From the outside, busy and productive look the same. A one-week exercise tells them apart: each person on the team writes down the work they did that no customer will ever see. What shows up on several lists is work the business created, and the business can remove it.
Asking people to go faster rarely helps. They are already fast at it.
What is the work no client sees?
It is everything from the enquiry to the finished job that a customer would never notice if it stopped. Some of it has to happen. A lot of it only exists because two parts of the business do not talk to each other.
The usual suspects:
- typing the same customer details from the job app into Xero, and then into a spreadsheet
- chasing a colleague for a number that lives in their inbox
- building a weekly report that nobody opens
- hunting for the latest version of a quote, a price list or a file
None of these is anyone's fault. Each one arrived as a sensible workaround on a busy day, and then it stayed.
What does it cost you?
Focus, first. Every retyped address is attention taken from the customer in front of you. Then growth: the team's week is full before any new work arrives, so every new job arrives carrying the same workarounds.
It also costs the people. Good people want to do the part of the job they are good at. A week of chasing and retyping is how they end up bored, and bored people start looking elsewhere.
How do you run the list?
For five working days, each person keeps a running list of anything they did that no customer will see, with a rough number of minutes next to it. Rough is fine. This is a list, not a timesheet.
Tell the team what it is for before they start: to take work off them, and nothing else. If people suspect the list will be used to judge them, they will write down what looks good, and the exercise is dead.
On Friday, put the lists side by side. Look for the same task on three or more lists, the same app in the middle of it, and the same handover where things wait. Those are the few jobs worth fixing first. Everything that shows up once is probably someone's personal habit, and it can stay.
Then what?
Remove the work. Do not ask for more speed. When the same details are typed twice, the fix is that they are typed once and every app reads them from there. When the report nobody reads takes two hours, the fix is to stop making it and see who notices.
Some of that is a conversation. Some of it is software built around the way your team already works, and before you hire anyone for that part, ask these five questions.
When should you leave it alone?
When the lists come back short and scattered, with nothing on three of them. That team is running well, and the better use of your week is winning more customers. The exercise is worth doing once a year even then, because workarounds creep back.
One step for this week
Start the list on Monday. Keep one yourself, too. Owners are often the worst offenders, and the team will take the exercise more seriously if yours is on the table on Friday.
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