Monday, April 6, 2009

Efficiency – The “Autobahn” part 2

Here you are, at your desk (or computer), your personal Autobahn for your office traffic.

You’ve learned to differentiate between your Porsches and your Trucks. Now let’s go a little further:

You have an emergency vehicle with flashing lights coming up from behind. What does that mean for your regular traffic? It has to move over and make room for the emergency vehicle. As a result you are now embroiled in the emergency and your regular traffic is stopped.

Ever happened? If not, then don’t bother reading further. BUT, if you have emergency happen in your business or organization then read on.

Any emergency that comes up must be addressed and handled as quickly as possible. That’s the nature of an emergency. But what happens if it’s not possible to get it out of the way quickly? Then your regular traffic (office work) keeps sitting there until it also starts to have flashing lights going and now everything is one emergency after the other. That’s not fun anymore, but pure stress.

How to avoid that? Is it possible? That’s not something you ask yourself while you are in the middle of the emergency, but how about afterwards?!!

Take the time and review the emergency. Ask yourself these questions:

a. Are the types of emergency I have to deal with of a similar nature?
If the answer is yes, what procedures and guidelines can be established to get them handled quicker, reduced in frequency or even avoided?
Get those established and known by all involved.

b. Was this an outside generated emergency (i.e. did the customer call with a last minute problem, etc.?
If yes, what could be done from your end to anticipate or even prevent such emergencies? Could you have made that extra call that would have avoided this?
Is there anything else that could have been done?
If there is, write a guideline for it and put these steps in place.

c. Was it an inside generated emergency? Did someone drop the ball? Was something not done?
If yes, get the person that was responsible for it corrected and then write a policy that would prevent this from happening again or get an existing company policy, which addresses that already, know and followed by all involved.

Having these steps done is going to reduce the amount of emergencies coming in (hopefully) and make work less stressful. Have more fun at work, ok?!

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