Don't Just Have Dylan Do It
There's no reason anymore to keep piling menial tasks on your team
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While doing calls with prospective and new clients for Obvify, I’ve found a few common denominators. Because of what we do, we’re generally talking with companies that have grown to a certain size and have started to recognize the need to run some of their processes more efficiently. But the area where I see the greatest opportunity for improvement often doesn’t align with their own assessment.
Most companies tend to focus on immediately broken things and that’s something you absolutely should do. Assuming those are actually urgent priorities, you obviously need to take care of them. But one area they don’t focus is where something’s not quite broken yet and it’s incorrectly classified as not urgent.
This came up the other day on a discovery call with a potential new client. As I was asking the team my typical questions to uncover places where I could help, they said the same phrase a few times: “Oh..that? We just have Dylan do it.”
Poor Dylan. He was on the video call and I could see him both sink in his seat each time and sigh with a resigned look each time someone said this. Dylan was assigned a ton of repetitive tasks that should have either been automated or eliminated a long time ago. And as we talked more, I came to find out that there were quite a few more “Dylans” at the company. Each of them had a daily workload of the same tasks over and over.
These tasks ranged from copying and pasting from one system to another to taking a screenshot of a competitor’s website each morning and emailing it to the entire company. Having worked in and around tons of companies in my career, I can tell you that this is pretty common. As the company gets more complex, many systems and processes don’t keep up. The solution is to just throw more people at the problem.
But there are a few big issues with solving things this way. First, it’s really expensive. Adding people costs lots of money AND lots more time and process to manage them. Hiring people isn’t bad in and of itself of course. But the overlooked issue with this strategy is that you’re hiring people to do something they would have never agreed to do in the first place.
For example, they think they’re joining the marketing team and that they’ll working on some interesting challenges and strategy to move your company forward. They come in excited with lots of great ideas thinking they’ll prove themselves and then get some opportunities to maybe lead your social media efforts or put together a new customer onboarding program. But instead you assign them the job to copy contacts from one system to another and update three different software tools with the exact same information.
That’s not what they signed up for. If you have people like this, I can assure you they aren’t happy and they aren’t going to last long. It’s a massive drag on your company’s morale and overall culture.
While it’s hard to watch Dylan on these calls, it’s great to see his reaction when you take away these unnecessary tasks, which is the best part of what I get to do at Obvify (and can help you do at your company). It’s an amazing transformation in these “Dylans” from the first discovery call to when our solutions are fully implemented. All of those tasks they dreaded doing everyday are gone. They now get the chance to do the things they were hired for and that got them excited about joining the company in the first place.
If you find yourself saying, “we just have «insert name here» to it” as the answer to how you handle tasks that probably no one wants to do, take a careful second look. You’re almost certainly wasting staffing dollars you shouldn’t and, even worse, wasting the potential of really good people. There is definitely a better way. It might take a little work and you might need some outside help, but it will be worth the investment.
To use the client that inspired this story as an example, we eliminated half of the tasks their three “Dylans” were doing each day. It’ll probably free up 120 hours a month. But moreover, the client got to look like a hero to the entire team because they identified a problem and put their team first to make it a priority to fix things. You owe that to your team.
Before you go…
If you find your company stuck with lots of inefficient manual processes, there is a better way. My company Obvify builds internal tools to make your company run better. Think of it as a custom business operating system. And if you ever need insights or assistance with business process automation or improvement, just give me a shout. Always happy to help. You can schedule a free initial call where I promise to give more free advice than selling things.
And if you just want to make a new connection, I’m happy to do that with any reader. Schedule a time here or just connect on LinkedIn.