The Challenge

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These team members work in a high-tempo, highly reactive work environment with seasonal peaks and troughs. Their overarching goals were to achieve better work/life balance and become as efficient and effective as possible in their work roles.

 

More specifically, team members are managing high volume, multiple email inboxes, which creates challenges in balancing reactive, business as usual and longer-term project work to ensure all are actioned and completed on time and in full. Laser-focused prioritisation is critical in these roles, particularly as the work landscape is in perpetual motion with ongoing changes to goals and priorities in response to media or more senior officers.

 

Stakeholder engagement across federal government, political and State bodies is critical to these roles. This means that team members can work across multiple projects and teams, which, involves many meetings on complicated and complex issues. The challenge here is to determine which meetings are important and impactful and how to make each of these meetings highly productive with concrete outcomes.

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Our Solution

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Having gained a detailed insight into how the teams worked, we recommended the PEP Program. 

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Armed with an understanding of the type of work the participants do, the environment they do it in, and the challenges they face from pre-program consultations, we recommended the PEP program.

 

Three teams of 6 participants applied the PEP principles, work tools and language to reach their goals of achieving better work/life balance. They increased productivity by optimising their efficiency and effectiveness in their roles and as a high-performing team.

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The Outcome

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As a direct result of attending PEP, participants reported they are completing an additional 2.8 hours per person, per day, of work on their high-impact meaningful work: Big Rocks.

 

Each group of 6, therefore, is now generating 16.8 hours of increased productivity per day, the work of around two additional colleagues, and the program pays for itself in about 4 weeks with ongoing return on investment for the remainder of each participant’s work life.

 

PEP has supported these team members to achieve their goals. The groups reported an average overall improvement in efficiency of 60% with more work successfully completed in work time providing a better work/life balance.

 

 Inbox management improved by 41% with a 61% improvement in the use of workflow from inboxes and a 29% reduction in procrastination. The teams report being 29% less reactive and spending 29% more on their Big Rocks or key priorities with a 25% improvement in managing and tracking tasks supporting them to deliver high quality work on time and in full.

 

Comments from the participants include them feeling ‘in control’, ‘more structured’, ‘keeping better track of tasks’ and ‘improved prioritisation’ to ensure they are focused on their high return, important and meaningful work – Big Rocks.

 

The changes in work habits, driven by the PEP principles, has given these team members control over their work rather than having the workload control them. They reported a 13% reduction in levels of stress or anxiety. PEP has provided a foundation for increased resilience and wellbeing.