Your Hyper Responsiveness is Expensive and Dangerous

In today’s business environment there is an expectation among workers, particularly remote workers that can be really damaging to your business’s overall growth and well being. And that danger is hyper-responsiveness. It can rear its ugly head in the form of emails, chats, slack, team messages and meetings. It’s the expectation that you should be able to respond to a message at a moment’s notice and if you aren’t always “on” it means that you aren’t doing your job properly. And a business leader, these expectations can be expensive and dangerous.

It’s Expensive

Let’s say that as a manager you are concerned with how fast somebody gets back to you.

“Joe, I sent you that email seven minutes ago.  I still haven’t heard from you.” 

In your mind, you have visions of Joe sitting on the beach drinking a cocktail. Or maybe he has taken a long lunch or is napping at his desk. Whatever he is doing right now, he clearly isn’t working right? What if Joe’s in a meeting with your number one customer working to delight them and to increase their purchase frequency by 50%, which might mean hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of revenue to you? Do you really want Joe to interrupt his best attention to take your email? Of course not. But if you create a culture of hyper-responsiveness in your business that is the message you are sending to your team.

Now of course, you need some base level of responsiveness but the hyper part of the equation isn’t needed for most businesses. As a team, you can communicate with others when you are free and open for emails and chats and when you have focus times and encourage them to do the same. That way no one is spending time sitting around waiting for a response on a Tuesday morning when you are working on higher value tasks.

It’s Dangerous

Be careful about hyper-responsiveness. There’s a tendency in a remote world to make hyper-responsiveness a proxy for whether or not someone’s doing their job. When in reality it should be the value someone generates. Everyone on your team should know what they are on the payroll to create, and how is that being measured. That’s what should be your determiner of a person’s worth to the company, not the fact that they’re getting back to you immediately. If someone’s getting back to you every time you send them a text or an email within 30 seconds, what it tells you is they are so mired in responsiveness and hyper-responsiveness that they’re interrupting everything else that they could be doing that would create value. And could actually slow your growth down and be more dangerous for your business than the alternative.