How many times have you heard or said, There's not enough hours in the day. I'll never get all the things done that my customers are demanding of me."
That's always a nice challenge to have in today’s society, especially in an election year with an unstable economy and high unemployment. Sometimes boatloads of work can overwhelm employees and hamper employee motivation to the point where they want to walk out the door. A boatload of work is a good thing if your inbound sales team is taught how to handle extremely busy customer service and that your executive team is making the tough decisions to continue to grow the company into the future. However, please always reinforce with your team to simply do what they do best - exceeding customer expectations - day after day - and to always do their very best while establishing priorities along the way. The challenge is how to balance a load of 500 pounds of work in a boat that will only handle 250 pounds.
Sometimes the boat just has to get bigger. Accuform Signs has purchased additional production floor space to allow us to handle more and more work. This includes the relocation and restructure of some of our work flow and relocation of certain functions of our production process. This requires “changes” that we've talked about in previous blogs. You'll never get a different outcome if you don't change the recipe. So we're changing the recipe and getting some fabulous results. The account managers here, who are the first line of customer interaction, are feeling the additional weight of demanding customers who need there signs and labels NOW. I consistently reinforce with the team to simply do your very best and that there is absolutely no substitute for a quality job. Nothing will take the place of doing the job correctly the first time despite how much work is backed up. We often have but one single chance to win over the customer. So that means give it 110% on every single order regardless of size.
Additional resources have landed here in sales to help minimize some of the pain but it will be a few weeks before the new employees are up to speed and in full sales production mode. We welcome our new account managers to the team, and welcome customer feedback as we grow.
So when you have the nice challenge of boatloads of work, it's important to acknowledge the employee's hard work and they realize they must to do their absolute best every day.
How do you encourage and recommend dealing with boatloads of work with your employees?