Energy-sapping offices that could use a shot of adrenaline
Last Monday lunchtime I hurried down Piccadilly towards Green Park tube as fast as my high heels would carry me. I felt lifted, full of enthusiasm and oblivious to the pain in the balls of my feet.
This heightened mental state was the result of having spent three hours in a room at the Hilton Hotel with Lord Kirkham, purveyor of sofas to the Great British people.
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He and I had been interviewing five young female entrepreneurs for a Women of the Future Award. Each had made a pile of money in different ways. One sold tailors' dummies, another had developed software that tells you what your house is worth. Some gushed and others were more measured, but they had one thing in common: energy. In fact, each had so much of it that as they talked their excess supply flowed into me.
Unfortunately, the transfusion didn't last. By the time I had emerged at London Bridge station and walked in the drizzle to the FT office I was a tired and bedraggled middle-aged woman in uncomfortable shoes with too much work to do.
By chance, sitting waiting for me on my desk was a report from Cranfield School of Management called Energy at Work - A Look at Generating a Vital Commodity for Success at Work Today. The press release said that companies waste 520 hours of productivity per employee per year by failing to manage their energy levels properly.
As a statistic, this is beneath contempt. What is less contemptible is to ask if energy can be managed, and if so how. Energy levels ebb and flow, both for people and for companies. My own are all over the place: when I have lots I can take over the world, but when I have little I can hardly put one word in front of another.
Equally, at the FT, there are times when the place hums, and times when it sags. The energy of the employee and the company are related: the more saggy the company the harder it is for an employee to muster any energy at all. And if the employees have no energy, the company won't have any either.
To get at this dynamic between individuals and companies, Cranfield has come up with a simple formula:
E Org = ???￡E Individual + E Social-Net +???"Emergent.
Actually the formula isn't simple and I don't understand it, but I do understand that it doesn't help me be like the women I met on Monday.
More concretely, it suggests that every company should hire an Energy Resource Manager whose jobs is to "drive people, teams and the organisation to leverage energy to drive value creation in business development".
Again, this doesn't help. I can ignore one "drive" when there is no car involved, but two carless drives in one sentence sap my energy. When I read on to discover that the manager must "unleash and marshal energy in order to create the appropriate energy levels to deal with the contingent competitive environment threats and opportunities" my energy levels fell so low I had to go to the vending machine to get a KitKat to redress the damage.
As the business school has failed to throw any light on the subject, I have done some research of my own, and asked acquaintances what drains their energy at work. The list turns out to be a long one. Some said the first glimpse of their office building in the morning was enough to do some damage. Others mentioned computers, meetings, flickering lights, pointless management change, boredom, bureaucracy, empty desks, colleagues who are energy black holes and dysfunctional bosses.
For me, little things can have a big, bad effect. An e-mail with a subject line "IMPORTANT, PLEASE READ: Change computer password!" is too draining to open. Then I don't open
it and consequently find my computer is in trouble. More energy drains away.
Most of all, though, my energy is sapped by dwelling on these sapping things about offices, so much so that I can't think of anything that boosts it at all. So I head off for a Diet Coke, which always lifts me up. However, there is a problem with this (as with the KitKat) as it always let me down again afterwards.
Fortunately, there is something else more reliable than anything dispensed in a vending machine: a deadline. Columns need to be written, and the fact that one's work is needed RIGHT NOW generates a reliable boost.
This sort of energy is really just adrenaline, and is by its nature temporary. Though exhilarating, it is not terribly good for you taken in large doses over a long time.
The best hope is that the work itself gives you energy, which it can if it isn't too deadly. It is partly a matter of getting the quantity right. For me, having slightly too much work is good. Having far too much is bad, though the worst is not having enough. Recognition always helps in my experience. If someone, preferably a boss (though anyone will do), tells you you are great, your energy soars.
Working for energetic leaders can be good, though it isn't always. I once had a boss who devoted his massive energy to making bad decisions, and that wasn't such a great thing at all.
Which in the end means there is nothing magic about energy. In a well managed company with an energetic (though sensible) leader and enough averagely energetic employees, there should be no problem at all.
A final word on the women entrepreneurs. I got a big lift from meeting them last Monday, but on reflection I don't want to work with them. Entrepreneurs are not suited to the corporate life as their extraordinary energy makes them disruptive - and makes the rest of us look like wasters by comparison.
“驾驭”活力太荒谬
上
周一的午饭时间，我以高高的鞋跟所能承受的最快速度，沿着皮卡迪利大街(Piccadilly)匆忙赶往格林公园(Green Park)地铁站。我觉得身轻如燕，精神饱满，脚掌的疼痛完全抛在了脑后。
这种高昂的精神状态，是我与大不列颠人民的沙发供应商柯卡姆勋爵(Lord Kirkham)，在希尔顿酒店(Hilton Hotel)某个房间共度三个小时的结果。
我和他一直在为“未来女性奖”(Women of the Future Award)面试5位年轻的女性企业家。她们每个人都通过不同的方式赚到了很多钱。其中一位出售裁缝用的人体模型，另一位开发了一种能计算你的房子值多少钱的软件。有几位滔滔不绝，其他几位则较为出言谨慎，不过，她们都有一个共同点：充满活力。实际上，她们每一位的活力都是如此充沛，以至于在她们说话的时候，她们的过剩活力都流入了我的身体。
不幸的是，这种流入并不持久。等到我出现在伦敦桥(London Bridge)地铁站、冒着细雨走进英国《金融时报》办公楼的时候，我已经成了一个疲惫不堪、全身湿透、穿着不舒服的鞋子、有太多工作要做的中年女人。
凑巧的是，在我桌子上等着我的，是一份来自于克兰菲尔德管理学院(Cranfield School of Management)的报告，名为《工作中的活力――对今日职业成功起到关键作用的要素》(Energy at Work
