Rather
than thinking of rework and the cost of getting things wrong the first time,
what about thinking of the value getting things right first time can bring?
Last week I
received a communication from school, via their app. It read…
‘Parents can book appointments on our Parents Evening System – Thursday appointments from 3.30pm until 6.30pm’
I immediately reacted, parents that do the school pick up relish that 3.30pm appointment, for others like me, the 5pm is a valuable asset, miss out and it means you’re waiting around or leaving work early.
I got to work immediately, where is this system…? Looked for a link, looked around the app, looked on the website… nothing. A little later, a parent posted in a shared social media group asking the burning question: How?
After
multiple comments it was established that the system was yet to be made
available. How did we find out this information? Well, I know of from the
limited sample of parents in the group, at least 2 had called the school, 1 had
emailed. Thinking about how many kids are in the school I’d expect the office
was kept very busy!
Just a
couple more words would have saved not only the school office but also all the
parents valuable time, collectively, think what we all could have achieved!
So it got
me thinking about another experience I’ve had in recent months.
Early this year, after a traumatic few months that at times pushed me deep into the realms of anxiety, we finally moved into a new home, a brand-new build. I’m not going go into who the building firm was, as from what I hear most run with a similar standard.
The snagging
list was captured a week in, and although it was long it seemed 100% doable within
a week or two if someone put some focus into it.
Then when I
started to think about some of the snags we had, the finishing touches are
valuable and surely some of this stuff is straight forward? You’d hope that
capable contractors would be able to do some of this stuff in their sleep.
- Upstairs heating controlling the downstairs heating and visa versa
- Light switches wired to nothing and the oven… not even wired in
- Paint all over the kitchen floor tiles
- Grass nowhere to be seen
Quite
honestly, I could go on… straight away, aside from continuation of my anxiety,
the building firm and related contractors are immediately starting to lose
their profit and reputation.
We are now 8 months in, the snag list is shorter but by no means is it near complete. Now in addition to the initial list, we’ve had hidden leaks festering away under flooring leading to repair and replacement, we’ve had 2 internal taps replaced as having eventually got our grass the outside tap wasn’t there so we had to use what turned out to be a damaging hosepipe connector for the internal tap… turns out the external tap just needed to be screwed on, a 2-minute job. Again, I could go on outlining additional rework.
All of
this eating into profit and reputation.
Outside of the cost of additional fixtures and fittings, there is the cost of resource such as extra contractors but also the impact on the builder’s staff, not only back office but those who have to face the angry owners, many who have been pushed beyond politeness, as yes, everything that occurred with us has been experienced in every single other house, some much worse and from what I hear, performance continues to be the same.
And then there
is the impact on us. We are lucky to be in roles that allow flexible working,
but I’m sure others have had to sacrifice annual leave. And I mentioned my
anxiety, having home life disrupted is bound to have had an emotional impact on
all the homeowners.
The value
As I pointed
out earlier, the value, if the school had taken an extra second to read their
message from the parent’s perspective, us parents could have got a few more
hugs in, maybe kept our sanity a bit more in check and I’m sure the office
would have had a much more relaxed day.
For the
building company, rewind back to February, I doubt that any new build handover
could ever go so smoothly as to not have a single snag but if they had stopped,
put in some more quality assurance and control, run a few tests before hand-over,
deal with trusted contractors… then the value in that would be immense…
reputation, recommendation, mental health, resource availability, growth and a
HUGE cost saving!
Returning to our business, there is undoubtedly rework as with any business, gaining 100% perfection 100% of the time is not a benchmark any business (be it human or technology) can attain, it is called 6 Sigma for a reason!
The customer journey in our business
has a start and an end but in-between, the processes spiral off in all sorts of
ways. For example; a simple error when the job is booked, whether by the
business or the customer can effect scheduling, logistics, the Operative’s
ability to even park never mind complete the job. Post-job correctly processing
the data means we are able to correctly invoice, and that is just a small
snippet of the people and teams involved in the end to end journey… regardless
of the error’s root cause… reputation, recommendation, mental health,
resource availability, growth and a HUGE cost saving…
If we endeavour to complete work
correctly on the first go, just think of what we could collectively do as a
business, think about the opportunities, reduction of stress and improved morale.
Think about this as you perform your
daily tasks, empower yourself to consider what we can do better,
how we can be proactive, how error prevention can be put in place, how we can
improve the customer journey and SHOUT about it.
Think of
the value.
