It doesn't matter who started the fire. But dealing with last-minute crises in the workplace - better known as firefighting - can eat into productivity and leave both executives and employees more than just a little burned out.

"Usually, fires are caused by procrastination, people putting things off - especially managers - and then realizing that the deadline is right in their face. They go into panic mode," says Doug Stewart, president of Markham, Ont.-based Vantic Consulting Inc., a firm specializing in executive coaching and improving workplace effectiveness. "But when we spend most of our time fighting fires, we rarely get a chance to focus on anything that is strategic or long term."

Since key business objectives are strategic, rather than urgent, they can continually get moved to a backburner when an office focuses on managing crises. This, in turn, makes it harder to remain competitive, as creativity and innovation fall to the wayside.

Stewart says one of the biggest problems in trying to stop office firefighting is that it tends to fuel more crisis.

Doug Stewart, president of Vantic Consulting Inc.

"The other thing about firefighting is that it is a very addictive behaviour," he says. "As human beings, we naturally gravitate towards the urgent. It gives us some immediate satisfaction to solve a whole lot of urgent problems quickly."

Resolving this overall issue is all about getting people to develop new habits and to do the jobs they were originally hired to do, rather than tossing those items aside in order to deal with the latest "fire.”

But in today's workplace - where the business cycle has sped up as technology and email increase the pace and instant expectations abound - that's easier said than done.

"I have spent a large part of my career believing that it was a badge of honour to be short of time, overwhelmed by emails, and have a calendar that was choc-a-block with meetings. It was correlated with being important," says Peter Wyles, vice-president and general manager for a diabetes product line at Bayer HealthCare LLC in Sunnyvale, Calif.

"I finally realized that in 'being important,' I was sacrificing time with my family and time to effectively lead my organization and its strategy."

Wyles was working for Bayer's Consumer Care division in Toronto when he heard about Stewart and his work. And even though he had implemented his own system for handling things, it wasn't effective enough.

"There was a lot of firefighting - an enormous bulk of emails that came in on any given day because of all the people working under me," he says.

"I was dealing with that at the moment; if it didn't get dealt with at the moment it fell to the wayside. My schedule was crazy. Everyone had control of my schedule, but I didn't have control of it. And it wasn't just the (email) inbox, it was the hard copy as well."

Following Stewart's suggestions, Wyles began implementing a series of changes. He now blocks off the first two hours of his day, 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., for planning. He deals with situations when they arise and he delegates more.

"Doug puts it into a good perspective," Wyles adds. "From his experience, you've got to deal with things as they come up, you can't just pile them up. You're an executive and people count on you and your response time.

"In my prior role in Canada, I tended to do most of the work for my people, and that just killed me. Doug came in and got me to delegate.

Fundamentally, it changed me from being a salve to the organization, to being a leader of it and determining what I do and what they do."

For Stewart, it's all about getting people to develop new habits that will work with the systems that individual uses. "We help them simplify the way they work and give them the habits they need to reinforce those systems."

Lorraine Irvine, vice-president of safety, wellness and total compensation at Toronto-based Ontario Power Generation (OPG), says there was no particular turning point that made her decide to contact Stewart.

"At the time, I was just vice-president of compensation and benefits, a slightly smaller job (at OPG), says Irvine. "I'd spent a couple of years in the same position; I had realized I was not being as effective as I needed to be with information requests and information outflow.

"I thought I was firefighting. I was always just trying to catch up with what came in and forgot what was lurking in my inbox. I never felt on top of all the issues I had to deal with, because I didn't have good control over the information coming into the office."

Even though Irvine developed her own shortcuts and had an assistant, it wasn't sufficient. "I would leave at the end of a long day not feeling I accomplished what I needed to accomplish, not knowing what the next day would bring," she says.

Stewart worked with Irvine, checking out her work routine and process for handling both paper and email communication. As a result, a filing system for paper documents was set up where hot files were within easy reach, but not necessarily on Irvine's desk. An electronic filing system was also set up in Microsoft Outlook and emails were either archived if needed for reference, put into an action file or simply read and deleted.

"Doug was able to show me lots of useful tips in Outlook that I hadn't learned being a normal user. I wasn't aware of the power of the software," says Irvine.

More importantly, adds Irvine, her administrative assistant was included in the process. He worked with both to determine what they were spending time on, as opposed to where they actually wanted to spend their time.

Even though Irvine and Wyles have made great strides in their workplaces, Stewart says the trend toward office firefighting will never be fully extinguished. The goal, he adds, is to get people to turn the tables - so the fires don't take over.

(Laura Severs can be reached at laura@businessedge.ca)