Take time off: systems need some duplication

More than 20 years ago, I chaperoned a U.S. university abroad program to England. A professor with us went to an office to get student/visitor group London tube passes. Arriving half an hour before closing, the clerks said no, they couldn’t help. He’d have to return the next day. They wouldn’t stay late to meet a customer’s needs for any reason.

We joked that it wasn’t the customer service we’d come to expect. When we moved to Canada in 2009, we noticed that, on a spectrum, Canada’s overall customer service was between the U.S. and the U.K. Canadians were happy to help, if it wasn’t inconvenient.

Sometimes exemplary customer service is more expensive. It requires extra time from employees. Yet, a system without enough employees or a willingness to meet clients’ needs becomes dysfunctional.

In Manitoba, our bureaucracies and businesses struggle with this. The business mantra of eliminating “extra” streamlines staffing, sometimes to a breaking point. This occurred in health care when Premier Brian Pallister’s system eradicated small neighbourhood labs in favour of a Dynacare monopoly. The government also removed city urgent care clinics. The NDP government has begun to remedy this. They’ve reopened an urgent care at Misericordia hospital, for instance. It’s a slow process.

This is a necessary step. Systems need some redundancy, and not just because, in that older case, tourists might need transportation passes. Canadian work culture retains a healthy notion that taking a real vacation, perhaps off-grid and out in nature, is a good idea. However, without job training duplication, each summer, many people still at work must wait on others’ return to work to get things done.

As a writer or editor, sometimes there’s no use submitting anything in August or December. Nobody senior enough to make decisions would be in the office anyway.

Does this phenomenon happen in Manitoba? Absolutely. I’ve been the observer to a complicated committee hiring process at the university level.

After nearly nine months of committee work, applications, and interviews, a recommendation’s been made to hire two professors. Now, the approval process sits in limbo, because the right dean/vice-provost/hiring official is off at the cottage and doesn’t check email. Meanwhile, those candidates might well accept positions elsewhere. The committee might lose an entire academic year’s worth of work.

The solution isn’t a workaholic approach, as many U.S. employees take, incessantly checking work emails, even while on vacation. Citing the tsunami of messages they have upon their return, they never allow themselves a break from the workload. Without real time off, it’s nearly impossible to avoid burnout.

Instead, consider the approach taken by many who staff smaller businesses or offices. Everyone knows how to do their work and has been trained or asked to occasionally step in to cover someone else’s responsibilities. While this might appear to be “out of the job description,” it offers multiple benefits.

First, and most important for efficiency of commerce, it allows work to function all the time. Work continues even while someone is on vacation. Whether it’s a smaller rural office or a huge bureaucracy, if someone always has access to the passwords, the keys, or the right paperwork process.

This is crucial, not just for trips to the cottage, but also due to accidents, injuries, parental or family leave. We’re all human. Sometimes life interferes with a perfectly streamlined work environment. A well-run system doesn’t collapse because the person who signs the paycheques or knows the passwords is out of the office for a day.

Second, a system that trains workers to cover other tasks allows every employee to learn new skills. Helping people to learn on the job means they can continue to gain new stimulation in the workplace. This paves the way towards new positions or future promotion. Introducing mastery of new systems means some employees won’t become bored and seek employment elsewhere.

Third, an environment where everyone is trusted to rise to the challenge results in a team collaboration. It’s an approach that allows positive community building. One hopes never to have an emergency, but a team that thinks fast and adjusts when someone has an accident and can’t be at work is a healthy (and more productive) work environment.

We all like to think we are indispensable. While it’s true that we’re all unique, big institutions and little shops alike don’t need diva personalities to function. Instead, we should be considering how best to find functional solutions while allowing each other time to recharge and live our lives.

This approach is the most efficient model, because it saves time in the long run and requires us to grow and do more, rather than just staying in our lane while our colleagues are off at the beach.

Joanne Seiff, a Winnipeg author, has been contributing opinions and analysis to the Free Press since 2009.