Saturday, November 28, 2009
Q: My staff seem to get sloppy in accounts. They end up making elementary errors. How do I prevent this?
One of my favourite cartoons from around thirty years ago shows a comb on its back with its teeth in the air. A flea is running joyfully along bouncing from one tooth to the next. It says, “Life is easy when you know how!” Ahead there are several teeth missing.
Running a workplace brings the cartoon to mind every day. No matter what you do, the second law of thermodynamics trips into action. This, you will remember from a recent blog, if not from your physics’ text books, suggests that everything is going to break down eventually. Whether it is cleaning and tidying your room or asking for the accounts from a clerk, there will be a progression from order to disorder and even chaos. I suppose it mirrors life as we know it, Captain. My own existence seems to be pretty entropic in that there are bits and pieces of me breaking down slowly, including memory. But it’s important that the clerk gets the figures right, so what do you do?
All workers, when faced with humdrum repetition, begin to commit mistakes. Even airline pilots. The skill for the MD of a company is to reduce repetition and increase challenge for all staff. Challenge here is made up of variety. Different kinds of work at different times of the day. Different workers cross checking the clerk’s figures. Physical activity to compensate for hours in front of the monitor. There is nothing worse than predictability for the mind. The synapses become fixed and the person retreats into a fantasy world to escape, losing touch with the reality of his or her daily tasks as s/he, like the flea, begins to take the job for granted.
So, ensure that a worker knows what is his or her core work – the work that is essential to the company’s smooth operation - and then seek to embroider it with unlike activity. Stimulate the left and right brain, the physical and the mental, the emotional and the rational. Everyone should have a mix of business as usual and project work. That’s how staff and company flourish.
Not to do it is a form of abuse...
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