Managing for Efficiency -- Part II

Frustration would be the best way to describe it. I have just spent the past 2 hours going through sheets upon sheets of non-sensical numbers. Only one person managed to enter all the relevant information in the corresponding column. Everyone else seems to think it's an essay format!

It has been a very frustrating summer period. I did my spring cleaning and fired two people I found to be incompetent. So there goes my 'Spring Cleaning' (done in the summer!). Now I need to help the survivors reach their potential.

Motivation seems to be a problem, since I do a very poor job at it. So, I will have a couple announcements to make:

1. You screw-up in a way that costs us time to fix a problem, you will have to fix it yourself, on your own time. Small mistakes are understandable, but we are not going to waste 3 hours to fix a mistake that shouldn't of have happened. You come in during your weekend and fix it yourself.

2. A cash-prize will be given every month for the 'employee of the month'.

Hopefully this will provide some motivational juice.

As for the efficiency evaluation, I am still working on it. Hopefully by the end of this week, I will have a clear picture of how many hours are being wasted. I can aready see quite a few wasted man hours. I'll be back with the results soon!

Managing for efficiency

I have always liked to give people freedom to move, freedom to create... but then I realized that this would only work when the work culture has an appreciation for this freedom. In this region, it appears that this is not the case. Freedom means you can sit around as the walls around you come down and do nothing.

Slight change. I have just instituted the most rigorous procedure for accountability. No, I am not trying to catch people screwing up. We have an operation that is very time critical. Everybody's output matters. Every second makes a difference (literally). The problem has been that something would go wrong and nobody would care to do anything about it. They do the minimum effort. Not good enough for me. The minimum effort may be minimum at my competitor's, but to me that is below acceptable.

So, in comes the task sheet. Everyone is instructed to write down every single task they start. This is done of course with the start time and end time, etc. Naturally this is not the kind of thing you give to every member of your staff. However, if you have a very time critical type of operation, you might want to consider giving this a go (to the department involved in this process only of course). I would never advocate giving such a task to a receptionist for instance.. there are better ways of dealing with that.

This has resulted in the following:

• Grumbling. Everyone's unhappy with having to 'waste' precious time in writing down pointless figures (all of a sudden people are aware of time!)
• Behind my back cussing (everyone thinks I've either gone mad or have just begun to show just how mad I am) -- they certainly think they can do my job better by now

Of course, I am expecting this. What I am expecting to follow is this:

• Everyone will be intimately aware of how much time they spend performing any given task
• Everyone will be able to determine if they are doing a good job, better job, worse job, etc. without having to have someone else tell them
• I will be able to identify areas where productivity can be improved

I actually expect to have an improvement of 70% of productivity from my own calculations. Currently, our productivity is sitting at about 350% compared to our competition. This is great for us of course, but I think we can do sooooo much better.

These numbers may be fine today, but as we grow, scalability must come to mind. In any operation such as ours (or any service-based firm), being able to scale your services is extremely important in a growing market. Remember, most of your expense goes in compensation packages to your staff. So that's probably a good place to make as efficient as possible.

In a month, I will be reporting back if what I have done brought back the results I am expecting or not.