~by Haley Lynn Gray~
Even if you’ve been doing the same job for the last five years, you can always get better. There are always ways to be more efficient, more proactive, and generally do things better. One of the things I’m learning as I get older is that even when I’m the expert in a given area, there is always someone out there who knows how to do things better. There are always ways to optimise a process, or perform a little evolutionary improvement on what is already happening.
One of the big ways I did that was with my home care business, Extension of You Home Care, which I ran at the time. I saw a lot of small opportunities in the market to do things better. That meant clients had better outcomes, and employees had a higher rate of job satisfaction. By incorporating the current best practices in the field and adding a couple of small changes — namely paying our employees a bit better and offering paid time off — we were able to offer a superior service. As we’d been in business almost a year at that point, we’d learned a number of ways to improve our processes internally and operate more efficiently. It is a learning process, and indeed life is a process of learning.
I could probably write an entire book on the things we learned starting that business — practices, policies, and ways to do things more efficiently. Each of those realisations meant we learned something, and subsequently did things better. One of our early challenges was automating billing. Each week we had to tally how many hours were worked, by which caregivers, for which clients, then quickly turn around and do payroll and bill clients. Needless to say, we were highly motivated to make sure we were billing promptly. A lot of the lessons from the early days were about billing accurately, and about making sure the client was able to pay the bill, so we could pay our employees.
We had corresponding challenges around scheduling employees for shifts and hours. We tried to make sure no employee was double booked or working too many hours. We also had to make sure the caregivers assigned to a particular client were a good fit for that client. We had to learn to be very creative when scheduling shifts, so they made sense and worked for everyone. There was a lot of improvement available there. The key is that we learned about that improvement, and kept getting better.
Where “always get better” stops working
There is a limit to this, and it’s worth naming because continuous improvement is the kind of advice that sounds unarguable.
Optimising a process only pays while the process is the right one. A great deal of effort gets spent making something more efficient that shouldn’t be happening at all — a report nobody reads, produced faster. A service that loses money, delivered more smoothly.
Both of the problems above were worth solving because billing and scheduling were genuinely load-bearing. But every so often the useful question isn’t how do we do this better. It’s should we be doing this at all, and that question tends to get skipped because improving feels productive and stopping feels like giving up.
Improvement is the default. Every year or so it is worth deliberately asking the other one.
What about you? When have you found yourself learning and getting better?
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
