Is everything a crisis? Make a list of your current
“crises” at work.
Who put these on your agenda and who decided they
were crises?
I worked for a time as a manager of a technical support
team at a major computer manufacturer. My staff supported 7,000
desktop computers with a staff of 20 technicians. This was
accomplished through a system of priorities, which I have since adopted
for my own business.
There are four levels of priority. There is no “2.5”
or “1.5” or “double-x crisis.” Just four options. And the
customer--the person with the problem--gets to choose from three of the
four priority levels.
Priority 4 means that there is a
problem. It should be addressed as time permits or when you are in
the area fixing something else. Might be upgraded to Priority 3 over
time.
Priority 3 means there is a
problem that should be addressed soon. Most problems are Priority 3.
Priority 2 means there is a
problem that needs immediate attention. This is the highest priority
that a user can assign to a problem. It generally means that someone
cannot get work done (their computer won’t start, email doesn’t work,
etc.).
Finally, there are Priority 1 problems.
Priority level 1 is not assigned. It just happens. I like to
tell people that P1 problems “assign themselves.” By this I mean
that major systems are offline. The entire network is down. Or
the Internet connection has failed. Or, there’s smoke coming from
the back of the server.
When Priority 1 problems occur, the company is losing
money. People can’t work. That’s a crisis.
Certain people want to insist that their problem is
“Priority 1.” For example, when the boss’s printer doesn’t work.
I have to insist that this is a Priority 2. It is urgent and I’ll
send someone right away. But I might have three Priority 2 problems
at once. They are addressed in order of severity.
The core of this system is a simple three-tiered
categorization that everyone understands. Problems are either high,
medium, low priority (2, 3, or 4). A crisis is outside anything you
would expect and it affects a large number of users (Priority 1).
At first, I was leery to delay responding to a client.
Then I realized that they know some things are lower-priority. I’ll
get a call, rush out, and be told “Oh that’s been a problem for months.
You didn’t have to come out today.”
Then, when I had a crisis at one customer and needed to
cancel an appointment somewhere else, I always found them understanding.
In fact, they’d tell me “If our server goes down, I hope you’ll be here to
fix it."
People instinctively know the relative priority of
problems.
And yet most of us get caught up believing that every task
on our list is high priority--in fact that it’s a crisis.
Most of the blame for this goes to bosses. If a boss
never says “this is high priority” or “this is low priority,” the worker
has to decide. Workers share blame as well because we don’t
communicate. We don’t ask about relative priority. And we tend
to throw everything on the high-priority pile.
In my business, the distribution of problems looks
something like this:
P1 - Crisis
1%
P2 - High Pri
15%
P3 - Medium
74%
P4 - Low Pri
10%
Most people, when asked to apply a simple scale, will put
most of their problems in the middle. Unaddressed problems will
eventually move from P3 to P2 or P4 to P3.
I think most of us assume that this distribution is more
like 80% high-priority and 20% crisis. That’s overwhelming. If
it were true, then you should be overwhelmed.
But it’s not true.
Too many businesses create a culture in which “everything
is a crisis.” How many times have you heard someone say “He put off
everything until the last minute and then it’s a crisis”? He tends
to be the boss and the crisis puts several employees in an unproductive
tizzy.
When everything is a crisis, people feel undue stress.
People get sick or burned out. The company pays for this when it has
to constantly train new people to replace those it burned out.
And the boss never learns! Why? Because she
sees a flurry of activity and a constant buzz of people rushing around to
get things done. It all gets done. And the boss confuses
activity with productivity.
All too often we believe that an office of stressed-out,
overworked employees is a sign of success. In fact, it’s just a
house of cards. But the house never comes crashing down because we
manage to replace the worn-out cards.
It is an absurd, wasteful way to run a company.
I’m going to STOP now. If you’ve had more than one
job, you’ve seen all this before. And right now you’re about to tear
into a fit of rage over the memory of a really bad experience. . . .
So we’ll stop.
Got get yourself a cup of tea or decaf coffee. Relax.
Maybe go for a walk. Come back when you’ve calmed down a bit.
