Re: Handling The Volume?
mcogilvie said:
Just off the top of my head:
1) You are spending way too much time in meetings. What are the meetings about? Who are they with?
2) Is your 50% staffing temporary? Should you be spending time hiring staff and training them?
3) What is the email about? Is it actionable? Why are you the one who should see it? Ditto voice mail.
4) Who is walking in and why?
5) How do your peers manage? Your predecessor? Your boss?
6) Can you talk to your boss about this? If not, you are being set up for failure.
7) What is your staff doing to support you? How can you help them support you better?
Mike
Great questions Mike:
Here is a pretty accurate answer:
We deliver sales support to our field sales team. I manage a team of two (about to expand to 4 with an additional position open.) One person works with field sales, the other works with our partners to run test suites and publish collateral.
Weekly Meetings:
16 hours (two full day meetings) Management/Partner planning meetings
1 hour Team Management Meeting
1 hour Team Weekly Meeting
4 hours (Field Rep focused meetings--project related)
4 hours (partner focused meetings--project related).
2 hours (1 on 1's with my direct reports)
2 hours (Business heads of the various field sales units)
2 hours (Meetings w/ Partner Alliance Managers)
The killer is what appears to be the standard two day planning meeting with our partners or management. I've been on for a little over 6 weeks now and we've had one of these almost every week...
50% staffing is temporary. We'll double staff in January, unfortunately the heavy work load occurs during the end of the calender year...
E-mail is probably the biggest culprit. I'm just getting so much of it that it is difficult to plow through it all. I am pre-sorting to the best of my ability at the moment, but I've been at this job for only a short period of time and I haven't yet been able to come up with rules to automatically process much of the mail. Of course company "news" letters and the like are instantly blasted into the delete bin (Unsubscribing isn't an option...apparently somebody high up the ladder thinks their newsletter is critical reading material).
Probably 10-40% of the e-mail is actionable. I give a range, because much of our organization takes a scatter-brained approach to firing off 5-7 e-mails for a single subject rather than taking 10 seconds to think before they hit send. This is encouraged by the prevelance of the blackberry and it's continued use inside meetings.
(Personally abhor this practice... If the meeting isn't important enough for senior management to be paying attention, then it isn't important enough to hold, and if the e-mail is so important that it can't wait until the end of the meeting then ... sorry started a rant...)
Much of the e-mail is CYA material that I typically just delete. Not only do I not need to see it in this format, it really needs to be put into a weekly status report.
Some of it is project related and gets filed. The problem is if it's important enough to file, it shouldn't be filed on my hard drive. It should be going into our internal repository. Maybe we need to set up an internal wiki or blog...
Most voice mail are mostly incoming customer requests trying to subvert the formal request process.
Walk-ins are 50/50 customer requests subverting the process or social time wasters.
Management by Peers, Predecessors and boss? Ah, here is the sticky point. Peers and Boss all do MBI (Management by Inbox). I had no predecessor as this is a new position.
Yes, my boss is probably open to discussing this. I know he is swamped by e-mail as well. I have to solve the problem first however. I cant' come to him with a problem and expect a solution.
I've been working with staff on other things, and haven't done much with this issue. Don't quite know where I can go with this. Suggestions welcome.