“The Urgent Vs Important Dilemma Will Remain:" Sunita Rath

There is always a blurred line between what is urgent and important. How do you differentiate between the two?

Urgent items are always focused on the present moment: they need attention right now, and if they are not dealt with, the consequences are mostly faced in the near future. They require your immediate attention, and their consequences can be swift. Typically, you can’t avoid urgent tasks. We occasionally notice a pattern in the types of urgent tasks, and this should be addressed systemically to avoid recurrence of similar issues.

Important items, on the other hand, pertain to medium/long-term pursuits and items of strategic value. Important tasks are tasks that contribute to your long-term values, mission, and goals. Sometimes an important task can also be urgent, but this is unusual. Most such tasks have less time-pressure and permit detailed analysis and planning. When you’re focusing on an important task, you can work in a responsive mode, which can help you stay rational, calm, and open to new opportunities.

By giving the employees the context of what is critical and non-critical, as well as what is important and urgent from an organisational point of view, leaders can facilitate this decision for them, but ownership remains with the employees. One step that we, at Aegon Life, have taken to help employees decide between urgent and important is developing organisational KRs (OKRs) and Functional KRs and have aligned the goals of employees with these KRs. The OKRs are reviewed on a monthly basis and tweaked/changed as necessary. The employees are required to do monthly check-ins and have periodic feedback sessions with their respective managers/stakeholders, as appropriate. This process has helped align the workforce with organisational KRs and functional KRs.

This dilemma of urgent Vs Important is not going anywhere, and each individual is responsible and accountable for making the right choice and finding the right prioritisation at a given moment.

It is equally the responsibility of both leadership and employees to balance critical and non-critical meetings in order to maintain a sense of belonging to the organisation. Your take on that.

Indeed, both leadership and employees are equally responsible for balancing critical and non-critical meetings. At Aegon Life, we have adopted this general principle that not more than 60 per cent of working hours are for meetings and interactions. In addition, we have the Golden Guidelines, a mechanism for ensuring that employees are able to maintain their work-life balance and are able to distinguish between critical and non-critical meetings. It includes “no meeting hours” (which is before 9:30 am, after 6:00 pm, and between 12:30 – 2 pm) and “no meeting day” (full day on the second Wednesday of the month). It also provides for not feeling pressured to check/ respond to late evening emails unless they are flagged as urgent.

Before sending the meeting invites for any task, one should consider, “Can it be done effectively without a meeting?” and if the meeting is still needed, review if all participants are required, considering their role and specific contribution expected in the meeting. The invites are to be shared at least a week in advance, and preferably at least 2 weeks in advance for meetings longer than 1 hour. Meetings scheduled for more than 30 minutes may be accompanied by a pre-read and details on the purpose of meeting the participants. Meeting requests should be responded to immediately by ‘Accept/ Reject’ to enable meeting organisers to figure out alternatives at the earliest, if required.

For example, we conduct OKR Review meetings on a regular basis where expectations are clear on the accountability of a particular KR in terms of primary responsibility, and the rest are invited as optional invitees, who have the choice to decide which meeting/KR review to attend based on what they feel is critical from their perspective.

To help understand this better, we have advised employees to try MS MyAnalytics to analyse/ comprehend their work pattern and make informed decisions.

Many important tasks involve tolerating thinking about things that could go wrong, which is anxiety-provoking. What approach would you suggest to manage such feelings?

While it is natural for employees to focus on completing all important tasks, they also need to have the understanding that not everything can go right every time. There would be situations where things could go wrong, giving rise to anxious moments. As an organisation, we encourage a few practices that equip the employees to handle these situations effectively and enable the organisation to support them at such times.

We provide a safe space for employee to try new ideas, fail fast and learn from it and move quickly. There is no judgement or adverse implication if an employee chooses to attend or not attend a meeting where s/he was either optional attendee or was not the main stakeholder.

(The full interview appeared in the Jan-Feb issue of BW People publication. For more such exciting stories, do follow BW People and its social handles)