Everyone Wants to Work Here

By Janus Boye

Maura Nevel Thomas is an award-winning international speaker, trainer, and author on individual and corporate productivity and work-life balance, and the most widely-cited authority on attention management

“A productive work environment doesn’t have to be stressful.”

Back in April, Texas-based Maura Thomas released her most recent book on individual and corporate productivity titled "Everyone Wants to Work Here: Attract the Best Talent, Energize Your Team, and Be the Leader in Your Market".

Maura is an award-winning international speaker and trainer and saw a gap in the skills being developed in leaders and the ever-increasing demands of work. She’s spent decades working in the trenches with tens of thousands of leaders. This research has led to proven solutions for how leaders can solve the problems eating away at productivity, and help their teams succeed in today’s fluid, fast-paced work environments.

In a recent member’s call we held an informal book launch for the new book, where Maura told us more about the book and shared a few actionable steps to plug your productivity gaps and energise your team.

Below I’ve shared a few notes from the call. There were no slides, but towards the end of this post, you can find the entire recording and also more about some of Maura’s other books on productivity.

We started by looking closer at the book and the idea behind it.

What’s really going on at work today?

The book cover for Everyone Wants to Work Here. The book came out in April 2023.

You might have heard of the so-called Great Resignation, also known as the Big Quit and the Great Reshuffle. An ongoing economic trend in which employees have voluntarily resigned from jobs beginning in early 2021 and in the wake of the pandemic.

As Maura said:

“What makes people have a good day of work, is when at the end of the day, they can say: This was a good day, I got so much done”

This is not only Maura’s view, but research also shows that accomplishing meaningful things makes us feel satisfied, happy and productive at work. The Power of Small Wins is a good read from 2011 on Harvard Business Review written by some of the prominent researchers on the topic.

Unfortunately, most work environments are set up so that we leave at the end of the day, and say, "gosh this was such a busy day and yet I got nothing done." Sound familiar? It certainly was to many of our members who participated in the call.

According to Maura, this is really an organisational culture problem, partially based on our own behaviours, but in large parts, the work culture is set up to prevent us having good days at work as we are constantly distracted with a million things coming at us all day long and we simply don’t have time to think.

In September 2022, Maura Thomas published this article on Forbes explaining why quiet quitting has been largely misunderstood: Why Leaders Should Want Their Employees To Quiet Quit.

When this happens, people want to find another place to work, so this really needs to change, and like Maura said, it has to change at every level of the organisation. Every person can work towards creating an environment where they can have more productive days, and that’s essentially what the new book is all about.

We then moved onto a piece of behaviour, that we haven’t really examined.

Unconscious calculations at work

Maura explained her concept of “unconscious calculations” as behavior that is seemingly guided by a particular belief, but it may be a belief we have never examined. She gave two familiar examples:

“People are bothering me all day long and I have to deal with that and that’s a part of my job, so I’ll just do my tasks when nobody is bothering me. Unfortunately that’s evenings, weekends and holidays”
“I’m providing good customer service and I’m a good colleague, if I respond fast”

These are unconscious calculations, because first of all, very few wake up and say that they look forward to working over the weekend or during the holidays. Secondly, we believe that fast is a metric of success, but is that really the case?

The focus for Maura’s work, and specifically this book, is to help people who are struggling to get their work done during their work day, so they can take care of themselves and their family during their downtime.

As she said, it’s partially an individual fault, because many wants to make themselves available and respond fast. We feel we need to respond immediately, so we leave our email and chat open all day long, but it distracts us, and finding that the right balance is crucial, so that we also get the important work done.

To quote Maura:

“Anyone can respond fast. That’s not a differentiator. You need to be accurate and thorough”

In her experience with clients, when she asks them to consider on what metrics they would like to be evaluated on by clients, speed rarely makes the list.

The biggest issue: Distraction

What I asked Maura about the top issue that hampers individual and organisation success, she started talking about distraction, which she also referred to as the most underrated issue.

As Maura said, we are constantly distracted, but we are hired to think. To quote:

“We are hired for our unique combination of intelligence, experience, critical thinking, problem solving, humor, empathy, diplomacy and then we are put in a situation where every 3 minutes on average, we are distracted. That prevents us from being our best selves”

When we are switching what we are doing every 3 minutes, everything takes longer and the quality goes down. I’ve been in many peer group meetings in our community, where our members ask for more hours in the day, but as Maura said, the the very best way to get more hours in the day is to do one thing at a time.

The reality as Maura has also heard about too many times to count is that employees, end up leaving at the end of the day with multiple emails half-written and many browser tabs open with things that we are in the middle of. Starting too many things that we don’t finish makes us both unhappy and unproductive.

Maura also shared some more advice and thoughts on how to improve things:

Better planning - often it’s really failure to plan, which creates false sense of urgency and then moves around people’s to do lists and agendas
Remember that things can wait. Address the expectations for speed and challenge the unconscious calculation
The ‘always on’ attitude is really a lack of commitment to work-life balance.
Stop managing time, but rather focus on managing your attention.

Learn more about creating a truly great workplace

This book is actually Volume 4 of the Empowered Productivity Series. The previous books in the series are:

You can read more about the book Everyone Wants To Work Here on Maura’s website, which also features links to buy the book from both independent bookstores and Amazon.

While the book series above is meant to convey big ideas and actionable tips in the convenience of a one-hour read, Maura’s prior full-length books are the perfect fit for those high-achievers and innovative companies who want a deeper understanding of productivity systems:

Personal Productivity Secrets has been called a “game-changer” and a “home-run” by people looking to improve their performance, get more done, lower their stress, and improve their quality of life!
Work Without Walls, where you can learn how your corporate culture is sabotaging your team’s ability to bring their A-game every day

The conversation also continues at our peer groups and conferences. Do join us in person, expand your network and meet with peers who are carving out the time to learn and develop themselves.

Finally, you can also lean back and enjoy the entire recording from the member’s call below.