At our local supermarket there is a cashier that appears highly stressed. She’d be about 60 and she’s very skinny. When you see her, everything she does is rushed. If they’d let her control another 4 scanners she’d volunteer. Even when she’s cleaning the counter, she wipes the surface faster. Sometimes she forgets to greet the customer as she’s so focussed on the next item to scan. She’s quite a nice person but why does she need to operate in such a fashion?
Then I compare her to another cashier who’s gracefully getting through the same tasks and is calm and efficient. If I was guessing, I’d say their work output is the same. The stressed lady moves faster but makes more mistakes. She can also appear rude when she’s in a flap so she might be costing the supermarket some customers.
So what are you like in your workplace? Do you fire fight all day long? Do you jump from crisis to crisis? Do you know people who are just waiting for the next thing to go wrong so they can jump out of their chair to get involved. I laugh at the 24/7 mentality of some people. One large insurance company was telling me about one of the office staff (Jimmy). He’d give everyone his 3 mobile numbers, his social media links and his home numbers (he had 2). His catch call was call me 24/7 and of course people did. If they had the choice between going to the movies or staying back to finish a project, they’d always choose the “Jimmy option”. Give Jimmy a call, let him do the work and they enjoy the movie (perfect). Jimmy was forced to take some annual leave and he was very worried the place would fall down while he was away. Anyway he went to Europe for a month and the place ticked over no problem. Then they wondered what Jimmy’s role was. He had morphed into something completely different from his job description. When Jimmy was gone the place was calmer and more effective. Jimmy got the Jimmy in a restructure.
We’ve been surprised this year the amount of time management training that we’ve run. If you haven’t done a time management course in a few years then you should consider it.
Course: TIME MANAGEMENT
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Ph: 1300 323 752 Email: mail@preftrain.com.au