There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of useless processes choking up your organization, gumming up the works and making it very hard for people to actually do their jobs.

I’m not talking about just meetings, although those are pretty big culprits when it comes to stealing precious time and killing productivity. I’m talking about things like dashboards which need meetings so they can be “reviewed” and everyone can “know what is going on”. Really?? If it is truly a dashboard, should it not be clear as daylight what aspect of the company’s operation it is reflecting? Usually it’s just a bunch of obscure figures, pie charts, bar graphs and so on with red, yellow and green status marks which require the creator to explain what they mean. Another meeting slot consumed! This dashboard is hardly ever revisited by anyone other than the creator until the next weekly meeting where it is “reviewed” again.

Then there are the yawn inducing slide decks which go into excruciating detail to explain what is in the dashboard you just saw, the “process” for creating it and why it is “so important” that other teams fill out the 20 fields on an intranet webpage so that the data in the dashboard can be kept updated. Let’s spread the misery around! Now begins the process of “pinging” people to “make the time to update your data” on the webpage so that the dashboard can be updated. Not doing so will earn the errant team a red status mark on the slide deck at the weekly review. Just imagine, it’s someone’s job just to create the dashboard, nag people into providing data to feed it, update the dashboard and present it at the weekly meeting. It’s hard to understand what that dashboard actually does apart from keep this person (or team even) employed.

Next are the tracking tools – the ticketing systems, time trackers, job queues and so on. These are supposed to track an employee’s work – the quantity of work done, the time it took her to do it and perhaps the steps she took to get the job done. Why? Mainly because managers want to show that they are “data driven”! So we collect data about tickets – the number closed by each person, time to close, aging data, velocity, and on and on and on. The ostensible purpose is to be able to demonstrate how hard the team sare working and to show that there is a tremendous backlog of work which necessitates the hiring of more staff and the cycle continues. The reality is that staff budgets are decided by how much overhead the business, and the CFO, can bear and these stats of team effort almost never figure in those calculations.

On the issue of “relevant metrics”, the ones that interest the C-Suite are those that clearly highlight efforts that either make money, cut costs or help the customer. It’s best if the tasks do at least two out of the three or even better if they do all three. And without question, they must be legal and ethical.

So here’s a message to all managers. Take a cold hard look at the processes in your team. Think carefully about their objectives. Are they actually serving your mission or are they just measuring the efforts of your team. If in doubt, cut the process and see what happens. You can always bring it back if it really is serving a critical need. Trust me, you are better off finding out about “status” by talking to your team members. Conversations are much better at finding out what is actually going on, what progress the team is making, identifying sources of conflict, roadblocks the team is facing and so on. These are rarely thrown up in tickets and dashboards. Besides, good conversations are the best way of building team collaboration and cohesion, enhancing psychological safety and building trust.

Stop creating processes. Start talking.