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No one wants to waste money paying their company employees to do the wrong, less effective tasks so how do these people end up doing wrong things? It is simple. It is not their fault. It is the fault of management that provides no guidance to those people. They are not told what is important in doing their job.
What are the most important aspects and which are less important? They have inadequate supervision and languish because of the vacuum of good leadership above them. Think of the key functions you want your employees to do.
If you are clueless, ask them to list what they are doing. If you do not know what they are doing, ask them to write down everything they do for a day or two, how long it takes and where they must go to do it and then hand the list to you. Once you get the answer to these questions, you can take corrective action. When you make these simple corrections, you will immediately boost profit for your firm.
Example questions to ask about key positions in nearly any firm:
- Collecting cash or filing? Is the accounts receivable person collecting cash or filing? Without being on the telephone or in contact with past due customers, the firm must borrow money on the line of credit from its bank and pay extra interest. The lack of cash because customers have not paid on time is very detrimental to growth plans, all because the clerk decides to get files off the desk versus making calls to bring in collections to the bank account. Get someone else to file; call and get your money. This is a no-brainer.
- Increasing production or sweeping? Is the machine operator making parts or does he stop the machine and do cleaning up around the machines? Do you want him to clean or produce? Rethink job duties if you are wasting a $20-$30 per hour skilled machine operator when a $10 per hour general production worker can pick up scrap, off-all and sweep for all of the operators. Keep the operators busy making you money. Take the broom out of their hands now and tell them they are to have the machine running all of the time producing quality parts. Keep the operators on the machine earning absorption and getting paid jobs out to paying customers. There are limited hours per day to run company machines. Make every one of those hours paying hours and not indirect idle broom hours.
- Selling to customers or typing data? Is the sales representative meeting with, or talking to a customer on a sales call which may potentially lead to the next top ten company customer, or is he manually entering customer sales orders into a company computer at subpar speed, a duty that any bright clerk can easily be taught to do starting today? Eliminate as much as possible, anything your sales people do that cuts their face time in front of a paying customer. Take these duties and start assigning them to other support people who do not necessarily possess great sales and marketing skills, but are much more computer entry savvy at a much cheaper hourly rate. The money you lose when sales people screw with computers is the opportunity costs, not just their compensation rate per hour.
- Buying smart and earning cost savings or not? Are your purchasing agents getting competing bids and negotiating savings for your company as they are paid to do, or are they performing other duties that clerks could perform? Think to yourself about every task they do and reassign them to others in your organization. Tell them now that they are freed up with more available negotiating time on their hands, request that they obtain multiple bids on their largest costly company purchases. Take the time they were wasting and have them invite five or ten new vendors into the office to discuss those firms’ capabilities and talk about how to get to lower prices (cost cuts or optimally margin improvements). These skilled negotiators buy millions of dollars of goods and services each year so giving them more time to further their knowledge of the marketplace is worth potentially huge cost savings to your firm. This potential profit enhancement is greatly diminished and far less likely to happen if those individuals are not speaking to vendors because of completing other irrelevant duties like filing, entering simple data, completing forms or wasting time working in the plant with inventory personnel.
- Maximizing revenues or losing opportunities? Are your firm’s billable hours near to the payroll paid hours paid for the week? For engineering or consulting firms, the key to the business is making sure that 100 % of all of the professionals’ paid time is billable to paying customers (i.e. lawyers’ hours, engineering hours, CPA auditors, environmental surveyors, tutors, nurses, etc.).
- Supervising or melting in with the workforce? Are your supervisors supervising or are they glorified mechanics, machinists, lawn care technicians, utility workers, office data clerks? You picked a person to help your firm achieve company goals. You did not pick them to do the actual work that needs skilled workers. You chose them because they are very knowledgeable about the operations and should be able to teach and monitor the progress of multiple workers, or hopefully you used those criteria. If you monitor your supervisors and find they have gotten themselves tied up back into running a machine, you do not have a supervisor, nor does the rest of your workforce.
Many companies simply promote good productive workers into supervisory roles and then do not understand why they end up making lousy supervisors. The difference lies in the person’s ability to monitor a number of workers and their progress and to evaluate that workforce and replace those that cannot attain the company goals or those who hold back the ability of the department’s potential because of their bad results or poor work efforts. Pick supervisors wisely and set guidelines as to what they are to monitor during their shifts. Show them charts indicating their group’s productivity or net profit achieved each month. Give them black and white guidelines to follow and report to them regularly their good or bad results. Your supervisors should be monitoring their employees and the productivity of those people, not running equipment.
- Answering telephone calls and impressing customers or not? Your receptionists must be the voice of your company and it should be clear, friendly, and on the telephone within a few seconds of any incoming call. When a call must ring multiple times before being answered, the caller wonders what the rest of the call will be like. If your receptionist tells you he or she cannot answer that quickly because you and five other people have him or her assigned to filing, completing reports or sorting office supplies in the nearby closet, you risk angering customers who do not want to wait. A supervisor should not have allowed this position’s responsibilities to be diluted with other nonessential duties thereby ruining the goodwill he or she can provide by quickly answering the telephone. If you want, assign duties that do not distract from this position, but only for a moment and that do not take them away from the switchboard and the ability to transfer calls to the right party. Ask the receptionist everything they currently do, cross off anything that takes them away from answering in three seconds or less and reassign those other duties to those who do not normally speak with customers.
- Delivering like clockwork or arriving hit and miss making customers wait? Do your drivers know to make customer deliveries first, and then do product pickups from vendors last? This may not be always possible given different routes, but your number one directive to drivers is to always deliver early or on time. They are never to deliver late to a paying customer. If you do not differentiate the difference between the two types of trips, they will not do it either. Teach your drivers not all trips are equal. Tell them to notify your dispatcher immediately when they realize they will be late for paying customers, regardless of what they have to do to get this done. Be the market player that has a rock-solid delivery reputation, one that a customer can always depend upon.
- Quick reaction on returns or do your slow workers anger your customers even more? When customers return your company’s rejected or flawed goods, their experience must be as pleasant as possible because they are already upset by the waste of time the return requires on their behalf. The last thing you want of a customer who has returned goods is to make them wait. Teach your employees (i.e. receiving dock employees, quality control technicians, returns desk personnel or your customer returns people on the telephone) to immediately display sympathy and genuine courtesy for the customer returning goods. This sale went wrong for some reason so regardless of the type of rejection (i.e. wrong size, wrong box, broken product, missing parts, no instruction manual, lousy assembly, expired or spoiled product, bad finish or color), teach your employees to handle these transactions as courteously as possible as quickly as possible. Remember you have already disappointed the customer once so do not do it a second time when he returns.
- QC feedback or no time to save money? Does your quality control department track all rejects by reason for failure, employee name, machine center, process, or any other particular data field unique to your company? If they claim they do not have time for this tracking and data collection, ask them why and what other duties they are performing. You cannot afford to continue to fail parts or make bad product and not know who is at fault, what machine or process is at fault or what bad material or supply item purchased from an outside vendor might be the reason. Rejected products cost money and need to be corrected at the source of the problem. If these exceptions to your production process are not tracked, you keep throwing money away. You continue to throw money away. If you want to change this, starting today, detail all of the tasks this QC person is currently doing and clearly mark those that have nothing to do with cutting production problems. Reassign these sublevel duties to someone else to free up the technician’s time. You should tell the person that every rejected item gets logged in and tracked with the results published to the department heads on a regular basis (or more frequently if deemed necessary). If you do not do this now, try issuing a report daily to see what trends show up.
- Technicians, service or follow-up delivered early or late? The concept of doing things for your customer on time or before should be ingrained into the job descriptions of all of those who make commitments and deliver to the customer. When service is scheduled, the technician should show up on time or a little early. When a product is going to be mailed to a customer, it should show up on the right date or a day earlier than expected. As they say, “Always amaze your customers”. When a customer leaves a message, the follow-up call should be immediate or at least within the time frame that is promised by the company (i.e. return calls within one business day, return email responses within 12 hours, replace faulty products within five business days, return ship repaired items within three days or replace free, etc.). Become the company that can always be counted on to be there. Instill this critical service value into your employees. If you must, add its achievement to their job descriptions to be used for evaluation when considering merit increases. Make it pay handsomely for your quick responsive employees to follow-up like the company promises.
First have the critical person list everything they do, regardless of how trivial. To start any of these critical realignments in these positions, first have the current person list all of what they do throughout the week in detail. If they cannot tell you, have them document everything they do on a notepad for five days. Once you scan these lists, you will quickly understand why the company cannot improve given how jobs have slowly meandered off course.
Without direction, employees write their own job descriptions and you will not like them. Understand that without directions, employees define their own jobs since no one is telling them what needs to be done. No one is telling them what is important and has priority and what does not. You or your supervisors are failing.
What are the most important duties you want this person to do? Think of the key duties you want each to achieve, list those out and take the majority of the rest and reassign them to a lower level person. This is not difficult especially if these people are on any type of incentive program. They will tell you what stands in their way of getting the next sales order, collecting an extra $1M this week in past due invoices or anything else that is defined for the position.
Fill up the employee’s extra time with those most critical duties. When these tasks are reassigned, tell the participants who have more time that you now expect an increase in sales, more parts produced per day, increased cost savings, an increase in the speed of cash collected and a general positive increase in the things that are important to the long term financial health of the company. Be very clear what are the person’s priorities and must be done first before anything else.
