Friday Challenge: The One-Employee Challenge

It's Friday!

So you know what that means.

I've got homework for you.

Last time, we followed the experience of one customer.

Today, we're turning our attention inside the organization.

Your assignment is simple:

Ask one employee one question.

Not a survey.

Not a performance review.

Not a team meeting.

One employee.

One conversation.

One question:

“What's one thing that makes your job harder than it needs to be?”

Then do something that may be harder than asking the question.

Listen.

Don't Defend. Don't Explain. Just Listen.

You might hear about:

A process that takes too long.

Software that doesn't work well.

A report nobody uses.

An approval that's constantly delayed.

A customer issue that keeps happening.

A policy that creates unnecessary work.

Poor communication between departments.

A task that should have been automated years ago.

Or something you never knew was happening.

Whatever the answer is, resist the urge to immediately explain why things work that way.

For a few minutes, your job isn't to manage.

It's to learn.

Now Ask: “How Often Does This Happen?”

This is where one employee's frustration can become a business question.

Once a week?

Every day?

Several times a day?

Now consider how many other employees encounter the same problem.

Something that wastes one employee 15 minutes may not seem significant.

But if 20 employees lose those same 15 minutes every day, that's five hours of productivity disappearing across the organization.

Every day.

A small annoyance can become a measurable operational problem.

Look for the Data

Now investigate.

Can you find evidence of the problem?

Look at:

• Processing times

• Rework

• Overtime

• Error rates

• Customer complaints

• Approval delays

• Help-desk requests

• Employee turnover

• Productivity trends

• Absenteeism

The employee gave you the observation.

The data helps you determine the scale.

That's where analytics becomes especially powerful.

Find the Friction

Businesses spend a lot of time looking for opportunities to grow.

Sometimes an equally valuable opportunity is removing something that's getting in the way.

One unnecessary approval.

One repetitive task.

One confusing process.

One communication breakdown.

One piece of outdated software.

Removing friction doesn't always require a major investment.

Sometimes it simply requires someone in leadership to notice it.

Your Weekend Homework

Before you leave today—or when you return Monday—choose one employee.

Ask:

“What's one thing that makes your job harder than it needs to be?”

Then:

1. Listen to the answer.

2. Ask how often it happens.

3. Determine whether others experience it too.

4. Look for the evidence in your data.

5. Identify one thing you can do about it.

That's your assignment.

One Important Rule

Don't punish honesty.

If employees believe identifying problems creates problems for them, they'll eventually

stop identifying them.

And leadership will lose one of its most valuable sources of business intelligence:

The people actually doing the work.

Final Thought

Your dashboard can tell you that productivity declined.

Your employees may be able to tell you why.

Your reports can show that customers are waiting longer.

Your employees may already know where the bottleneck is.

Your analytics can reveal the pattern.

Your people can provide the context.

Great organizations need both.

So this weekend, forget about finding another metric.

Find an employee.

Ask one good question.

And listen carefully to the answer.

You might discover that some of the best business intelligence in your organization isn't sitting in a database.

It's sitting at a desk.

#FridayChallenge #GoAnalytics #EmployeeExperience #Leadership #BusinessAnalytics #OperationalExcellence #ContinuousImprovement #DataDrivenLeadership #MichaelGrismore

Champions don't guess. Neither should your business.