Overworked?

Employers are looking at ways to eliminate unnecessary work.

Team members began meeting biweekly to identify and cut out redundant work, Ms. Dunn says. They reduced unplanned phone calls and the number of sales-history and analysis reports they had to generate for salespeople, by referring requests to online resources. Customer-help teams also organized to back each other up on service calls, to avoid any one employee's getting backed up with complex jobs. Such changes helped enable Mr. Williams, who works in a pricing unit, and more than 30 others to get more done during the workday, he says. Cummins plans to expand the pilot to other teams.

Similarly, at Alcan, based in Montreal, a 2005 survey of 55,000 employees revealed dissatisfaction with heavy workloads and long hours, says Steven Price, a human-resources director. In a series of steps, a half-dozen top executives got coaching on how to be better role models, partly by speaking up about their own challenges managing workload. Executives began encouraging employees "to push back and say, 'I'm not working on weekends as much,' " Mr. Price says. In Alcan's finance unit, employees were discouraged from working Sundays. The mandate was one of many improvements in processes that saved thousands of hours of work annually.

Elsewhere, some CEOs are calling on employees to speak up about scut work. At auto retailer CarMax, Richmond, Va., CEO Austin Ligon begins some monthly meetings by asking, "What are we doing that is stupid, unnecessary or doesn't make sense?" The question draws a laugh and gets employees engaged in improving their workplace, he says. A Naperville, Ill., general manager, for example, created a new time-saving process for parking cars.

This indicates the importance of systems. A lot of the overwork results from tasks that creep into our work day and remain. The ad hoc becomes permanent. Periodically reviewing procedures can catch these questionable activities.