Do you know your company?

Posted by Josh Friedlander | No Comments

I’ve been reading a lot lately about corporate efficiency, and it’s not like the concept is foreign at this point. It’s not like Peter Drucker has been forgotten.

But I’ve also been calling hedge funds all day (actually, all week, and all of last week) for a big survey of ours, and it’s amazing how some of these companies (highly profitable and selective in their staffing…theoretically) employ receptionists who can’t get me to the right person in less than four transfers.

It’s not limited to hedge funds. You’d think companies would make an effort to make sure the person who you see/talk to first thing — your first experience with a company — is informed enough to put you through to the correct person. But it doesn’t work that way 20% of the time (my estimate).

Just out of curiosity: do you know who does what at your company? Would you feel comfortable handling incoming phone calls for an hour or do you think you’d be totally lost?

Everyone at a small company should have a basic sense of what their co-workers do and the types of information they handle.

Ironically, smaller companies seem to have more difficulty with this. At larger companies, there are well-defined groups. At smaller companies there are more people acting in jack-of-all-trades positions.

One maxim I like is that if you’re the only one in a company who can do your job, that means you haven’t done your job (i.e., you haven’t trained someone in case you get hit by a bus).

It’s equally fair to say a company can only claim expertise in areas its receptionist can point callers to. I’ll have to think of a snazzier way to say that, but if you can’t get to someone and access their expertise, then that expertise, in a very real way, doesn’t exist.

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