Value-Based Thinking
- The Process Maven
- Jul 5, 2017
- 7 min read
Today I want to share one of the secrets to effective prioritizing - what I call "Value-Based Thinking". Mastering this sort of thinking will increase your capacity to produce value-adding work. It is a habit you must learn and practice, a productivity muscle you must work out and grow, a process in and of itself just like everything else in life. If this is new to you, start small with a 5-lb weight (just start somewhere), and gradually work your way up to lifting with the productivity heavy weights. I'll be there smiling and sweating right along with you, doing bicep curls and bench presses with utter ease. In this process you will gain confidence in your delivery and a higher satisfaction in your daily work or daily tasks. Buckle in and prepare yourself with a nice large hot cup of joe! Or tea. Or soda. Or Saint Arnolds beer. Whatever your beverage of choice. I pass no judgement.
What is Value?
Value (n)
- The monetary worth of something
- Relative worth, value, or importance
- A numerical quantity that is assigned or is determined by calculation or measurement
Merriam-Webster
As you can see from Merriam-Webster, value is relative worth. Your car, house, clothes, TV, and phone all have value to you. You easily know what this value is, because it is what you paid for it. But what if I asked you what the value of the e-mail report you send to your boss each week is? What about the worth of your current top 3 projects? What about spreadsheets you are keeping up with? Those get a bit trickier. The gain in these is not as overtly evident. However, knowing the importance of these tasks enables you to see they WHY behind what you are doing. You are able to justify, prioritize, and communicate your impacts. You are also able to discontinue or postpone those endeavors that have low usefulness. You are able to maximize your value by choosing which activities or projects you focus most on! This idea of knowing and understanding the relative worth of your daily tasks is a powerful concept you must internalize.
Value Application
Now that we all have the same concept of value in our heads, lets move from concept to application, from intangible to tangible. If each of your daily tasks has a relative worth, exactly how are you to assign it? I recommend breaking down your thoughts into 3 steps. You can download my Think Value Template on my downloads page, which will help you to sort through your thoughts in the order laid out in this post.
Step 1: List Your Current Activities
Start by creating a list of all of your current activities or projects. Comb through your calendar for inspiration. Read through your recent e-mail chains. Think through your day from the moment you walk through the office doors to the hour you shut down your computer and go home. Now, if you don't work a normal 9-5 job, do not sit back and kick your feet up at this point with a wry smile on your face. You are not off the hook. This thinking still applies to you - whether you are a stay-at-home mom, small business owner, or the freaking President of the United States. Don't skip activities you think are not worth jotting down. Write them all down in detail. This will give you a complete, broad canvas from which to start painting value.
Here's an example for illustration:
Ms. Process-Maven-In-Training works at an office supply store in their sales department. She has listed her current 5 projects.
1. Compile data for weekly sales report to management
2. Evaluate outcome of monthly customer satisfaction surveys
3. Train new hire
4. Investigate customer complaints for the week
5. Help Michael with product list
Step 2: Assign Outcomes To Your Endeavors
For all of the projects you've listed in step 1, consider now what the ultimate outcomes or goals of those activities are. Why are you pursuing them? What are you hoping to accomplish? Don't worry about putting numbers in yet. For now, word descriptions will suffice.
Following along with our example:
Ms. Process-Maven-In-Training jotted down her thoughts of the outcomes of each of her current 5 projects.
1. Compile data for weekly sales report to management
For this report, I compile a significant amount of information from our weekly sales for the management team so that they can assess the health of the department.
2. Evaluate outcome of monthly customer satisfaction surveys
I take the responses from our 10-question customer surveys that we offer at the end of calls or purchases, I compile the numbers, and evaluate them for any meaningfulness I can glean.
3. Train new hire
I am currently undergoing 2 weeks of training a new hire for our sales team, who will replace Damonica while she is gone on maternity leave.
4. Investigate customer complaints for the week
I look into the customer complaints we've received over the phone, in the mail, or via e-mail. I create detailed reports for each complaint and send those reports to my manager.
5. Help Michael with product list
Michael asked me to help him put together his product list. I don't want to be rude, so I will compile it for him and send it over.
Step 3: Assign Value
With your activity and outcome list, attempt to assign value to each. This time, you will use numbers where possible. Note: Assigning numbers and graphs to things is not just for the engineering nerdy calculator types like myself. This stuff works, TRY IT!! Plus it's fun to be a nerd sometimes...How much money does this activity impact or produce? How much is customer satisfaction impacted? Who are you trying to impress or please? How does management use your reports? Here is where the light bulbs should start coming on. For some of these activities, you honestly may not know why you are doing them. You may not know how or where your reports are being used. This is a problem, and could mean you are spending time creating slides or graphs that either are not applied or could be simplified. For those activities you don't know the value of, start asking questions to those people who are requiring them or potentially utilizing them. If someone isn't requiring them, why are you doing them? Thinking through these questions will hopefully give you insights into the value of each of your daily pursuits. You may soon realize that your perceived value is vastly different from the actual value. Alas! This is where you can make changes. Once you've fully mastered Value-Based Thinking, you should be able to quickly list and identify the actual (not perceived) value of each of your activities, justifying why you are taking your precious and limited time to do each. This should become a daily habit.
Here's the value Ms. Process-Maven-In-Training listed for her activities in the example:
1. Compile data for weekly sales report to management
After asking my manager how my sales report is being used, I found out that only 2 of 10 managers read it, and those 2 do not usually take any actions from it.
2. Evaluate outcome of monthly customer satisfaction surveys
The outcomes of our monthly customer satisfaction surveys are used in our directional meetings to decide focus areas for the next month. After implementing these survey reviews and directional meetings with focus areas, our customer satisfaction has been improving on average by 2% every month for the past 6 months.
3. Train new hire
The new hire will be replacing an employee who handles approximately 60-100 customer calls per day, about half of which are related to placing orders and the other half are related to complaints or questions.
4. Investigate customer complaints for the week
I create 10-page reports for each customer complaint. After asking my manager how these reports are being used, I discovered that only the last section with the complaint cause is being used for department metric graphs to identify problem areas. Last month, we had 2 top problem areas. The department head discussed these problem areas in the directional meeting, and after brainstorming what area managers could do, assigned an action for each area manager for the month.
5. Help Michael with product list
Michael procrastinated making this list, and is now in the middle of monthly close. He often asks me for help on smaller items he hasn't gotten around to at the end of the month. This task isn't on my yearly goals with my manager, and my manager isn't even aware that I'm doing it. It adds very little value to me or the company.
Action Plan
Your last step in laying the groundwork for Value-Based Thinking is to create an action plan. You should be armed with some new powerful insights into the value of your daily and weekly undertakings. Hopefully, you've identified some projects that have tangible and very powerful benefits. You've also likely identified others that either are not adding value at all or are not being used to their full capacity. From this knowledge will come your action plan- How can you restructure your daily tasks to maximize value? What steps can you take to increase value-adding activities?
Here are the steps Ms. Process-Maven-In-Training (now almost graduating to Process Maven status herself!) chose to take:
1. Compile data for weekly sales report to management
I will ask my manager if I can either discontinue this report, or simplify and modify it so that it is useful for our department.
2. Evaluate outcome of monthly customer satisfaction surveys
Based on the observed value of this activity, I will place this as my highest priority and look for ways to increase the value further.
3. Train new hire
I will place this as one of my top priorities, getting feedback from the new hire to ensure that I am training him adequately and effectively.
4. Investigate customer complaints for the week
I will discontinue the 10-page reports, and instead compile the complaint causes into a single graph each week for management.
5. Help Michael with product list
I will stop doing Michael's work for him, and explain to him politely why.
You can see from this action plan that she has chosen to broaden and improve upon her most value-adding activities, modify those adding minimal value, and stop the useless ones. She now has cleared space in her day to focus on what makes the most impacts.
Close
We have reached the end of this fairly long blog post. If you've made it this far, congratulations. If you skipped down here as a short-cut, shame on you. Do yourself a favor, saying (with a facepalm- this is very important) "What was I thinking?!?!" and go back to the beginning.
Hopefully you have added several new, exciting, and formidable tools to your effectiveness toolbox. Your assignment now is to go apply those tools. Unbox them, plug them in, and practice using them. Start building your commitment to excellence and changing the way you approach your career. Utilize my Think Value Template in my downloads page to create your lists, outcomes, values, and action plan. Follow-through with your action plan. This will create momentum for you, and can be used for input into deeper prioritization skills that I will share in the blog posts to come.
© 2017 by The Process Maven
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