The Big Question

Managers often ask themselves questions regarding operations and processes every day. Yet every day managers fail to ask one of the most important questions. Truth be told, this question is one that every employee should ask themselves repeatedly and encouraged to do so by their line manager.

Before revealing the question, let’s provide some background. Every day, every employee completes various processes and transactions in line with company guidelines. A significant part of most processes involves approvals or “box” ticking. Whilst some of these are critical and need to be done, the majority of this is usually pointless and the only real contribution they make is to prolong process completion and certainly do not enable business.

While this is happening on a daily basis, managers are constantly looking to make improvements and increase efficiency and spend precious time conducting analysis to try and find answers. Try? Yes, because it is difficult to find the right answers when they can’t see the roots of the problems.

So, who can see this?

Their team members see every small step of any process and carry out these required steps whether the understand the reasons why these steps even exist. Their managers may not even be completely au fait with everything involved in completing a process.

So, the Big Question every employee should ask is this: why do I need to do this?

Honesty is key! If each employee asked him or herself this question when completing a step in a process, they should be able to answer it. And the answer of “because I am told to do this” is not an acceptable answer. If the answer is unknown, they should ask their supervisor or manager, and if they can’t answer it, their line manager should escalate this to their line manager and so on until an answer is found. If no answer is found, then the question really does become “Why ARE we doing this?”

Often the answers are vague, especially if it is related to a different department, and these become the steps that should be challenged, more times than not, with great difficulty. This is because the other departments rely on your step for them to complete their parts of the process and will often insist that it is necessary. Discussions between departments is regularly fraught with difficulty due to departmental “silos”, a whole different topic that would take up an article, if not a book, to discuss.

One of the main issues when streamlining processes and improving efficiencies comes down to dealing with departments that don’t directly interact with customers regularly, finance for example. People in these areas tend to focus on spreadsheets and reports rather than seeing the bigger picture, or, to be more precise, the customers perspective of dealing with a company. They are more worried about reducing risk to either zero or as low as possible rather than what is required to enable and grow the business.

Inter-departmental communication regarding processes and finding the right solution should not just be encouraged but enforced through regular interaction and discussion. The answer is simple, yet too often people resist and push back due to focusing primarily on their own departments rather than what is best for the company, or even more importantly, what is best to exceed a customer’s expectations.

The simple question of why I need to do this, is the simplest way of making internal processes more efficient and making the act of customers doing business with your company easy and satisfying for the customer.

Many department managers need to come down from their pedestals of self-importance and self-justification and embrace the idea of working towards doing what is the best for their customers. Those who don’t are, in many ways, helping their competitors more than their own company.