Escalation at the Cafe

Escalation at the Café

The other day, I went to get coffee at the drive-thru, as I do most mornings when I’m at home, and there was a line of cars wrapped around the building and out into the main road. So I did what any other red-blooded American would do…

I parked and ordered on the mobile app.

I’m not proud of it. I did rationalize it by thinking my daughter Autumn would be happy that I was saving the environment by not sitting in the line of idling cars for 25 minutes. But I know I was just making things easier on myself. Or so I thought.

After playing on my phone for the “9-12 minutes” that the app recommended, I went to the side door to go get my coffee, but it was locked. Going to the front door, I found that (1) it was locked too, and (2) there were a couple of other forward-thinking-and-now-irate customers there who had also ordered on the mobile app only to find themselves locked out.

And so then, as the others left in a huff to go on-line to look for refunds (is that even possible?), I actually did something pretty lucky: I sat down at a table outside and waited. Sure enough, an employee soon came and unlocked the door in order to bring a drink out to someone who had just left the drive-thru line.

And so I nicely did an?escalation, asking her if she could bring out my order, which she soon did. No problem.

As she came out, she said with a chagrined look, “Sorry we’re not opening the door, but we’re short-staffed today.”

Capacity and Demand

The funny thing about that was, it sure didn’t look like their strategy was saving time.

By the time you unlock a door, talk to a customer, go get their coffee, explain why things are going badly today, and go back to your work station, you’ve spent a lot more time than it would have taken to just leave the door open and deal with the people who come into the store.

Failing to keep up with the work just causes more work.

When you get behind on your work, whether you’re a coffee shop or any other kind of business, your customers will start calling, knocking, or otherwise reaching out to ask for status updates or reprioritization of the work you haven’t done yet. Those escalations unfortunately just cause a snowball of work rolling down the hill, which eventually becomes an avalanche of extra work as the reduced capacity (from responding to the customers instead of just doing the work they need) just gets you further and further behind in getting the actual work done. Your team then spends more time on the “escalations” (communicating status, prioritizing, and doing the work for some of those unhappy customers) than on the regular work itself. Finally, even if the original capacity or demand situation that caused the problem in the first place gets resolved, the backlog continues to beget more backlog, and your team gets further and further behind.

We’ve had a few clients who’ve been dealing with similar situations recently, and a lot of the reasons are perfectly understandable:?

-???????The pandemic has impacted staff availability and driven new processes that cost more time and effort for employees to manage

-???????The Great Resignation has even further drawn down available staff, and that particularly has impacted training and skill levels, as experienced team members are replaced with newer hires

-???????The need to train new people creates an even greater demand on the more experienced people, who may have to answer questions and check the work of those new people until they’re fully capable; these distractions reduce the capacity even further of your most efficient workers

-???????As the economy has picked back up, demand has increased more quickly than companies can re-energize their capacity

It can cause a perfect storm, a rogue wave of work that builds upon itself and capsizes your business.

The JIT Café?

Next week, actually on St. Patrick’s Day, we’ll be leading a webinar discussion with a real case study on how to recover from a process capacity and demand problem. The case study comes from a real client story from quite a while back, but the causes and solutions will sound very familiar. In keeping with the coffee theme, our friends from the Just-in-Time Café, Elisabeth Swan and Tracy O’Rourke, are sponsoring that conversation, and we’re really looking forward to it. (Reach out?here ?if you’d like to attend on Thursday, March 17, at 2:00-3:30 pm Eastern.)

In short, there are a few key strategies that have to happen in concert in order to get on the road to recovery:

-???????Find some quick ways to reduce handoffs and/or non-value-added work in order to free up some capacity to get more work done

-???????Use that freed-up capacity to start keeping up with “new incoming work” in order to reduce the escalations from newly-unhappy customers

-???????As counter-intuitive as it sounds, stop hiring for a while, so that your experienced people can get work done rather than training and checking new people

-???????Focus the team on performance by providing daily feedback on progress, with a team goal for keeping up and catching up

-???????Dedicate the additional freed-up time on knocking out the in-good-order work (the work that is ready and available to do) from the remaining backlog?

We’ll talk more about those strategies at the webinar, and then we’ll likely send out some more details about that story afterwards, once we’ve let the participants have a chance to try to guess how the story ended!

Thanks for reading. Feel free to reach out to us to continue the conversation on how our experience at Implementation Partners can help you grow, sustain, and/or improve your business.

All the best,

Dodd Starbird

About the Author:

As the Managing Partner for?Implementation Partners LLC ,?Dodd Starbird ?leads change efforts that consistently achieve exceptional results for clients. Implementation Partners exists to inspire and enable every leader to transform their organizations by giving every employee a chance to contribute their best work on an engaged, sustainable, winning team. Dodd is the author of two business books,?The Joy of Lean?(ASQ Quality Press , 2016) and?Building Engaged Team Performance ?(McGraw-Hill, 2010).?

See the?Joy of Lean?webinar from ASQ Quality Press – hit the link to connect to the Webex:?https://asq.webex.com/asq/lsr.php?RCID=96db9102823f47a3ba1eb37336764766

Dodd Starbird

Managing Partner

Implementation Partners LLC

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