Workplace Prioritization: How to Redefine Urgency in the Workplace
One of the insults casually tossed around about younger workers is that they have no sense of urgency. According to Jamie Aitken, vice-president of HR Transformation at BetterWorks, younger employees are better at defining emergencies than their older colleagues. They will call it out when a false sense of urgency is created, something their managers may not like.
Common Triggers for a False Sense of Workplace Urgency
- Upper management (e.g. not a direct manager of the employee) sends out requests for updates on projects
- Management expresses open displeasure about something
- A co-worker is in distress about a project or issue
- An email or text after-hours, falsely elevates the importance due to the time it is sent
None of the above items requires dropping everything to address the task or problem, but many employees do, disrupting workflows and causing stress. When a worker doesn’t, they are often labelled as not having a sense of urgency.
While this perceived lack of urgency is often criticized, the reality is that constantly operating under a false sense of emergency is a silent killer of workplace productivity. When employees are conditioned to drop high-value, scheduled tasks to address a manager’s sudden, "urgent" request—one that doesn't actually impact the health of the business—their overall workflow is fractured. This reactive culture prevents effective task prioritization, leading to poor decision-making, reduced focus, and ultimately, a significant drain on company resources.
True efficiency requires a clear, agreed-upon framework for defining urgency, ensuring that employees dedicate their time to matters that truly move the business forward.
What is a Real Workplace Emergency?
According to Aitken, a workplace emergency is one that could immediately disrupt the health of the business. If, for example, a client’s marketing department has asked for an updated print asset, and their CEO notices that it has not been done, that would constitute a workplace emergency. Treating this as less urgent could harm the company’s reputation and cause the client to take their business elsewhere.
Small mistakes are not workplace emergencies. Aitken proposes that many companies treat every mistake as an all-hands crisis, which can lead staff to disregard actual crises. The “Manager Who Cried Wolf,” if you will.
People-First Managers Turn Mistakes Into Teachable Moments
When an employee makes a mistake, the responsibility for the mistake is ultimately their manager’s. People-centric managers bolstered by effective leadership training and focused on manager coaching, treat mistakes as an opportunity for coaching and training rather than as a crisis.
They understand that a punitive approach, common among legacy-style managers, not only stifles innovation but is a direct contributor to employee burnout—a far greater emergency than the initial error. If employees don’t have room to fail, they will never reach their full potential and won’t make strides that result in company growth.
Younger workers, particularly in Gen Z, know this and may react in ways that infuriate legacy-style managers by not being receptive to reprimands when they make a mistake. Aitken sees Gen Z workers as “rejecting chaos” in this scenario rather than being insubordinate.
Older generations, particularly Generation X, are also apathetic toward reprimands for minor mistakes, but frequently occupy management positions and can’t be as easily accused of insubordination. Instead, these older workers often act as human shields for their direct reports against what they view as minor reprimands.
Take Proactive Steps: How to Clearly Outline Task Urgency
To align everyone’s expectations, management should create a policy to determine the urgency levels for specific problems. A color-coded traffic light-type system, for example, could help visualize task priority. This can be implemented in project management software and used as a labelling system for emails related to the task or project.
| Priority Level | Urgency Status | Action Required |
|---|---|---|
| Red | Actual workplace emergency | Vital importance, all hands on deck. |
| Yellow | May lead to an emergency | Must be resolved promptly. |
| Green | Non-urgent | Normal workflow, no immediate action required. |
Managers and executives should then be coached to avoid labelling matters that are important to them, rather than to the company, as yellow or red. A simple system like this can go a long way towards helping workers prioritize tasks appropriately and avoid disrupting the entire business whenever someone higher-up has a pet initiative or concern they want addressed immediately.
Prodoscore can help you determine how productive your employees are, even sensing frequent disruptions caused by false emergencies. Our robust productivity monitoring system helps your people track their productivity and provides executives with vast insights into the company’s inner workings. You can track healthy workplace dynamics and use them as a model for your workers, get AI recommendations for improvements, and much more. Contact us for a demonstration.
