Week 5 - Non-negotiable expectations
A troubling week for our business.
The end of financial year reports showed that we’d earnt less that the year before.
On top of that, this week we had half our staff away for at least one day of the week.
Although we hit our Monthly targets for placements, the productivity on work-in-progress was much lower than needed to sustain this for next week.
This week I’d spent some restless nights ruing the loss and thinking about the year ahead.
After inspection of the productivity, it was clear that all of us needed to step up our productivity - especially the Finance and Marketing area.
Some hard conversations were required.
I started the one-on-one meetings with outlining the financial results to each staff person, save our recent hire who I felt still had a hall pass as they were in training.
I chose to do this as I believed we needed to be on board with what our challenge was and how the important our non-negotiables are.
Quality, Value for Money, Communication and Efficient Delivery
I missed a conversation with our Finance & Marketing manager as she was away on sick leave for most of the week.
Those staff that I did have conversations with were helpful. There was a genuine concern for putting our business back on track and fast.
What fell out from these meetings was that our improvements in planning for our software development team was making a difference, but more was needed. Finding the time to do this was going to be hard. Doing planning during work hours conflicted heavily with my role of business development.
We’d taken on making flowcharts that mapped our software workflow. We had started with a very rough diagram, and in the past two weeks I’d redrawn them several times using draw.io. We chose this tool as it allowed us to share using google docs, allowing our staff and I to work on remotely. The team had suggested the idea, and suggested refinements to the way we drew them.
During the week, our lead mobile app developer identified a scenario we’d not sufficiently accounted for. Within two hours we’d scoped a solution that re-used code and inserted it into our flowchart. Keeping on top of the flowchart documentation was a habit I could see would pay high dividends.
Good ideas on promoting and marketing shared. Viable plans to rapidly increase revenue from our software were tabled.
The recruitment team feedback was rather limited though. We did find that communicating a sense of urgency to our clients was missing. It felt like a sense of complacency had crept in.
Targets around quality were given to our new trainee, along with a plan on how to get there.
Targets around revenue were given to our experienced recruiter. I’d felt that he’d been on a good wicket with commissions, but seeing that he held our key clients, he should be doing more.
As I reviewed our candidate marketing, it was clear that we needed to better with some of our channels, and others we should use less.
This week, I’d taken working with our new recruiter. In doing so, it allowed me to pass on some of the time saving processes we have built into our software and processes. Encouragingly I could see that I made a very good hire. Our new recruiter has the smarts and the commercial acumen that the role requires.
The year before I’d kept an under-performing recruiter to long, this seat was a loss. If the recruiter had met their target, we would have met our company targets.
“Instead of blame, train. If that does not work, then remove”
The recruiter I’d hired was good at customer service, but not in sales or technical recruitment within the spaces we were targeting. I’d not played to their strengths and instead put them in a position that exposed their weaknesses. More importantly, I’d accepted not meeting targets for too long.
I could also see that my management style was not helping. My style is more of a delegator, without following up enough to see if done to the quality required. I needed to change this.
Time management on my behalf was now becoming a major issue.