Top Time Tip #97
Do You REALLY Know How Efficient Your Staff Are?
5th December 2007
Powerful Productivity Tip From A Top Recruiter - How Linda Helped Her Team Save Hours Per Week
I've known Linda van der Velde, the source of this great story, for many years - she's always been a very efficient and effective woman.
Linda and her business partner Marie Howley-Watson are the directors of Team Recruitment, a personnel recruitment company that specialises in the freight, shipping, import/export and logistics industry here in New Zealand. www.teamrecruitment.co.nz
The company had recently introduced a new system. Linda and Marie began to suspect that inefficiencies had crept in: they noticed that people were creating their own processes rather than following the new format. Consequently tasks were taking longer than expected.
So, Linda set aside a day per week for two weeks to ‘shadow' - sitting beside some of the staff to see exactly what they did. She didn't interfere – just watched.
Major things she observed:
- Three or four of the staff were able to save about 2 hours per day each. As they'd been doing verbal reference checks they'd been spending unnecessary time making their notes perfect. However, the notes were only used internally. Perfection was only necessary for work going off the premises.
- Junior staff support their senior consultants via background research and preparation of CVs. Instead of giving their comments to the seniors via a quick chat and very simple notes they were spending up to an hour per CV on comments. The senior consultants then reworded according to their style – much of the hour per candidate contributed by the junior staff was a waste of time.
- New staff are given a script. However, what Linda noticed was that people were relying on the script too long. There's definite value in using a script as a training tool, but once a new staff member has a good grounding of the work she believes it's better to use their intuition. Encouraging them to let go the script led to better quality questions, better quality listening, and better quality results.
- Two senior consultants job-share. They were each spending at least 2 hours per week making comprehensive hand-over notes for their handover. When Linda dug a bit deeper she found that the necessary information was already being recorded elsewhere as the work was done. With a very minor tweak of the software, a report in the existing system was able to be adapted, saving the consultants nearly four hours a week.
Many managers would say ‘I'm too busy to sit quietly for 2 days and just watch.' Linda and Marie, on the other hand, said ‘We can't afford not to.' I applaud them on their astute use of time.
As a leader in your organisation, where's the pain?
- What two skills, if you were to develop them, would greatly improve your leadership and management outcomes?
- What are the top two management challenges you face with employees?
In order to go faster, first we must go slower
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