Originally published as Peeling Back the Five Layers of in a Restoration Business June 22, 2016 in Restoration & Remediation Magazine (R&R) By Jon Isaacson How many times a day does the phone ring and it's a customer calling wondering when your organization is going to get the work done, when the crew is going to arrive or what the schedule is? Is it more often than it should be? Who holds the responsibility in the organization to communicate these details to your customers? Before we start to point fingers, let's follow the sequence of information. Organization Layer 1 Our customer called the office because they have not been communicated with, the last person at the job was an employee who was there over 48 hours ago. We ask, why didn't that employee tell the customer what the next sequence of work was going to be? At the conclusion of our investigation into Layer 1, we are ready for a heated discussion with our lead technician assigned to the project. We say our organization values our customers, but we are not demonstrating this with clear and consistent communication. Organization Layer 2 We track down the responsible employee who was last at our under-informed customer's home and it turns out that employee didn't communicate scheduling details with the customer because that employee was not provided with sufficient information to intelligently pass along to our customer. While we were prepared to discipline this employee as the source of miscommunication, we discover that there are additional parties involved with this malady - there are more layers to investigate. In addition to this discovery, our employee brings to our attention that they regularly don't know what they are doing for the day when they show up for work. As an organization we would say we value our customers, we also would say that we value our employees, we may even have these values posted on our walls, and yet we are not communicating with clarity or consistency to either party. Organization Layer 3 As a manager, the frustration is turning is now bordering on anger. We march forward to discuss these disturbing findings from the previous two layers with our employee's supervisor. Rather than uncovering the head of the snake, we reveal that our production supervisor hasn't been clearly or consistently communicating scheduling or work details because they haven't been receiving them from their supervisor (in most restoration companies we are now at the estimator level/layer of the org chart). Our production team hasn't been communicating in the manner we would expect with customers or employees because they are flying by the seat of their pants with the work being handed down to them. We are uncovering that our issues are as much with systems as they are with persons. Organization Layer 4 Each layer has revealed an additional layer, managers who are willing to investigate may now be fearful of encountering additional worm holes within the system. Not us, we continue our investigation and gather the estimators into the conference room for the final tongue lashings. As a related side note, everyone serving in the 24/7 emergency response industry knows that work comes in at all times, in all sizes and has no mercy with regards to holidays or special occasions, yet just because we service emergencies does not mean that we shouldn't have as clear a process that we can develop. Our management team unravels the layers of investigation stemming from the call received by our confused customer, the estimators relate their challenges in working with how the work flow is initiated. Work flow with relationship to how assignments are handed out, especially when our organization is serving the needs of clients who are all in various degrees of distress, is essential to setting our teams up for success. We are faced with a reality that our response process may be broken or at least damaged and needs some TLC in order for our team as a whole to be successful. If we value our customers and we value our employees, we need a system that communicates with clarity and consistency. Organization Layer 5 The investigation goes full circle and we have determined that there are issues related to a lack clarity and consistency in the work flow process which is affecting us at every level. In order to fix this, we will need to address the system from top to bottom and will need every layer of our organization to be invested in the restoration of our process. Communication is our organization showing our customers that we value them. Clarity and consistency is our organization showing our employees that we value them. Scheduling is the result of a commitment to preparation for success and a successful scheduling system enables everyone on our team to communicate with clarity as well as consistency. Our efforts to create a system of clear and consistent communication from start (receiving a request for service) to completion (creating a happy customer) will require intentional efforts as a workable schedule will not create itself. The reason we spent all these words (all this time) just to establish the problem, is that while scheduling should be the foundation for any service organization, the commitment to clarity and consistency is rather uncommon. Often we get so wrapped up in the emergency nature of our business, that we forget to build around our values. When a customer calls with a valid complaint, this is an opportunity for some honest organizational evaluation as well as a wake up call for action. What Must We Do? Property restoration as an industry requires multiple aspects of technical knowledge in our fields of multiple service offerings as well as communication of multiple work details across multiple data entry points to keep multiple parties involved with a given loss updated on work progress. Clarity At The Point Of Work Intake Do we have a consistent process for gathering as much information as we can when a call for service comes in? Regardless of who answers the phone, we should have a clear and consistent process for acquiring the details necessary to set our teams up for success. When we answer the phone, we communicate to our customers that we care by getting the details right and we communicate to our service employees that we care by providing them with the details they need to start a project off with good information. Clarity At The Point of Work Initiation The reality In emergency response to disasters, work comes in at all hours of the day as pipes break, fires occur or a host of other scenarios play out for homes and businesses in our area. Because of these contingencies, our schedules can never be fixed to the point that they cannot change at a moments notice. As such we always have to build into our schedules a certain amount of flexibility. Our production managers have to be aware that they cannot send all of our resources to the furthest reaches of our service territory and still be able to reallocate personnel to respond in the middle of the day to a customer that is in need of emergency services. We have to be honest with our customers about what we can and cannot do as we have to fulfill our prior commitments while evaluating our abilities to service new ones. Being busy is a good problem for any organization, this usually means we are growing, but being chaotic is unhealthy and will lead to failure. Clarity Within The Organization Establishing a visible joint schedule for our organization is an essential means of assisting all of our teams to prepare for the day ahead while enabling us to update our customers with our strategy for keeping their project moving forward (read our previous article about visible schedules HERE). Our people deserve to know, as best as management is able to communicate, what their assignment will be for the following 24 hour period so that they can mentally prepare and ready their teams to respond to our customers needs. Our customers deserve to have consistent communication of job progress and to know when strangers are going to be in their home. Find the medium that works for your team, but make the schedule accessible and visible by all in the organization as this creates great accountability through transparency. When the concerned customer calls to ask about their job, the person answering the phone should be able to say, "Let me pull up the schedule. Yes, I can see we are scheduled to be at your home between 11am and 12pm today, would you like me to get ahold of the technician who will be responding or the project manager assigned to your loss?" Clarity Within Your Work Communication For our team, we inherited a system of carbon copies for printed work orders (or field scopes). Carbon copies served a purpose at some point in time...a point in time right around when the dinosaurs became extinct. We were able to adapt our hand printed work orders (penmanship is a barrier to clarity) into a Microsoft Excel format so that they could be typed - allowing us to ensure they were readable and savable which allows us to track and reference these forms. The first order of the work order is that in order to be effective the work order must be legible, must have sufficient details and must be executable by the team members assigned to the tasks. Notes on a piece of paper are useless unless those composing the document have been intentional to be clear with those who will be touching the project. As our system for work orders evolved we wanted our system to be easier to input and more readily shareable by our entire organization. We needed a medium that would allow team leaders to communicate effectively with team members the details of work scopes and resource allocation. We looked into mobile and desktop applications as well as cloud based systems, most of the ones that were the most appealing were also fairly expensive. We experimented with free versions of popular systems but found many of them to be a time consuming venture that did not have the return that we needed, especially with our shorter term projects. Our schedule needed to show management where our fleet would be assigned, which personnel would be responding to an assignment and what production tools would accompany that crew to complete their tasks. We found that some of the best resource were those that we were already utilizing (see a fun video we made introducing our simple systems HERE). Google calendar is an effective means of creating a shared calendar that could be viewed by anyone in the organization at any time with features such as assigning a color to individuals to enhance the ease of visual review. (We gladly borrowed this aspect from a local plumbing company who showed us their production system). Through the shared calendar, each technician had an email that would show up in their email as well as their calendar with details such as the job address (which assists with OSHA compliance), the job number, contact information for the customer and a detailed scope of work written out for each day in the body of the calendar notes. Team members that wanted printed copies for their folders could have those in their hands and those that were savvy with their mobile devices always had records for reference. Each organization is unique, for us the values we are building around are: 1. Our schedule should be visible - anyone in our organization should be able to see where our resources are assigned at any given time (to the best of our ability) 2. We want to show our customers that we value them by being clear with our communication 3. We want to show our team members that we value them by being clear and consistent with our scheduling Clarity and consistency in communication requires the commitment of everyone in the organization, top to bottom - from the point of receiving a call for service to the completion of a project. We have to be intentional about improving our systems as the systems (good or bad) do not create themselves. Our systems may never be perfect, but we will reap what we sow. If the phone rings more often than it should with confused or upset customers, follow the layers to yourself and get to work on fixing the problems with the system.
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Like many, I discovered this image through social media where it was originally attributed to the recent events in #Charlottesville, Virginia. As many have since reported, the law enforcement uniforms seem to be older than 2017 and the origin of the photo has been tracked down to an incident in Gainesville* from the 90s. While that piece of information as it relates to facts is important the picture holds power in the sense that it captures the tension of our current reality in the United States. In my view this picture screams to the responsibility and high calling of parenting. The age-old question of nature verses nurture is being challenged in this photo as the child has no concept of what they are wearing or representing and curiosity is driving the young one to cross the line of philosophical division that their parents are raising them under. The photograph stands as a piece of history as well as a moving piece of art with themes of innocence, racism, humanity and the tension that still exists in our society. That this picture is possible in modern and progressive civilization is disturbing to say the least. And yet, if like me you are disturbed or surprised perhaps we should do a better job of listening. We have come so far and yet we have so much further to go. Rather than become bleak about the implications of this photograph, the power of the image should speak to all parents in relationship to their essential work in shaping the foundation of values for those developing minds in their care. The negative messages in our culture have so much volume and frequency that it is difficult not to lean towards a fatalistic view of humanity. Yet, there is great hope in this same photograph in that first there is a force within this young child that transcends their social programming and secondly, as much as parenting can be a foundation for negative messaging it also has great potential for positive momentum. If you are a parent and you wonder how you can make a difference in the world, your greatest force for good in the world is developing under your umbrella of influence. A child’s nature includes a proclivity towards being a stinker which all parents are familiar with, but the roots of racism have to be watered (nurtured) by family, friends and social affirmation. Even though parents are tired from the 24/7 duties of parenting and may doubt whether there is much more that can be done with the limited time that they have, there is hope. By being intentional with those essential years that the young humans in our care are within our direct sphere of influence we can have a significant and enduring impact on making the world suck less (#MTWSL). If you are a parent who is doing their best to handle their business and raise humans that will be a force for good in the world – keep doing good things! *From what we could find, this photo originated from a KKK rally held on September 5, 1992 and is credited to Todd Roberston, read more from Poynter HERE. In order for something to be a priority, that thing by definition must be of elevated importance. If everything is a priority then nothing is a priority and life slowly begins to lose meaning. So, maybe life doesn’t lose meaning when we fail to prioritize but life certainly struggles to find any sense of order and we struggle throughout the day to gain traction towards our goals. If you are in the habit of planning out your day, prioritizing your tasks and being productive with you time than you know the struggle that often occurs when there are too many fires too put out. If the village (your plan) is burning, there is only one hose and a limited water supply – where do you start? The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. - Stephen Covey Those who prioritize live in reality. Success starts with planning, without a plan there is no target. There is an ever widening expanse between the plans we make and the completion of those goals, if we do not make changes to get ahold of the void it will grow daily. That gray area in between reaching our destiny and falling into the expanse requires adaptation through prioritization. The plan is the intentional process that flows from our vision and through execution we move towards our intended outcome. Project management must always allow for flexibility as emergencies arise, components do not always function perfectly and elements outside of our control impact our trajectory. Prioritization is an essential mechanism that keeps our efforts on course and prevents adaptation from spiraling out of control. There is more than one way to find yourself trapped in the void of failure. As all entrepreneurs know, you live and die by your ability to prioritize. You must focus on the most important, mission-critical tasks each day and night, and then share, delegate, delay or skip the rest. - Jessica Jackley Create a daily plan – be intentional about how you are going to move towards your goals Execute your plan – allow for flexibility and be prepared to adapt to the obstacles life throws at you Prioritize your plan – keep yourself on vision and hitting your targets by governing yourself If you are not in the habit of creating a daily plan for yourself, you are running in a hamster wheel that you will never get out of. If you are in the habit of making a plan but you do not allow for flexibility, you are headed for a heart attack. If you are in the habit of planning and adapting but you do not prioritize, you have a better hamster wheel than most but the hamster wheel is running you. If you have a vision, make a plan and are intentional about hitting your target then prioritization is the methodology that will enable you to make your time effective. If after planning, adaptation and prioritization you still cannot get ahead then you will need to make changes to how you approach your tasks, for example get help or say no to projects, or else your hamster wheel will soon detach and you will plunge into the abyss. For an example of how this is put into practice with project management, see how one team does so by making their schedule visible (HERE - includes Video). What have been some of the key lessons you have learned about prioritization? Connect. Collaborate. Conquer. More money equals more problems? But everyone thinks money solves everything, and no one believes The Notorious BIG is a prophet. Yet, the only power money has is to solve money problems of which money is often the culprit. If you have bad spending habits adding more money to the equation can be like adding fuel to a fire, you just keep burning through those dollars until the fire is out of control. Sports Illustrated confirmed in March 2009 article that 78% of NFL players and 60% of NBA players go bankrupt within five years of retirement (Torre, 2009). We want money because we think it solves problems but poor money management is a black hole that can consume exorbitant amounts of cash. If we didn't have money problems would money be as important as it is? "Who covets more is evermore a slave." - Robert Herrick The love of money is the root of all evil. Is it an argument of chicken or the egg when you parse the difference between the love of money and money being the root of all evil? Money itself is neutral, yet even the richest people and the wealthiest countries still have major issues and would tell you they are concerned about money. If there is a money pit, money itself is not the answer to fill the hole as there are other issues that have to be resolved before those voids will heal. We love money because we long for acceptance through status, we crave power and yet we don't want to build either through the long road of influence - or it seems that the world doesn't honor the honorable path. To the victor goes the spoils and so we spoil in the proceeds. "Money often costs too much." - Ralph Waldo Emerson Money itself is an exchange system that replaced hard value in trade items such as food or cattle with objects such as gold, paper currency and now plastic. Being content with what you have, building value through positive impact and building influence through relationships. It all sounds so ideal. Yet, whether your goal is to lose weight or to pay off debt, there is no miracle cure - it's one pound at a time, one dollar of debt at a time through change of perspective, change of heart and change of disciplines. Train yourself to think differently, begin to act differently and bring yourself around people who will positively encourage as well as hold you accountable. "Don't let making a living prevent you from making a life." - John Wooden Referrence: Torre, P.S. (2009, March 23) How (and why) athletes go broke. Sports Illustrated. Retreived from https://www.si.com/vault/2009/03/23/105789480/how-and-why-athletes-go-broke |
AuthorThoughts on personal and professional development. Jon Isaacson, The Intentional Restorer, is a contractor, author, and host of The DYOJO Podcast. The goal of The DYOJO is to help growth-minded restoration professionals shorten their DANG learning curve for personal and professional development. You can watch The DYOJO Podcast on YouTube on Thursdays or listen on your favorite podcast platform.
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