Your entire staff complains that they are overworked. And yet, deadlines are being missed. Tasks keep slipping through the cracks, and it seems the whole department, maybe even the whole organization, is struggling to keep up. You need more people to help, right?
Not necessarily.
Allegories are all the rage these days, and so I submit the following:
An elderly couple hosted Thanksgiving dinner for their 12 children and grandchildren over the holidays. Well-raised kids that they were, everyone insisted on helping with the cleanup. They all brought their own dishes to the sink. Two returned to tidy up the dining table, and two went to work making coffee and putting out desserts, leaving 8 to wash the dishes.
One person operated the hot water, and another the cold. A third controlled the position of the faucet, while a fourth ran a soapy sponge over the dishes. When the sponge ran out of soap, a fifth person would dispense more. The sixth person was relegated to just holding a dish as it was being washed, turning it over at the appropriate moments, and then passing it to the dryer. Number seven dried the dish and passed it on to number eight, who put it away in the cupboard.
As you can imagine, dish washing went pretty slowly. Back the dining room, the coffee was made and desserts sat waiting to be enjoyed. Now grandma, seeing that grandpa was getting impatient for his cheesecake, says to her four grandkids sitting at the table, “Go on and give them a hand with the dishes.”
Ridiculous, right? But this is exactly how some businesses respond when deadlines aren’t being met–they assume that the only options are to add more hands, accomplish less, or simply live with poor quality work and stressed out employees. Hopefully, one of the grandkids will see the mess of people struggling around the sink and suggest a more sensible arrangement.
A comprehensive, top-down approach to optimizing your organization’s processes to be more efficient is called Business Process Improvement, or BPI. It involves honest evaluation of your organization’s goals and priorities, assessing the current state, and analyzing the system to identify weaknesses. And then, you fix them. Sometimes one simple change will do the trick. Sometimes it turns out that yes, you do need to add more people–and can now do so with confidence that it will actually help.
But it may be that you need to look at the entire system and make sweeping adjustments to people’s roles. (Tell half the dish washing staff to switch to packing away leftovers.) Or, if it’s a recurring problem, maybe it’s time to look into automating parts of the process. (Christmas gift idea! What’s the cost of a dishwasher divided by 12?)
Since the changes made based on business process improvement are so highly customized to your organization’s needs, resources, and constraints, they’re your best chance at getting out of “fire fighting” mode so you can focus on the work. If your employees are accustomed to doing things “the way they’ve always done them,” the process can be a bit jarring at first, but watching your work go from stagnant and ineffective to efficient and productive is an amazing motivator.