Weekly Thoughts

A Case Study in People Management

We currently don’t have a junior person in the office to handle getting, sorting, and scanning the mail. So, in the meantime, we do that. Yes, we understand opportunity cost, return on time invested, and all that good stuff. We also understand it’s not forever and that if we don’t get the mail, it won’t get picked up, and we’ll miss paying bills, which ultimately is our responsibility. So we just get on with it. 

 So, last weekend we brought home a big stack of mail. Since we were stuck at home in a snowstorm, on a whim, we told our eldest we’d pay her $5 if she opened and scanned in the mail for us. In theory, we have a decade of experience managing people. Turns out, we were about to make some rookie mistakes.

Here is a post-mortem of our performance: 

Failure to Properly Scope the Role: Turns out, our youngest also wanted to work (… or just make money). Being three years younger, he has fewer marketable skills than his older sister, so it was initially unclear whether there was even an open position in the mail department. This led to angst. Fortunately, after some conversation (and initial resistance), the eldest agreed to adjust her role to be responsible for scanning while the youngest would be responsible for opening.  Lesson: Thoughtfully outline duties, responsibilities, and openings before assigning jobs. 

Failure to Provide the Right Tools: Turns out, if you’re six, opening envelopes by hand is hard. There was frustration and some ripped letters. Eventually, the dimwits in management realized it might be easier if the mail opener had access to advanced tools – namely, a butter knife – to open the envelopes. Productivity increased dramatically after implementing this new technology.  Lesson: Invest in the right tools for your team.

Failure to Properly Train: Some multi-page scans were out of order or upside down. That’s a failure in our training protocols and an obvious opportunity for improvement. Lesson: A couple of extra minutes of upfront training prevents downstream errors. 

Failure to Manage Payment Terms: After attention started to wane, we had to articulate payment was contingent upon project completion. Payment was all or nothing – there was no opportunity to earn $2.50 for doing half the work and leaving to practice gymnastics and hockey in the basement. Lesson: Outline payment terms upfront. 

Failure to Manage Compensation Expectations: We had thrown out $5 for “helping with the mail”. What does that mean exactly? Turns out, that could mean a lot of things. We were thinking of a $5 labor expense for the entire project, but didn’t communicate that. About halfway through the project, it became clear our daughter was locked in on earning $5, regardless of how many other contributors were present. And our son assumed he’d also earn $5 because that’s what his sister was getting. This was a problem. What to do? The easiest thing to do was to just give them both $5. But, that would increase our out of pocket by 100%. So, we figured we’d honor our $5 commitment to our eldest because that is what we had initially told her, and then boldly told our son we’d give him $3 for opening the mail because his job took less time, required less skill, and was therefore less valuable. 

Ha. One can imagine the response. After a 20-minute detour into a passionate debate about compensation “fairness”, it was determined by an external consultant (a.k.a, “Dad”) to be acceptable if our son’s scope of duties was expanded to earn the extra $2. Thus, younger brother was promoted to “assistant to the scanner”, and put in charge of organizing the post-scanned items and disposing of any recyclable materials. Lesson: Outline the compensation terms upfront, before any work has been done, with a clear description of expected responsibilities, outcomes, and payment timeline. 

Clearly, the at-home mail processing department is not yet firing on all cylinders. As believers in Chasing Better, we’ll aim for some serious process improvements with the next batch. We’ll define roles, communicate compensation clearly, and train our team up front. We’ll see how round two goes! 

Have a great week, 
Your Chenmark Team
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