I’m always amazed at people’s resistance towards recognizing efficiencies. I experienced this first hand when I had my first will drafted about 15 years ago. I hired a lawyer to do the paperwork. However, his process started by giving me a very long, very complicated, form to fill out. The form was clunky and badly formatted. Most of the questions didn’t apply to me, yet, I still had to carefully read each one to make sure I didn’t leave anything out.
The whole time I suffered through this form, I couldn’t help wondering what the lawyer would do with it. The process was terrible. Overly manual and filled with lots of small, important details that were easy to miss in the complexity of the form. When I met with the lawyer, I asked him how he used the form. He explained that he carefully reviewed the multiple times, to make sure he didn’t miss anything. Then transfer the information from the form to the document.
I mentioned there were more efficient and less error-prone ways to accomplish this. Yet, the lawyer told me efficiency wasn’t in his best interests. If something took a long time, it meant there were more opportunities to charge the client for more work. Something about this never sat well with me. I used to be a small business owner, but I would never have used the excuse of charging clients more to be intentionally inefficient. For me, the pain of doing tedious, manual, low-quality work, was incentive enough to streamline my processes.
Similarly, learning that some people in the work place also frown upon efficiencies is surprising. In these scenarios, it’s because they fear losing additional headcount. However, in my opinion, streamlining process and finding efficiencies focuses on quality work. Nobody wants to be copying and pasting information or manually re-entering something because of a bad form. This is garbage work and introduces a lot of errors and re-works into the process.
Efficiencies can often create win-win scenarios. For example, every DIY home project results in multiple trips to Home Depot. Why? Mostly because I don’t gather enough information at the beginning of the project. The fix is easy, spend a few more minutes determining what needs to be done. Measure everything. Go to the store once and buy everything. Then save time with the repair work knowing it’s all ready to go.
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