Success Is Much Easier To Achieve When There Are Less Moving Parts.

I recently had a discussion with one of my clients about staffing levels and manpower.

Well, not so recently.

I actually bang on about staff levels whenever I have an audience…

And this is because the principles of business are such that for simplicity’s sake, the less moving parts the business has the better.

Because the more moving parts that a machine has, that a business has, the more things can go wrong.

And will go wrong.

In staffing, the more part-time people you employ as opposed to full-time people, the more things can go wrong.

This is because the more employees you have, the more the message of consistency will get diluted, and does get diluted.

It’s just the bell curve at work.

A team of one will always be more consistent than a team of many.

The team of one may be consistently poor, but because it is a team of one, the one reduces the random distribution.

A team of more than one will have highs and lows.

But a small team of more than one will be more consistent than a larger team [for the reasons of numeracy articulated just now above].

In the old days…

In the old days, when people worked forty hour weeks, most businesses traded forty hours each week.

Easy equation.

There was little or no weekend trade. There was little or no late night trade.

But in today’s expanded retail market, of seven days of trading, with extended hours on some days, and now the roles of part-time, permanent part-time, casual, and full-time employees, you really need to be Einstein just to manage a weekly employment roster for your team.

And it gets worse…

Some team members who are part time, like to work [or should that be “like to turn up”] on alternate Saturdays, or alternate Mondays, or occasional Fridays… the system is not a system at all.

It's a rabble at best.

On the one side, if your business has a glut of casual or part-time employees who don’t care how they work and are happy to just get a few shifts here and a few shifts there, then there should never be a day when the business is under-manned.

It just means that owners and customers can face a “lucky-dip” as to who is actually working when…. but if you’ve got the manpower available, and everybody is accommodating, this is a pleasant downside to brush over.

But….

But for most small businesses, they don’t have the luxury of having employees on standby ready to jump when a bell goes off that work might need them this week…

In today’s economy, that really is LA-LA LAND…

That’s not a reality world in any way, shape, or form.

Here’s the kicker:

The more part-timers you have, the more your business becomes a commodity for your customers rather than maintaining itself as an experience.

And the more commoditised your business presents itself as determines the more that the public and customers will choose your business based on price rather than on service and any WOW factor that your business delivers.

And we all know that the best way to win the race to the bottom is to try to compete on price alone….

And the reward for being first to the bottom is that you don’t need to listen to other people’s sob stories because your business is the first one entering the drain hole.

Remember…

Remember what James McManemon, General Manager of The Ritz-Carlton said when he was asked:

“If you were starting a new business, any business, and wanted to make customer service your value proposition, what would you do first?”

He replied:

“The first thing I would do is create the Service Vision for the Company. Be crystal clear with what the company’s vision is, and be able to articulate that extremely well. Then I would hire talent based on that same belief, only adding employees that share those service values, and finally create the processes and training to achieve that Service Vision.”

What McManemon was talking about here was the establishment and the fostering of a superior?INTERNAL CULTURE in a business.

And that is way easier to do with more full-time employees and less part-time employees.

McManemon was talking about team members all working together with the same beliefs and mindsets and?VISIONS,?using methodologies that are indeed truly?WORLD-CLASS?that totally eliminate chaos, allowing every member of that team to function smoothly and seamlessly and as one, as a truly empowered team.

And that will always be much easier to do with less moving parts….

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