Busy and responsive
Fun fact: You. Can. Not. Have. Both.
The failure to realize this causes pain and suffering beyond belief.
We somehow all agree that it’s a good idea to be as busy as possible. On top of that, let’s only define “busy” as working on billable work. From this follows that to improve our process will not be billable, which is bad. And if you do happen to improve, you will work faster, thus reducing the amount of work you can bill, which is even worse.
Let’s think about the effect of all that for a second.
We now reward people for being ineffective and slow. Well done.
But.. but.. that doesn’t sound right. Being busy is good, isn’t it? We can’t have idle people! What would happen?! A more interesting question is what happens when all your people are busy. Imagine a call center where everyone are busy bees, currently on the phone responding to customers. Looks great for the manager who passes by. But what happens when a customer calls? Nothing, that’s what.
Interestingly, that’s exactly what happens when we ask IT to fix an urgent request too. First we tell them it’s imperative to stay busy at all times. Then we expect them to respond at a moment’s notice to new requests.
Good luck with that.
“I prefer to shop at Walmart, because their registers are always busy.”
You recognize the feeling from when you’re at the grocery store on Saturdays with three screaming kids. The registers are so busy the queue runs two aisles back. Is that a quality you value in a service? “I prefer to shop at Walmart, because their registers are always busy.” Of course you don’t. So stop doing that to your organization.
