Service Industry Lessons

The epic movie Lonesome Dove had its moments. One of the best was this little lesson on customer interaction in the food service industry…

Risk Management

Quit Your Day Job

Getting a job is easy… compared to quitting one. First, there is the connotation of the word quit. Nobody likes a quitter, right? Sometimes, it’s not a matter of your failure, but your inability to continue. Many people have asked me about how they should know when it’s time to part ways. To me, it’s something that you just know. Nevertheless, here’s the top ten list from About.com.

These are the top ten reasons why you might want to quit your current job. These are difficult, if not impossible, work problems to solve. You need to look out for your best interests. Your job consumes too many hours of too many days of your life for you to stay where you are if you’re miserable. No excuses, now. If these problems exist in your current job, make a plan, and quit your job.

1. Your company is experiencing a downward spiral, losing customers, losing money, and rumors of possible closure, bankruptcy and failure prevail.
2. Your relationship with your manager is damaged beyond repair. You have sought help to mend the relationship but you know it is too damaged for recovery. (Perhaps you were untrustworthy, missed work on too many days, or the manager acts like an untrustworthy jerk.) Whatever the reason, the relationship is irrecoverably damaged.
3. Your life situation has changed. Perhaps you have married or had a baby, and the salary and benefits no longer support your life needs. You need to move on to better opportunities to support your family.
4. Your values are at odds with the corporate culture. Perhaps your company is egalitarian and you believe in assigned parking spots for salaried employees. Your company does annual employee satisfaction surveys and you think these are a waste of time. Your company is hierarchical and you want to influence every aspect of your job. No matter where the clash is occurring, a lack of congruence with the corporate culture will destroy your attitude at work.
5. You’ve stopped having fun and enjoying your job. No matter what changed, when you dread going to work in the morning, it’s time to quit your job.
6. Your company is ethically challenged. Perhaps the managers lie to customers about the quality of the products or the day on which the product will ship. You become aware that the company is stealing information from competitors. Whatever the issue, don’t stay in an organization where your ethics are out of sync.
7. For whatever reason, you have behaved in ways that are considered improper at work. You’ve missed too many days of work, slacked off on the job, failed to maintain needed skills, and / or just generally developed the reputation of a loser. That reputation, once earned, is unlikely to change; you might as well quit your job, while you have the opportunity.
8. You’ve burned your bridges with your coworkers. Your group is not getting along in an environment that requires people to work together well. Again, at some point, the reasons don’t matter; start fresh in a new job and resolve to not let this situation happen again.
9. Your stress level is so high at work that it is affecting your physical or mental health and your relationships with your friends and family. Watch for the signs of burnout and if they can’t be cured, move on. Read this article, Tips for Managing Stress and Change at Work for ideas about managing work stress.
10. And the top ten reason to quit your job? You are unchallenged, need more responsibility, and seek opportunities that just don’t exist for you in your current organization. You’ve explored the current and potential options, and they are limited. It’s time to quit your job.

Workplace Screwage

We all get it. The economy is in the crapper. Jobs are hard to find and sometimes hard to keep. Don’t be stupid if you decide to take a job that wants to pay you as a “contract” employee. In many cases, this is a recipe for disaster. What’s the big deal… Employers like a contract situation because all they do is hand over a lump sum to an employee. No federal income taxes, social security taxes, unemployment taxes, etc. to be held back from a paycheck. This also means no employer share of the taxes being paid. But it also means that the employer loses a lot of control that they might not really ever do give up.

Although there are complex terms and matrices to determine an employee’s status, the basic theory is that a contract employee is hired to complete a specific job. The employer has little, if any, control over how the job gets completed… He’s just paying for the completed task. If he is directing the employee, as in: when to show up, how long to stay, how to do the job.. the employee is really not a contract employee. If I hire you to paint my house, I’m paying you to do just that. You pretty much do it how you want and I pay you the agreed amount. You are responsible for all the tax ickiness. But if I hire you to show up at 8:00am and leave at 4:00pm, to paint specific tasks as I assign them… then you really may not qualify as a contract employee.

Beware of being paid as a contract employee when you do not qualify. At some point, things may go south. You may get fired for some silly reason. You’ll want to collect unemployment benefits, right? There aren’t any unemployment insurance premiums paid on behalf of contract employees. Dang. But if you really were not a contract employee and you are entitled to benefits (and a refund of a bunch of taxes)… you can file a few forms with the IRS to get an employee status determination and then do a little re-filing of your taxes. Of course, this might wind up having your boss paying for the original taxes he sought to avoid… and penalties and interest.

Stuffing Envelopes

I’ve just finished up a little mailing campaign for one of the enterprises that I am involved with. Every time I stuff an envelope I think of Sandi Stewart. She taught me how to do it right. What’s this about there being a right way and a wrong way to stuff an envelope? Yep. About 25 years ago I can remember walking past Sandi’s desk at the office. She was very deliberately folding letters and stuffing them just so into envelopes. I was kind of mesmerized with the diligence of what she was doing and actually had the temerity to ask why she was doing it that way. I was rewarded with a wry smile and a “Because it’s the right way to do it.”

Sandi went on to explain that it was important that the first thing a recipient sees when they open the letter was the sender’s name or letterhead image. And just as important was that the recipient should not have to work to see that. The B plan was to stuff the envelope in such a way that the recipient only had to slide out the letter and unfold once to see the name. The A plan was that the recipient merely had to slide the letter out. Most of us fold a letter with the text toward the “inside” of the fold and stuff the envelope. If you put the open edge of the letter situated such that the recipent has to remove the letter from the envelope, turn it around and open two folds to see who it is from… you’ve wasted their time. Sandi folded the letter accordian style and stuffed it so that all the recipient had to do was begin to remove the letter and they instantly knew who it was from. Genius.

Serial Litigants

Work… earning a living… being productive… All of these things have different definitions for many folks. Rarely will you find two folks who have a common basis for what they think “proper” work should be. That said, I think that many folks will agree that their is some common ground to be shared in the thought that work takes place when things of value are exchanged. I wash your clothes, you give me money. You tend my fields, I give you shelter. Establishing a quid pro quo is just one way of describing the work/value arrangement. But what about serial litigants?

What’s that you say? I am talking about folks who seize upon an opportunity created by legislation to use that legislation to earn a living. Huh? For the record, I am not coming down on those folks who cannot work and collect some kind of government subsidy. I am talking about those who turn themselves into well-paid champions of contorted regulation. Thomas Mundy, a beefy ex-contractor with longish brown hair and a daily routine of dining out and enjoying the ocean, spies an 8-inch concrete platform on which a woman in a dark-green sari has set up a table of sunglasses under an awning. “There’s nothing in there that I’d want to buy but this might be of interest to a judge,” 50-year-old Mundy, a paraplegic since a 1988 motorcycle accident in Maryland, observed with a knowing air. Mundy says he has filed more than 150 lawsuits in 18 months demanding damages from small businesses in violation of the exacting requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Attorneys representing those he has sued estimate Mundy’s proceeds at about $300,000 in little more than a year, and a similar sum for his attorney, Morse Mehrban, from Mundy’s cases alone.

This is not work. This is extortion.

Bear In Mind

There is absolutely no doubt that the United States is moving into a period of dramatic uncertainty. I wish the new President well (really) and hope he can guide us through this mess, but I have serious doubts that just one man is capable of piloting such a large boat, any man or woman. Everyone is on edge. And that is never a good recipe for a harmonious future. I think it’s wise to remember the immortal and sage words of Guido The Killer Pimp:

“Let me give you a little advice so you know. In times of economic uncertainty, never ever fuck with another man’s livelihood.”

Maybe the world should take a few hours off and go watch Tom Cruise slide across the living room floor in his underwear and pink oxford shirt?

Right To Work?

Hurricane Ike caused a lot of damage to Southeast Texas. The island communities, such as Galveston, were hit particularly hard. Most of the island was wiped out and many have yet to return. Especially hard hit was the University of Texas Medical Branch, John Sealy hospital. It’s a huge service provider and a huge employer. Ike caused an estimated $710 million in damage to UTMB, putting John Sealy Hospital temporarily out of business and saddling the medical school with a $40 million monthly payroll that included many with no jobs to return to. The UT regents authorized the layoff of 3,800 employees two weeks ago to cut UTMB’s losses and the administration laid off 3,000 over a five-day period that ended Monday.

That sucks. But is reasonable and prudent. I really do feel sorry for the folks getting laid off, but if there is no operational facility (they cannot maintain hospital status in many categories because of the damage), the patient base is severly curtailed (the reduced number of folks on the island provide a smaller base and that base cannot fully use the impaired facility), and, more importantly, the income stream used to pay the employees is gone… well, cutbacks are inevitable. It appears as if the laid off workers are being given 60 days of pay… being paid until the January 19th end of the line. Now, some of those who received notices are pissed. Why? Because they have to… wait for it… keep working until the 19th of January. Those workers think it is unfair that they have to do work (the facility isn’t completely shut down) until the 19th while others do not. In addition, UTMB is completely restructuring the administration and staffing and offering re-application to those who were laid off.

I’m trying to wrap my head around all of this. UTMB doesn’t have the money to continue full staffing. It’s going to take a good bit to fix the nearly 3/4 of a billion dollars in damage to the facility and the UT regents are acting in a fiscally prudent manner with state/taxpayer money to mitigate losses. They follow all the employment rules and regulations and even establish a program for re-hiring folks as the facility emerges from damage. I somehow get the feeling that these workers and their union leaders want their employer to just continue paying them for not working. It wasn’t the worker’s fault that a hurricane hit. It wasn’t the worker’s fault that there isn’t enough resource to continue operation. I get the feeling that they want to continue getting paid full boat until the hospital is completely back on line. Umm, no. Apply for unemployment benefits and start looking for a new job. While you are looking for a new job, you can collect a check every two weeks… after your mandatory waiting period ends after your last paycheck (which will be January 19th; this in known as payment in lieu of notice). I think the max that you can collect is $378 per week.

Let’s say that I owned a small coffee shop on Galveston Island that had six employees. The shop got leveled by the hurricane and there’s nothing left of my business. I intend to rebuild, but for now, I have no customers and no way to serve them. I let my six employees go and tell them to come back and re-apply when I get the shop rebuilt. Is there some moral or legal code that says I have to continue paying those six employees until the shop is rebuilt and reopened? How is this any different from what happened to UTMB?

Management Style

There are clearly two types of managers in this world: those that assign tasks and those that assign goals. It is also generally understood that the task master creates an unhappy work place, while the goal giver fosters the more productive arena. Why is this apparently so?

Let’s talk about the goal manager first. He/she specializes in putting together a team that is focused on achieving goals. A talent base. These goals are macro in nature and the manager doesn’t tell his team how to get there, just where there is. Increase sales, finish the building, make the customer happy. It’s up to the team to figure out how to accomplish the goals. This dynamic encourages dedication, innovation, and creativity. It also has a very real chance of failure if the wrong team members are chosen to participate. If they cannot step up, the goal will not be achieved.

The second style of management is the most commonly encountered “in the wild”. These managers do not want and do not encourage independent thought. They have spent a great deal of time and energy directing a program and the workers are cogs in the machinery of that program. In simple terms, the ownership of the goal is with the manager. The workers are expected to perform their assigned tasks in a specific way. This is the world of fast food, mall retailers and franchises. Unfortunately, while the short term success of this style in inarguable, burn out (for the workers and managers) is a common result, too. This is just not a long term growth/health/happiness environment. That doesn’t make it bad, just demanding.

So which is better? For the answer, I give you… it depends. Have a look at the concept of entropy, the tendency of a closed system to become more disorderly. Or put another way, a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder. Entropy is very closely associated with the second law of thermodynamics. Some argue that the second law of thermodynamics means that a system can never become more orderly. Not true. It just means that in order to become more orderly (for entropy to decrease), you must transfer energy from somewhere outside the system, such as when a pregnant woman draws energy from food to cause the fertilized egg to become a complete baby, completely in line with the second line’s provisions. Why the physics lesson? It’s important from a management perspective because it’s “rules” also provide a guide to manageing people in a business environment.

The task master system is a closed environment. Without the regular introduction of new energy sources, the closed system is doomed to degradation and descent into uniform chaos. In order to maintain the system, “fresh meat” is a constant requirement. New workers, new managers… the old ones will burn out or get fired and must be replaced.  This can have a relatively high long term expense associated with system maintenance.

The goal driven system has a high up-front cost. The reason for this is that “fresh meat” is heaped into the system in the beginning and these resources have the ability to inject new energy into the closed system as needed. People that are successful in this system create successful systems… and increase their own value. So much so that retention becomes an issue. An interesting problem, eh? Choosing the correct system to deploy can be difficult and require enormous contemplation. You must choose between increasing the value of just one system or increasing the value of many.

Almost universally, managers shy away from the concept of helping folks to be succesful beyond the immediate system. “Why should I train somebody who’s just going to move on?” In reality, most all of the workers will move on. It really doesn’t matter which system you are in. So which system breeds more success? I’d like to think the goal-based system does. Through participation in those systems, I still maintain a large and viable professional network that still contributes to my own personal success. And the task masters are nowhere to be found in that network.

Soiled Shorts

There are sometimes when being a deck hand during flight operations is one of the most amazing, intense jobs in the world. There are other times when you are certain that you need to change clothes…