A few weeks ago, we talked about the importance of strategic delegation and how it might just enable you to enjoy a phone call free vacation, much less free up some strategic thinking time.
When I was in the photography software business, I quickly learned that photographers absolutely detest being pulled out of the camera room to answer the phone. Likewise, if I emailed them about something urgent (usually because they said it was urgent), they’d often respond hours later saying that they had been in the camera room and hadn’t seen my email.
It’s not as if they were hiding from us. Usually we were trying to contact them to help them resolve a problem, train them or answer a question.
But you don’t pull them out of the camera room.
The camera room isn’t a magical place, but it is where they make their money. It’s where the backgrounds, props, lights and cameras are. It’s where their clients are when they are creating their masterpiece, which results in revenue. They DO NOT like being interrupted while they are in there, just in case I wasn’t clear.
Technical jobs (programming, engineering, etc) work the same way. While performing detailed, highly-technical work; these workers despise being interrupted. We get into the zone, into a flow, we get clear, whatever you call it. Interrupting us from this work after immersing ourselves in it is expensive and annoying. It takes a while (15-20 minutes or more) to get back to the zone where we can be productive with all the right stuff in our head.
And then the door to your office opens because someone wants to know where the toilet paper is or what place we have planned for lunch.
In an instant, you’re out of the zone. Even if you aren’t “technical”.
Produce a Procedures Manual
One thing that helps reduce these interruptions is having a procedures manual. Just because it’s called a manual doesn’t mean it has to be printed. It might be a wiki or a really long MS Word document. It doesn’t matter as long as it is documented and accessible to anyone who needs to perform a task at your business.
This manual might prevent you from getting a call on a Sunday afternoon at dinner time because someone went into the office to plan their week (or pick up something they forgot), and realized that they don’t know how to turn on the alarm. Or the alarm is going off and the police are there and they want to know how to turn it off, so they call you while you’re in the doctor’s office, on the beach, etc. Worse yet is when they can’t reach you, so they leave without turning the alarm on, or similarly less-than-ideal situations.
Important Safety Tip
There is no process that must be done regularly in your business that is too trivial to leave out of this documentation.
Yes, I said no process too trivial.
One reason I suggest that is that someday you will have a new employee. They will start at the bottom. They won’t know anything.
And they’ll pull you out of the camera room (or your equivalent) every five minutes to ask you about this or that if you don’t have anything else (like a procedures manual) to provide this instruction.
Certainly there will be enough face to face contact as it is. In the old consultants’ home, you’ll hear us muttering something along the lines of, “What’s worse than spending the time and effort to train an employee who stays for years? NOT training them and having them stay for years.”
I know you’ll train them. Really I do. Still, there are things that simply shouldn’t require hands-on training. They might be performed by a temporary employee.
These tasks will often be mundane, ranging from opening the store to packaging to closing the store at the end of the day to turning off the alarm when set off by mistake.
Each is one less “really good reason” to pull you (or someone else) out of the zone.
Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a business, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site or contact him via email at mriffey at flatheadbeacon.com.