disallowing the symptom doesnt cure the disease

examples:
1) Don't get yourself in a car accident answering a phone call or email from work while driving, nothing is that important. This is a message delivered against a backdrop of endless pressures that say that in fact, it IS that important, common sense would have otherwise allowed these people to let it go to voicemail, so there is a far greater disease out there that only this much overwork can try to mask.
2) No overtime is allowed. At first this can come from a seemingly forward thinking person, in a company where the cost of overtime is not at all the issue, a smart manager might think, hey, this just masks the problem, if we need that much more work then we need more people. While that is true, disallowing the overtime doesn't overcome all the forces in the opposite direction that are against increasing headcount. You simply create new problems; poor service and employee burnout/turnover which leads to much more of both.
3)No IM/Chat at work. I was asked to block the use of this with technology, though I knew I couldn't I had to conduct a full project of exploring every method of doing so, once I was able to prove that if I did everything possible, most users would simply use the standard web port (80) and web based chat which required no installation. The assumption was that because this was available to people, they would chat with friends rather than work, if only it werent they would be 'forced' to be productive. This is a total management cop-out, just like micromanagement, and the notion of the cube farm visibility making the fear of over the shoulder drive by produce more productive workers.

Mandate thinking, deliverables and ownership. Never look at what an employee is doing just as you happen to walk by as any indication of their value, be clear on the net output you really need from everyone in the same job. if the average worker can make 20 sales calls a day then push for that, people who are slow, chat with their friends, etc... will have to skip lunch to stay on track and keep their job, but people who can crank out 30 (with the same success metrics of course) in half a day will naturally first take that extra time and play (let them!!!) but then they will get bored, they will start using the extra time to think up ways to improve things, or themselves, pretty soon they will approach you asking to be a team lead so they can show everyone how to make 60 good calls a day. Saying yes to that (and increase in pay to match, dont be stingy) has wide spread benefits. #1 is actually not what they will bring, but what the promotion says to the rest of the team, kick ass and you will be left alone to play and you just might get a fat promotion. more carrot less stick.

try to keep the mandates to a minimum, pushishments even less, always keep in mind that everyone is watching, when you finally give up on that 12 call a day employee, dont fire them, it scares people, maybe they dont know about the 12 calls or in some cases you cant tell them. instead, be as positive as you can. Tell the low producer that you feel badly that though they have tried, it just seems like sales is just not their best skill, move them to a lower and preferably generic role, maintaining the supply room or something else far more visible to all that is not humiliating but doesnt allow for slacking, manual labor, unpleasant but not really punative, with this move, tell them that you dont like to fire good people just because they arent good at one thing, you want them to think about where they want to go in the company and what other area they would like to try, and how they could prove that they would do well in that area, they could be too creative to make 60 calls a day, they might make a brilliant marketing exec some day and if you gave them that chance when they were failing so badly, think of the loyalty you'll gain.

back to the symptom. leave the symptom alone, its a band-aid and it will go away on its own when you solve the real problem.

also, on each:

off hours urgent work is a culture, you need to get right to the core of your business to solve this one, teach people that you need them working at this pace in 20 years so if they feel pressured to work that much they will be rewarded not punished for bringing it up, pointing out the cause of the problem, possible solutions, like, you know if I had some help from y dept durning the day, I could free up some time to document this stuff in a more user friendly manner and then when group z runs into this issue while I am on my way home at night, they have a system to consult instead of me, far more accesible and consistant that would I could give at random, on my cell/blackberry on the freeway.

overtime, very often a cure for many ails, if its constant then it is a problem that needs a root solution, but your business should have peaks that you dont staff for that this can take care of, plus, people who are paid hourly do not make enough money to exist in this world, period. So for them this is a huge benefit to be able to make a little extra once in awhile to catch up on bills or finally get the car fixed. As much as possible it should be voluntary, again a mandate can cause so much more trouble than its worth. I once got an email that said, no one leaves this building until this problem is solved. my immediate thoughts were, um, 45min after normal business closing my sons daycare closes, after about 30min thereafter they call child protective services who will take him from me and charge me with neglect. my only logical conclusion was to leave on time and start looking for another job, when in fact I could have come back with my son, or better gone home and worked from home, or gone home and come back, I could have worked through the night but what I couldnt do was meet that mandate of not leaving til it was solved. I hated that manager deeply for such rash mandates, very harmful to the company. They eventually lost me when they could have actually gotten so much more from me, if they had simply asked, instead of told.

IM/chat has many very positive values, in my investigation I found that most employees were actually chatting with each other about work and not socially, they were saving phone calls or trips down the hall for quick questions, they were forming a real team building tool. Some chatting with family or friends, usually not long and usually just to make plans for off hours errands or other plans but also just social chit chat, being allowed to do that made them more satisfied with their job, they felt trusted they didnt feel micromanaged, they all had deadlines and quotas to deliver on, so they kept it short, eek, 20 more to go, gatta get, chat with you later. (for the record I didnt read peoples chats but easily could have, I was a trusted middle party and could hang on the cube wall without changing their behavior)
this goes for the phone as well, I had a VP once who was infuriated that the same employee kept making long distance phone calls to her husband on company time on company phones, he told the CEO that he could block her or track her to solve the problem, the CEO said, do nothing, her husband and children moved to a nice island and she can only see them on the weekend once a month because she stayed back to take this job and help build our company, if this is all it costs me its worth every dime. The VP blocked her anyway, we paid for very expensive one on one support with a vendor, she was to call them for the appointment and couldnt, we had to pay, reschedule and it delayed our product rollout. The VP had his ass handed to him.

Notes

Information Asset Management.

defign what is an information asset
data, knowlege, procedures, technological and human connections that are;
necessary to fulfull business practices that directly or indirectly increase profit.

compare value of non-information assets, inventory? machinery
how much do you spend (time and money) protecting/insuring those.
could your business survive the total loss of all non-information assets - probably
could your business survive the total loss of all information assets, very unlikely

basics and not-so basics of digital data and the warm fuzzy of the offisite tape backup.
documentation and backups both must be designed around how they will actually be used when the time comes. backing up everything just to be safe can result in loss or delay of recovery of important data.
live backups, wan topology and other big words

human data, your only real asset, the difference in loss between digital and physical assets is pale in comparison to the difference in the loss of digital and human assets.
understanding what a human assets is so important that you can actually fail miserably at the rest and be very successful. if you watch carefully you will see that how things actually get DONE in your business do not follow your org chart, policies, job descriptions, job requirements and least of all the degrees behind the humans who get the work done.

Subtitle: the memo you never got why you need to take a different view of qualifing potential employees. you must do the hard work of qualifying the qualifier or you must do it yourself; A Harvard MBA does actually have some totally stand alone merrit, still, its worth your time to make sure the persons last name isnt bush and didnt just get pushed through as a favor to daddy but most likely they busted their ass to get that MBA, candidate 2 however started and ran 3 coffee shops in highschool, starting with 5,000 startup captial from their lawnmowing mutal fund savings which they paid back in 6 months and managed to sell the business when they were 19 for $38,000 mostly for the name, locations and equipment were leased, inventory was minimal and they used the money to buy a long lasting and very nice car and to pay their way to move into the big city (your city) with enough to live on for 3 months to find that perfect apprenticeship.

person 2 is both younger and less 'educated' than person 1 but if you got the memo; you should be conflicted. person 1 has proven that they can take instructions from well established leaders of industry and education, good guidence, help from peers with the same goals, and other peoples money that they wont likely have to pay back, and succesfully turned something into something more, person 2 on the other hand is going to make you money, you wont have to tell them how, you wont have to give them a budget you wont have to send them to training, all you have to do is tell them what you do and ask them to do more of it and do it better, they have already proven that they can deliver the goods with little to work on, give them a budget, they can do even more, the real reason you wont hire this person is that you need to represent to other people who have not gotten the memo that you have a highly qualified team. dont feel bad most companies are forced to hire both, why? because person 1 went to ma-n-pa state college for agricultural effectiveness where they slept through class, did 2 hours of work 3 nights a week, partied till they puked and couldnt solve a problem if their life depended on it, but they have that piece of paper that business has become accustomed to accepting equally as 2 different dollar bills, only one of them isnt worth the paper its printed on. sure, the very best programs at the very best schools and graduating at the top of your class, and in particular, grad school does give you a good idea of some accomplishment but still no guarantee of quality just a higher probability, whereas the other 100million degree toating employees to be may or may not have a clue at all, their degree wont tell you that. you have placed your #1 filter criteria in the hands of an accredidation orgainzation that has to meet the demands of federal financal aid guidelines, this whole scheme is no less hollowly aristocratic than the spelling of though, as in 'though I didnt finish college I know the history of that laim attempt to keep the -lessor- people out of the system of goods'.

my examples are extreme but they are very real, to some degree - no pun intended - every new hire you make is affected by this bias. this is not about doing the right thing for the poor guy who doesnt have a degree, screw him, this is business, its about your bottom line - isnt it? so you go on hiring a mouth breather for $80k then, if you are lucky and have at least half a clue, an undiscovered rocket scientist for $45k then to justify this massive waste you nullify the value of the rocket scientist by making the mouth breather his boss, if you would have just hired jonny prop head for $125k to begin with you would have made your investment back hand over fist in no time - after all he has already proven he can do that without any micromanagement or you wouldnt have hired him at all.

things you need to get rid of entirely:
middle management

meetings

paper

faxing

cubicals walls and doors