific, immediate and sustained productivity gains. This article will talk about how to do that using an approach called “Work-Out.”

People have returned to the office with remote work habits. The National Bureau of Economic Research shows how COVID-19 has significantly changed our meeting and email habits. Their research shows an increase in meetings per person, per day, of +12.9%. The average number of people in the meetings has increased by 13.5%. A similar trend is seen in the number of daily emails and the number of people on emails. That is time taken away from their contributions to the business.

The Challenge

Leaders see the post-COVID productivity issues. Meetings and emails are just one example. They may have tried simple directives like “cut meetings to 30 minutes”. But without cross-functional buy-in and coordination, these quick fixes fail to stick or have the desired level of impact.

For many employees, these tactics can have a negative impact on their perceptions of the work environment and trust in leadership. So, the challenge is to find a simpler way to deliver meaningful productivity improvement and improve engagement.

Work-Out is proving to be a fast, easy and inexpensive solution to the problem and a solution that L&D can lead.

What Is “Work-Out”?

Work-Out is a problem-solving method developed by GE as a core business strategy. It is used to quickly take out extraneous work and bureaucracy and to make the organization faster and simpler. It enables employees at any level to be more active participants in the business.

For GE, it not only delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in productivity; by 2007, the practice had become engrained in the culture. It changed the way leaders and managers were developed.

A Work-Out “event” is done in three stages:

1. Planning with business leaders to ensure there is a clear goal, understanding of the issues and design for the Work-Out meeting.
2. A Work-Out meeting in which a facilitator guides a group of participants to identify recommendations for each problem and present them to the business leaders.
3. Follow-up plan and implementation to ensure actions are taken, communicated and the goals are achieved.

When compared to other problem-solving methods, Work-Out ranks as the simplest in terms of time to implement and effort/intensity. Leaders are quick to adopt Work-Out because:

• It has a bias toward action, not assessments and surveys.
• It has the potential to deliver real and meaningful results.
• It can be used in several different use cases.

Work-Out Roles and Time Requirements

A typical Work-Out event, from planning through full implementation, is done in 2-3 months. Key roles and their average time commitment are as follows:

1. Sponsor: Senior leadership is responsible for setting goals, empowering the team and removing roadblocks. They require six hours.
2. Business Champion: Primary business lead is responsible for detailed planning, choosing participants, oversees the Work-Out team and implementation of improvement plans. They require 20 hours.
3. Work-Out Lead/Facilitator: Certified Work-Out lead and facilitator is responsible for planning, coaching leadership and Work-Out meeting facilitation. They require 80-100 hours for the first event. Approximately 50 hours for future events.
4. Work-Out Participants: Employees responsible for participating in the Work-Out session and implementing approved recommendations. They require 30 hours.
5. The time to train, certify and coach new Work-Out facilitators is 16-20 hours.

L&D’s Role

L&D can play a strategic role in partnering with leaders to plan and facilitate Work-Out.

• Talk with leaders about productivity issues/opportunities specific to RTO (also see other use cases below) and educate them about Work-Out and its potential.
• Plan and execute an initial Work-Out, partnering with sponsor, the business champion and the certified Work-Out lead.
• Plan to certify your trainers to scale up for ongoing events.
• Continue to showcase Work-Out events in communications. Guide/coach leaders to size the potential opportunities and prioritize future events, creating a regular operating rhythm for productivity improvement.

An RTO Work-Out Use Case

Earlier this year, I led a Work-Out event for a company with the following goals:

1. Apply Work-Out to deliver productivity improvement. Time spent in meetings increased significantly during COVID lockdown. Attempts have been made to reduce meeting duration and frequency. But little progress has been seen.
2. Improve engagement scores, which have dipped due to a recent reorganization.
3. Prepare the organization to grow their Work-Out capability by training selected employees to be facilitators and prepare a roadmap of future Work-Out topics.

The Work-Out approach led to three key actions:

1. Senior leader alignment on the productivity goal and scope. After some brainstorming, leaders agreed to focus the Work-Out on cross-functional meetings, approvals required for specific processes and to set a measurable productivity improvement goal of 5% per employee per week.
2. A cross-functional team was chosen to participate in the Work-Out meeting. The team included 14 frontline employees, SMEs and a few managers. A brief sensing session was conducted with participants before the Work-Out meeting to further clarify and focus on the specific issues and to design the 2-day Work-Out meeting.
3. During the Work-Out meeting, the team was empowered to come up with solutions. They presented their ideas directly to the senior leaders/sponsors of the event, and nine of the ten recommendations were approved. Their action plan showed all approved recommendations would be fully implemented in under four weeks.

The Work-Out led to three key results:

1. The team exceeded the productivity goal. They found 10% per employee, per week with the potential for more savings. Work-Out engages people who have firsthand experience in the issues and who are motivated to solve them.
2. Teambuilding occurred between people who did not really know each other but shared the same issues and roadblocks. Work-Out creates shared goals that break down silos and removes bottlenecks, roadblocks that are created by organizational layers of approval.
3. Employees had direct communication with senior leaders which led to an immediate improvement in trust and dispelled myths and misinformation. Work-Out streamlines decision-making and communication. Work-Out overcomes inertia that is often hidden in middle and frontline management.

These results are typical when everyone involved applies the process of Work-Out and begins to adopt the mindset. Work-Out is even more exciting when the employees discover an opportunity that even the senior leaders are not aware of. In this Work-Out event, participants discovered that they shared another common issue. Each person thought they were the only one dealing with weeks and months of rework and delays trying to complete an important business process.

Individually they had escalated the problem to their manager only to be told it was not a priority or that change would not be possible. Their individual performance goals were negatively impacted. The problem and interactions were buried in long email threads sent to people with undefined responsibilities, making the whole issue appear to be deeply complex on-offs.

But this team discovered it was a collective problem and they were able to quickly produce simple solutions. There was plenty of low hanging fruit. When they presented the problem and solutions to the Work-Out sponsors, it was a big “aha” moment for everyone. And that is when the senior leaders saw the strategic potential of Work-Out.

Other Work-Out Use Cases

I have had an opportunity to apply Work-Out in the following situations:

• Mergers, acquisition and integration: Combining people and processes of two organizations to achieve proforma targets and preserve the best practices.
• Technology/tool implementation: “Lean before you automate” to optimize new productivity targets pre-implementation. When there seems to be no defined process, get the collective knowledge of people who are in the process and agree on a process before automation.
• Offshore and nearshore initiatives: Simplify the process, hand-offs, standard work and goals.
• Organization structure change: eliminate bureaucracy, simplify work and processes to achieve organization change goals.

Work-Out is not a solution for every problem. It is not effective on complex technical problems or issues over which employees have no control. Communication issues do not make good Work-Out topics because solutions tend to lead to more communication.

Tips to Help You Get Started With Work-Out

1. Start by talking with leaders about RTO productivity and any changes they have seen. Where do they see signs of bureaucracy and complexity? What actions have they taken and how did it go?
2. Become familiar with the Work-Out process and examples that can help you relate it to your business. Review available resources for more in-depth discussion and analysis.
3. Begin to educate leaders on Work-Out and decide if it is the right approach at the right time.

RTO is not finished until leaders and employees are aligned and functioning at levels of productivity that are attainable without big investment or technology enabled. Getting started with Work-Out is relatively easy and inexpensive. Ideally, Work-Out is not a one-time event but leads to a broader change that empowers anyone in the organization to bring their best every day. When leaders are engaged and everyone follows the Work-Out methodology, the benefits are real, fast and can be a significant positive change for the individuals involved.