Yesterday I went to a seminar in my city. It was held at night, so I had to skip all working activities during the nights such as support and coding for ZonASINHunter updates. I got stuck in traffic jam so I missed one hour session.
Well, sometimes we as a programmer need to have a life besides coding you know? It’s good to see other Internet Marketers once in a while to share our knowledge about the future of our different worlds.
Anyway, the seminar was held in a teleconference room provided by our national telecommunication company. It was free to attend but only lasted for two hours.
The topic was how to handle online store customers and employee. That was a great topic to discuss in order to grow our business.
Sometimes I do feel that we need to have more staffing as we grow so we can become more productive. However, more staffing also doesn’t always equal to more productivity so we need to carefully access our future plans.
Interesting enough, the topic was much more detailed than I imagined. It talked about how to micromanage people, something that I was not too happy with. It talked about how to use a strict plan, which got down to hours and even minutes how people should work. For example:
8:00 AM – checking email, post status to FB, Instagram, etc.
9:00 AM – making calls and checking for feedbacks
10:00 AM – make sure that all delivery has been scheduled and cleared
I remembered watching Ted talks which described how micromanaging people just doesn’t work. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “Plans are useless, Planning is everything”
There are three things that need to address when managing people:
- Make work visible, so we need to make somehow that we can see what people have done. This is done by making plans.
- Let it go! Don’t micro manage them, let them self-organize.
Plans are useless because reality demands much more flexibility than a plan that is set to stone. However, planning are everything because we need to address as many issue as possible.
