Category Archives: Writing

Beyond being one of the five purported love languages, quality time can be used to create an analytical framework for groups of people, the way humans treat the other humans within, and the way individuals think about getting things done. In short, annual organizational efficacy (OE) is determined by the aggregate quality-time-time the members spend (essentially the area under the curve of the quality-time function measured from Jan 1 to Dec 31 of a given year on an hourly basis, where the quality-time function is the total level of quality-time in a given hour, with quality-time represented by a number engagement points (a measure of self-efficacy), a number between -100 and 100, measured at the end of each hour of work, then added up and multiplied by the number of hours in a given workday for each person). OE’s units are thus efficacy-hours/organization-year. It may seem as though the time/time units would cancel each other out, but here we have a key apples/oranges problem with time. The organization’s time is represented by the denominator, as the organization does not measure time by adding up every person’s years, otherwise a thousand-person organization in 2020 would have experienced a thousand years. Efficacy, on the other hand, happens on the level of individual humans. The relative experiences of time and engagement must be measured in units that cannot be divisible by the organization’s more zoomed out view of time. And engagement can only be measured at points in time, about the past, through self-reporting (at least with today’s methods). “How engaged were you for the last hour” is a far more meaningful question for OE than “how engaged are you in your job”. Setting aside the practical challenges of actually asking people for their engagement levels with such frequency (perhaps a daily reporting, efficacy-days, or a weekly reporting, efficacy-weeks, could be sufficient), the relationship between engagement and efficacy must be proven. Self-efficacy is a level of belief in one’s ability to achieve goals and complete tasks and engagement is a measure of the level of absorption a given person in a given time period. This framework proposes that absorption leads to efficacy – an absorbed person is effective & effective people are absorbed in what they are doing. People who are not absorbed by time during work are absorbed by something else: fear, anxiety, ego, uncertainty, boredom and may report low or negative engagement on an ongoing basis. What about the industry or category of the organization? What about the CEO? What about the other critical strategy and operational factors that lead to the efficacy of a given organization? I hypothesize that individual people can only find ongoing and momentary engagement in their work when they believe what they are doing can effect both the desired outcome of their job and a desirable outcome according their preconfigured notions of value. Engagement is self-efficacy across both personal-values-defined outcomes and manager/organization-defined outcomes, and when these two areas match and result in high engagement, organizations have high organizational efficacy in meeting both emergent (values-based) and externally derived goals (investor/board/customer/other stakeholder-based) objectives. So if an organization seems extraordinarily capable of adapting to its environment while maintaining a healthy coherence in actions, engagement and individual self-efficacy are high across individual experiences and throughout the hours of a year. If an organization seems stagnant, dissonant, or brittle, it may be that the humans across the organization spend too much of their time afraid, worried about their identity, or anxiously twiddling their thumbs, making it a critical moment to start spending more quality time with your colleagues.