Get Inspired by Your Worst Employees

The virtue of laziness has value beyond any other in the post-industrial world. While the reliably hard worker will follow your processes and file your paperwork properly and generally give you a sense that all is right with the world, the lazy one in the corner will push the limits of good sense. The lazy one will always be late with the expense report, will frequently "forget" to attend group meetings, and if your accounting clerk gets the entire sales package paperwork correctly completed from the lazy one, he will fall down dead.

It's the lazy one you have to watch. This guy (or gal) is gumming up your works. You probably had a team design your workflows, maybe a while back. You had a great system in place! This one lazy so-and-so comes in, knows better than everyone else, and throws a wrench in a well-running machine.

The lazy man vies with the industrious. - William Shatner

Worse yet, the lazy one is infectious. Not toxic, because you would deal with that immediately. Just infectious enough that you notice a general trend of slippage. After a few months, none of the expense reports are early, even if they're not all late. You hear a drumbeat in the back of your head. It might be a call to war.

But who goes to war against the lazy? Even thinking about it, you're sure you'd end up doing all the work and somehow the lazy one would get the victory. And for that matter, on what grounds to attack? You'll just hear the story you've heard a thousand times - how the paperwork is crowding production time, and consuming focus, and should be eliminated. And while we're at it, isn't there a better way to funnel things like sales paperwork through the organization?

And then it hits you. The lazy one is the best asset you have with perhaps the worst set of passive-aggressive communication skills on the planet. Observe the lazy one. See what lazy behavior patterns others in the organization adopt. If more than one person is willing to be lazy on a point, especially one of your star reliable players, you can rest assured that it's time to reconvene that process improvement team.

It is meaningless bustle that actually gets in the way of productivity. -Tom Hodgkinson

We are none of us perfect, and every process is a work in progress, always. Let the lazy show you where to focus to make your organization's operations as efficient and streamlined as they can possibly be.