Turning your back on breaks creates a false sense of accomplishment and impedes progress over the long-haul.
If the mother in this video keeps her back to the baby, she’ll be stuck in an infinite loop of refolding and putting away the laundry. She can’t afford to do that. She has a host of other tasks to complete. Similarly, your business needs to move forward despite operational breaks that are inevitable. So how do you fix this?
We believe you divide and conquer. We give you a team of process experts that can document and execute plays approved by the team they support. Something breaks, they have a play and handle it. If not, they escalate. You don’t worry about handling breaks at all.
Let’s say one of our teams supported the mother in the video. The mother puts away all of the laundry only to find that the baby has thrown some of it on the floor. A team member would execute the “Refold the Laundry” play. Now mom isn’t wasting her time double-doing. Dinner is not going to make itself after all.
So we’ve given mom back valuable time, but that’s not the end. One of the things that separates us from the herd is our focus on quality metrics and continuous evolution. By tracking the time spent by both our team and yours we can evaluate our effectiveness and identify additional time savings by supporting more of your task oriented workload.
In the example above our team member has a “Re-fold the laundry” play. But sorting, washing and drying the laundry is still on mom’s plate. With sophisticated metrics on the time mom is spending and the frequency the task occurs we can make an effective cost benefit analysis of our team taking on additional tasks.
Breaks are inevitable in any organization. How you choose to approach them determines whether or not they will impede progress. Turning your back on the organizational impact of breaks is an almost certain way to end up a stuck organization, where everyone involved from management to the team itself, is constantly frustrated!
Have you seen this in your organization? What else do you think contributes to organizations that can’t move forward?