Kategoria: english

  • Email management after holidays – 5 tips

    Holiday season is upon us, and after holidays, coming back to work season.

    I have thought recently about the dreadful moment of opening my mailbox and sifting through hundreds of emails on my first day after holidays, and how it is never as bad as it first look.

    Throughout the years I have learned a few things that help me with getting through that first touch of reality, and I decided to share it with you today.

    1. Start from the newest emails and go back to the past. I used to start from the old ones thinking that they waited long enough, but then it turns out most of the issues get resolved without your help, or they get more complicated. So, starting from new ones, you can save yourself time and stress. 

    2. Check direct messages from your line manager/closest cooperator first. If you are in CC, don’t bother, if there were more direct recipients, check if someone else did the work. 

    3. If you were added as a part of mailing list, and the sender is not your direct manager or closest cooperator, treat it as FYI unless message specifically tells you to act.

    4. Don’t act on anything right away. Unless, maybe, the reply is as simple as yes or no. Make a list, maybe flag some messages, and let it go. Meet with 
    your backup or your manager and check with them on the priority of tasks.

    5. Remember, you are on holidays but there are still people at work that do their job. If you created good handover and made a plan for your absence, you can take it easy after your return.

    Let me know if you have the same rules in place. Or maybe something does not apply to your situation? 

    P.S. change line manager with MVCustomer and you can still follow the same rules.

  • Your KPIs are a game – and you’re invited to play

    There may be many ways for your employer to decide if you are a good hire or not. You may always be first in the office, you may never take a day off, you may be taking all of the overtimes, or you may just walk the office hallways really fast.

    There are also less human ways to decide your value, like KPIs, OKRs, and probably many other ways to put your performance in numbers. 

    Today I will focus on KPIs, as I think they are among the most popular ways that your manager can use to judge you (using numbers).

    So, what are KPI’s? The abbreviation stands for KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS. Which, in simpler terms, mean goals that you can track and use as a benchmark for success. They come in percentage (from 0 to 100) or an absolute value (for e.g. 25 calls each day). the KPIs should be aligned with the direction of a company – and they should be changing from time to time.

    Let’s say your company wants to make sure each customer that calls helpline gets answered – they KPI would be measuring the amount of calls taken, or the amount of calls dropped. If they need more customers – they will focus not on the revenue your customers are generating, but rather – how many new customers you are bringing. If the production process is too long – they may be looking at the time each production step is taking and try to limit your time spend on some actions.

    The key word here is should – because not every manager understands the KPIs, and not every company has a clear direction. Even so, I do recommend looking at your KPIs as a whole and try to find a pattern there. You may see what your manager, or the manager of your manager is up to this quarter.

    Why would I recommend that?

    Well, the thing that your supervisor is not telling you is that you don’t have to achieve 100% of every indicator, to be considered a good employee and move your career further. I will write even more controversial things now – being top performer in each and every one of your goals can hurt you in several ways. 

    First – your goals will be getting higher and more difficult to reach. Although this is true for everyone, once you will not be able to perform, you can see some disappointed looks and questions about „what happened? Why is your motivation lower?”

    Secondly – once you reach 100% of your quota it does not mean the amount of work you have to end, what is more likely is that you will get more work for the same salary, with minimal recognition. I mean, more work is the recognition you were looking for, right?

    Finally – it is very hard to show progress when you are constantly overachieving. I mean, go from zero to hero and they write about you in the news. Go from hero to superhero and suddenly everyone is tired of you and you are just showing off.

    And here we come to the clou od my message. Getting recognition is more about showing progress than showing great results all the time. And, if you can show progress in the areas that your manager needs to see the progress is a recipe for success.  This is why, by looking at your KPIs you should be looking at the story they tell you. Why is my time on the call suddenly so important? Why do I need to add specific details to CRM that nobody asked about before? If you can decipher the message, you know where to push harder and what results will stand out.

    Also, for me, understanding why I need to do the things that they ask me to do, helps in actually executing and prioritizing my work. There is nothing worse than trying to do something I don’t like and I don’t understand just for the sake of doing it because someone told me to.

    The best outcome is when you can align the goals (not your KPIs but the ultimate goals) with your strengths. then you know where you can let yourself shine, but also where you need to push yourself a little bit, even though required things are not your strength.

    Try and find the balance between what is needed, why it is needed, and how you can use your strengths to reach the ULTIMATE GOAL. Then, even if you will not be performing at 100% of every objective, you will be seen as a strong player, and hopefully, you will also find bits of joy during your working hours.

    What do you think? Have you found a hidden meaning behind your KPIs?

    Do you need help deciphering them? Let me know.

  • Your vocabulary matters – and I don’t mean curse words

    Every company that I worked in had their own specific language. Most of the concepts we use at work are used in different places, but can vary in names. Sometimes it depends on the country of origin, sometimes on the education of founders. Often the vocabulary is created as a result of different cultures cooperating and creating something new.

    I was mostly OK with this part, languages came easily to me, and learning new slang at the beginning of a job seemed justified, and, I won’t lie, fun.

    All of that changed when I started working more with processes and task management. It turns out that the language we are using can hurt us in many different ways. Some of them I had not anticipated.

    Problems can start already at the onboarding. One issue is that, especially in the tech world, we use the same terms to describe different solutions. Why? My guess is that we just invent things as we go. So concepts were often created at similar times, by different people. Every company tried to make them their own – so they used their own names. Now, if you are moving from one company to the other, you need to be aware that the term you know may have a whole other meaning in a new place.

    It may be tough, but I find this problem quite easy to catch.

    It starts getting annoying, when different departments in the company use different names for the same concepts. Or they use the same word, but it has a different meaning. And no department is an island. 

    When I first started calculating quarterly results for our sales team, I lost so much time on extracting data and not getting the right numbers. Just because I was using some specific terms that I learned working as a salesperson. After painfully long conversations and adjustments I realized the same term was being used by finance. Only it had a slightly different meaning. The difference was so subtle, that we used the term often, both departments thinking we know what we are talking about. But the numbers didn’t want to add up. Due to small inconsistency in terminology our results were looking completely different. Thankfully we caught it in time, but I still remember the stress it caused me and my peers.

    Our time was wasted, our energy consumed by frustration and we had to get back to the drawing board, just because of one word. 

    The definitions matter, and if your company works in silos where departments don’t cooperate unless they absolutely have to, I can bet that you have seen this issue. Maybe you even didn’t realize what was the cause of the problems, maybe you decided it was ego, or some personal agendas. 

    So, what now? I mean is there a way to make sure 5,000 employees in 14 different countries sit down to write the company dictionary? Should they even do it?

    For me, the start to undo this mess would be to start and write down your own processes. Start with the basic ones, the things that everybody knows. If you can write down your own repetitive tasks, you can look at them from a completely new perspective. Then, see where actions of your department connect with others and talk with them, check if they see and understand their part, if they agree on their part, and if they understand the whole process: start to finish. 

    When you are in doubt, you can easily refer back to the process you described, and confront it with how others understand the tasks. 

    It does look like a lot of work, but if you start with the basics, or even when creating a new department, while your organization still grows, you can save yourself a lot of time (and time is money) in the future.

    If I struck a chord, let me know. I am planning on something special where I will show you how to start and create your own process book. No matter how big or small your operations are, it is always a good time to start and define your processes.