The Daily Grind

How do you cope?

I run (maybe it would be more accurate to say am loosely responsible for) a back office.  It provides a service to an organisation. 

• It doesn’t talk to customers
• It doesn’t make sales
• It doesn’t drive revenue

It is one big cost.  A lonely place to sit on any profit and loss account.

What do I have to do?

My job is to make sure that the department can cope.  The better we are at coping with the demands that are made of us the better the quality of the service we provide. 

If we do what we said we would do, when we said we would do it, then everybody is happy… Well nobody complains… Which for me, amounts to happiness.

The complication

Unfortunately, people will keep adding new ever more complicated tasks too our to do list.

As our workload goes up our ability to cope goes down. Life becomes harder and harder.

The solutions

When this happens, there are two simple ways to improve our ability to cope.

1. The first is to increase the capability or capacity of our staff. Hire more people and train them.  The more staff we have, the easier it is to cope and the better the service we can offer. 
2. The second is to improve our systems.  The slicker our systems, the more we can automate and the less work-arounds we have to do.

Unfortunately both extra staff and new systems cost money.  Remember I am already a big fat cost in somebody’s P&L. It is really hard to lay my hands on any more cash.

A balancing act

We are one big machine that sucks up money and throws out a service.  In that way we are no different from a hospital, rubbish collection depot or the back office of an investment bank.

That is my daily grind. It is one long juggling act, trying to cope with increasing workload, demanding customers and not enough money.

The worst thing

Now comes the nasty bit.  If we reach the point where we can’t cope we screw something up.  Some people have — rather unkindly — said that we are a screw up centre of excellence.

There is some truth in this hurtful remark.

• The more we screw things up
• The more work we create for ourselves trying to fix things
• The less likely it becomes that we can cope. 

Which in turn means… The screwups start to arrive with alarming regularity.  

This is not a nice place to be. It is why people with jobs like mine tend to come and go.  Things can easily become so bad that we jump, or maybe we just get pushed.

Teaching you to suck eggs

So far this post has been a long exercise in stating the blindingly obvious, but if you have a job like mine let me repeat myself…

Sooner or later your ability to cope will falter and you will spiral downward. When this happens there are only two ways to improve the situation:

• Hire more people
• Invest in systems

Both of these cost money that your boss won’t want to give you.  You are screwed.

But you knew that anyway.

Biting the bullet

If you — like me — like your job, or at least would like to keep it, there is a way out.

You don’t have to invest money in improving your systems.  It isn’t quite that black and white.  Systems don’t have to be fancy all singing all dancing I.T. solutions that cost millions.  There are a thousand and one things you could do to make things slicker. You could:

• Write a macro
• Clarify a help file
• Mend a faulty machine
• Lay your hands on some better management information
• Reorder your work allocation
• Stop a query

There are so many things you could do…

But you can only do these things if you take a little pain and free up some of your staff’s time to do them. Then invest the time saved in that small improvement in another and another and another. That way you will spiral up the way rather than down.

Like all good advice, this is easier said than done.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now

Chinese Proverb

If you enjoyed this post click here to receive the next

Image by martin.much