Michael White, the founder of MashTank, is on a mission to help leaders get the data and tools they need to map, measure, and optimize success in their businesses. He emphasizes the importance of identifying and separating work types within an organization, which can have a significant impact on productivity, retention, and sales. White believes that every activity in a business can be categorized as either a transaction or a project, and failure to differentiate between the two can lead to various problems such as rising switching costs, difficulties in managing teams, and a lack of clear measurement by senior leaders.
Transactions are tasks that are recurring, easy to measure, and completed in a day, while projects are done once or infrequently, hard to measure, and can take weeks or months to complete. White highlights the importance of understanding these types of work and the pitfalls that arise from switching between them. He gives an example of a grocery store employee who is interrupted from his transactional work to attend to a project, resulting in inefficiencies, performance issues, and challenges for both the employee and the manager.
By separating work types and ensuring that individuals are dedicated to specific types of tasks, businesses can reduce switching costs, improve on-time delivery, and enhance financial metrics around their activities. This approach also allows for a clearer understanding of roles, improved comparison of performance between individuals and teams, and increased productivity and efficiency. White emphasizes the importance of identifying work types to enable better management, measurement, and overall success within an organization.
For smaller businesses that may need to mix work types, White suggests blocking off separate time for transactional and project-based work, rather than trying to juggle them throughout the day. By dedicating specific blocks of time to each type of work, managers can effectively manage and measure tasks differently, using tools such as BI dashboards, gamification, scrum points, and burn-down charts to enhance productivity and quality. This approach allows for a more structured and efficient way of handling different types of work within the organization.
The ultimate goal of identifying and separating work types is to provide team members with clearer goals, increased happiness, and higher productivity and performance. This approach also benefits managers and directors by reducing foggy vision and goals, turnover, switching costs, and lost productivity and revenue. White believes that by implementing a structured approach to managing work types, leaders can focus on load balancing, stakeholder reporting, increasing transparency, and driving ownership, leading to greater success for the organization in the long run.
White envisions a future where AI and automation can reduce workload, friendly competition can increase motivation, and empathy and cooperation can keep everyone performing at their best for longer. By separating types of work, management, measurement, and philosophies, businesses can achieve clarity and higher ceilings for success. White’s work with MashTank aims to provide leaders with the tools and guidance they need to navigate the complexities of work types and optimize their businesses for long-term success.
