Get the sledgehammer out, we breaking down your job!

Hi Everyone,

 

We are going to head back to our Work district today and have a look at plans we can put in place to set sail for a more fantastic working life.

 

Walking into the foyer, you proudly see your mission statement hung confidently above the reception desk. We now have something to measure ourselves against! The next task we need to do is break apart the nut we call our jobs into smaller, more manageable, pieces and see how we measure up.

 

 

In our previous letter,  we mapped out our work building and gave floors to all the important sections of your job. Today I would like to focus on a group of very important floors. I want to break down the tasks you do at work, put them under a microscope and identify how we can do them better!

 

Your job will most likely have many layers and processes involved in its completion. Breaking these steps down can be very useful and can often fill up a floor each. For example, if you work as a server in a gastro-pub you may have some of the below roles:

• Serving customer
• pouring drinks
• delivering food to tables
• clearing tables
• checking on customers experience

 

In your building, each task you need to complete at work should be a given floor, these floors can be broken up into many rooms. The key thing to do on each of these floors is to split each task we need to complete into its smaller parts so we can look at how we perform and can improve in these areas.

 

Taking the act of serving a customer, you can break down this job into the below sub-tasks:

1. Greet the customer.
2. Enquire about customers request.
3. Take order from customers.
4. Take payment for customers order.
5. Close the exchange.

 

Of course, these may differ based on the query from the customer, and a different job will have wildly different steps you need to complete in order to progress through your day to day tasks. By breaking these steps down however, we can hone in on our strengths and weaknesses in order to improve and tailor ourselves to our working day.

 

 

Now when I usually say this to people, I would sometimes get back a retort that may sound something similar to the below:

 

“But dude, what’s to stop you from breaking those steps into smaller steps and then breaking those smaller steps down even further! You could keep going forever, this is pointless!”

 

Whilst their logic is sound, and you could keep breaking every task down until you find yourself reminding your self to breath in the most optimal way possible, I do find myself struggling greatly to contain my urge to find the nearest spoon and clang them around the forehead with it!

 

 

I therefore only recommend splitting down your daily tasks to a certain point, a good rule of thumb would be to picture someone who is completely unskilled in your job being asked to replicate the work you do. What steps would you need to highlight to them in order to teach them the best practices at your work?

 

Once the best practices have been established for your job, you can then set about making yourself, in the words of the famous poet and wordsmith Kanye West – “harder, better, faster and stronger”.

 

I hope that this letter has been useful to you, the carrier pigeons I use have demanded a pay rise so I regretfully have to admit that the material you are reading this on is now only 40% paper. We will find alternative methods of getting this information to you in future.

 

Yours sincerely,

Ryan Rose-Blanc

Rose-Blanc Town management