Ok so I have a tiny dilemma with my employees at my “Real” job, some of them tend to have very lengthy telephone conversations. Now, I don’t mind people talking on the phone (If fact if you had nothing going on outside of work I’d be a little concerned) but after someone sits on the phone for 20-30 minutes being completely unproductive I have to do something to keep the work moving without careless mistakes.
Now there are a few ways I can go with this:
- • I can go directly to the current culprit (since they all seems to do this from time to time) and address the situation (problem here is that different people tend to take advantage at different times so this becomes a cycle )
- • Publically announce the problem in my office (problem here is that everyone will look at the last person who was on the phone and they might not thing it applies to them)
- • The tactic I thought of was sending out a document (an email) because as I’ve learned, “if you don’t write it down it was never said”. This way they would be greeted to this email in the morning and even if they don’t think it relates to them personally, the thought will lurk in the back of their minds.
Ok, so I’m trying this tactic out tonight, I will keep you posted on whether this works or not (plus any backlash I receive). This isn’t an end of the world type of situation so I’m trying this out, hopefully it alleviates the problem without being a big deal. We’ve just acquired a few new companies so there is a lot of work to do, I need to keep people motivated so I’d rather “remind” them about a half an hour call rather then make a federal case at this point.
I’d love to hear about ways you might handle this situation and if you agree on my sneaky ninja tactic or would you have gone in guns blazing.
Without further ado, the Letter to my Peeps.
Hello, With the addition of (New companies that we acquired) (and everything that goes with that), the accompaniment of auditors and impending tax return burdens that we will soon face, I wanted to thank everyone for all of their hard work and dedication. With that being said, I wanted to mention something, since we have more work per person then we’ve ever had in the history of (Our Company), I wanted to ask that we keep personal telephone calls and text messaging to a minimum during working hours. With that being said, I realize that we all have lives outside of (Our Company) (I realize it may not seem that way at times) and I do realize that we are all professions (We all pitch in to make sure that all the work gets done), so I EXPECT everyone to make and receive personal calls every day, I know with Elvis (My one year old Basset Hound who ALWAYS gets in trouble !!) I’ll be getting my fair share, but if you can do me a favor and keep the conversations down to a few minutes that would be helpful, both for everyone in the department as well as for your own work. It’s very difficult to give your full attention to work when you’re on a lengthy phone call, so either work isn’t getting done or the potential for careless mistakes increases dramatically. To reiterate, I am very happy with our team. I think we really go above and beyond the call of duty and set the example other departments to model. So little things like long phone calls that interrupt us just enough to make a careless error is something we can easily prevent. Thanks, Scott
I went looking for Trouble...
Life without compromise SUCKS, but never compromise your values. (or you run the risk of living with regret and that REALLY sucks !!!)
~Scott
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