Making Your Business Successful And/Or Keeping A Good Job

Computers have made major changes in our everyday life and in everything that's done in business. Unfortunately, business training and management hasn't changed in years, so managers are running businesses as if this were the 70s.

Today we're watching company after company going broke, laying off employees and closing down product lines.

Employees think that the company owes them and promotions are automatic if they wait their turn. Boy do they get upset when a more productive person gets promoted ahead of them. Employees think nothing about extending their breaks, wasting time and goofing off as long as their managers isn't watching.

Once the company starts to get into financial problems, the layoff talks start and the company starts looking into cheaper automation options. If only the employees were more productive and could put out better products faster. So they decide they're employees aren't as qualified and capable as the machines they can be replace them with.

So the company starts talking about downsizing and/or laying off, then employees start looking for ways to make other employees look less capable and competent to make themselves look like the best employees to keep. That leads to poorer quality products, bad moral and the eventual loss of good employees. That bad management decision means they kept the bad employees and layed off the good employees. That further complicates the production problems, that the business was having. So they continue to try not to layoff more employees and stay in business.

As a result, the first set of layoffs and downsizing of the best employees, the company's losses continue and further layoffs get scheduled and the cycle repeats itself until the company fails. /TD>

This problem is the result of BAD management. Today's managers don't do enough hands on supervising and monitoring of their employees. In many cases the managers have no idea what the employees they're supervising do and how important and/or had that job might be. They don't take the time and money to see what work space changes might pick up productivity and/or moral.

In some cases management even makes moral worse by making cost saving changes that piss people off and make moral worse. I use to work for a company that had a home made ice cream machine that was used to make a different flavour ice cream everyday. Well, they use to charge by the size of the cup used. Then they changed it to charge by the weight. It became to expensive to buy the ice cream. I bet they added more water and got heavier cups to make it cost more. Anyway that changed pissed people off and took away one of the coolest things about the job. Did the company save anything by making that change? Yeah the moral went to hell and sales of ice cream fell off so much that they got rid of the ice cream machine. Everyone lost.

To modernise management major changes are needed. Computers have forced employees to specialise because the industry changes faster then they can keep pace. If managers are going to manage these constantly changing jobs when the employees can't keep up with everything how can you expect a first line manager to keep up with what's changing, what's important, who's doing the best job? You can't. So what's management suppose to do? The business has to specialise managers and reduce the level of managers. To accomplish this, employees will have several managers. One to manage and help with personal related issues like leave, pay, getting workstation changes.... Another manager that is very technical, understands the job and has the ability to mentor employees. That person would also help to plan future technical changes in the organisation. Another manager would provide all the written documentation for that employee group including evaluations. But that writing would be done from information provided by the other managers that don't have time to work on that activity.

Thus the organisational chart would look like this:
President
Admin manager Technical Manager Technical Writer
30-50 employees

Since the managers a specialised, they can handle more employees and keep better watch on the aspects they control and monitor everyday. They're also able to supervise more employees, thus limited the number of levels of management and bringing top management closer to the workers and a better chance that they'll understand the consequences of a bad decision and avoid making them.

This concept makes it easier for management to find the workers that are goofing off and making others look like bad employees. It also gives the managers a chance to stay technical and keep upper management more informed.

Even the government is being run as if this were the 1800s. In the early days of our country, our representatives were jack of all trades. They had to be because we didn't have factories, lots of money, plastic, computers, telephones, or even the telegraph. So when they wrote a law or past a bill, they knew how it was going to impact the average person, farmer, businessmen...., so the bill and laws were fair and just. Since everyone knew and met and talked with their representatives, their representatives had to do the right things or they wouldn't get re-elected. They didn't have to worry about special interest groups funding their re-election. So the system worked then, it isn't working now.

Our representatives aren't held accountable similar to the bad managers above. The only way to fix this problem is to mandate the publication of the daily accomplishments of our representatives everyday in the local papers. I don't need to know how the senator from another state voted. Cause he's representing a different group of people. He has to do what they want him or her to do but my representative better be doing what his or her voters want him to do. The paper also has to have a user friendly description of every bill voted on my our representatives. The local paper might want to have a pro and con view of the bill to help voters decide which vote helps them the most.

Since some people are going to want to see how other representatives voted on some bills, congress should be required the same information on a web page indexed several ways (Bill, Representative, Date, Subject, Past, failed). That would help voters to check out future presidential candidates and/or new senators....

I hate to spend more tax money but if I get good value for it its better than wasting it on finding out about the sex of a frog. Anyway, Queensland, Australia got rid of half of their representatives and provided housing on the government's complex. By reducing the size they can monitor their representatives better and it takes less work to pass or fail a bill. The housing keeps the representatives away of influences that mike corrupt the representative like owing a landlord, commuting to work, needing to find a gym.... It also allows them to go home for lunch and when they don't have to be in session but they can get back for a vote in the middle of the night if he or she has too. It also provides better and security for our government officials.

One of the biggest mistakes companies are making these days is contracting out or outsoaring. In many cases the initial contact does not produce the desired result because the winner of the contract gave a low estimate because they knew the needs would require additional support. When the contract is expanded to include the options that were not requested on the initial contract the contractor charges an arm and a leg for the modification. They have the company by the balls and want every penny they can get from them. That's why they under bid the initial contract. They knew additional work would be required and they'd make up the difference then.

One of the WOST things to contract out or outsource is customer service or local offices. Once you give that function to the other company, you have very little control over what they'll do for your company. They know they're going to get money for providing the local office or customer service even if they don't provide good service. For example: SPRINT gave contracted out local offices in the Hagerstown, MD area to an unknown company. When I tried to use that office for support, they never carried the phone I wanted, didn't have parts for it after I ordered it via an 800 number and couldn't fix it. They wouldn't even handle changes to my phone options, when I was in their office. All they wanted to do was sell new contracts and certain phones. I guess they were the ones they made the most profit on (commissions from SPRINT). Anyway since they made me call the 800 number to change my phone options, I asked to use their local office phone to make the change. When I got put on the answering machine, I put the phone on speaker phone in the phone sales office (out source office). As soon as I did people from the back room ran out and provided the service in that local office. What does that tell you about contracting out?

Another problem to avoid is using answering machines. To many customers drop your service because their time is costing them more than what they might be saving by using your company. I made $40-50 dollars an hour. So if I wait 15 minutes on the phone you costed me $10-15 dollars. So if I can find another company with better service for $10 more, I'm gone. The other problem is never getting anyone to call back when you leave a message.

I suggest, hiring people to answer every call. Tell the customer how long they are going to have to wait for service (estimate) and/or what might be a better time to call back. Even better, take their name and number (why make them pay to call you and sit on the phone - cell phone time costs even for some free calls) and give them a control number for future reference. Tell them you'll call them back as soon as they get to the top of the list. Tell them if you don't get a call back in ??? minutes/hours, give us another call and check on the status in case our computers lost your request. Sometimes we have electricity failures and viruses that cause us to lose information. I think I'd only use companies that offered that type of service. I bet their are a lot of people that hate wasting their time on hold listening to music, ads or repeated messages telling me how important my call is and keep waiting.