Insights from Doing Someone Else’s Job
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POSTED IN MANAGEMENT AND TRAINING
by Brett Snyder
2:00 pm
BrettSnyder
It's remarkable how much you can learn by doing someone else's job for a few days. I did just that at Cranky Concierge recently and didn't expect it to be such a valuable experience. Sure enough, I think this is going to improve how things work in our company.
I've written about cross-training before, but that's not really what I'm talking about here. With cross-training, you need people to be able to do multiple jobs so you can shift the work around as needed. In this case, I'm talking about a more temporary situation.
People take vacation all the time, but our office manager isn't one of those people. He was my first employee in the company and he never takes time off. But this past week, I was happy to see him actually take an entire week away. But someone had to step in to do the basic functions of his job during that time.
Much of what he does is around billing/invoicing and managing of trip assignments (for example, which concierge handles which trip). He interacts with everyone in the company because of that, but no one else ever does the actually job he does. With him taking vacation, someone obviously needed to step up. I was the most obvious person for the job.
Since I've started building my management team, I've been able to pull myself out of daily operations more. That, combined with the fact that I'm most familiar with the work that he does, means that I was the best candidate to fill his shoes. I didn't do everything, naturally, but there were a few tasks I knew to be critical so I became office manager "light" for the week.
Before my first day was done, I found all kinds of problems with our processes. There are things we're doing that are inefficient. For example, when our office manager needs to charge a credit card for our service, the person who takes the sign-up doesn't always provide him with all the information he needs. That means a back-and-forth is required to determine the right card to use, where to send the invoice, etc. That's a huge waste of time. I also found big issues with how we set up communication methods for our clients. We need to have the right information and it's just not being provided in our existing process.
This might sound like an indictment of our officer manager, but it's not. The reality is when you do the same job for long periods of time, you get used to the routine. He's able to get everything done, and so he does just that. But the minute I stepped in as a fresh face, I could quickly pinpoint the inefficiencies and then try to work on them. I'm sure this would be the same in every job in our company. Getting a fresh perspective is a fantastic way to try to improve the process.
This might sound like I'm a big fan of consultants. After all, consultants like to tout how they can walk in from the outside and see something with a fresh perspective. But I'm not a fan when it comes to something that's core to the business like this. We need to have people who are closer to the process evaluate it. This is something I want my employees to handle, not someone from the outside who doesn't really understand how we work.
Fortunately, we have our big annual meeting next week, and this is going to be a topic of discussion. I'm looking forward to improving our processes so our office manager can be more productive and we can improve our accuracy. I'm not sure we would have achieved these insights if we hadn't had someone -- it didn't even have to be me -- step into these shoes.
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