Today I Learned:
1. Michael Jackson wanted to be Jar Jar Binks but George Lucas wanted to do the work with CG instead of prosthetics.
2. Jar Jar as Lian Neeson’s character from Taken would be terrifying.
The video is episode three from a series called These Are The Actors You’re Looking For where Jamie Strangroom tracks down actors who played lesser Star Wars rolls.
He has also interviewed Boba Fett (Jeremy Bulloch) and Greedo (Paul Blake)
Your job is not your identity. Your job is not your family.
Your job will not be there for you in the bad times.
Your job is a place where you trade time for money.
Nothing more. Your job may use terms like family and try to build work relationships into friendships or beyond. But it’s just work.
At the end of the day, you should be able to leave that job, go home and think about other things. Your job should not follow you around as you lay in bed or walk in the park. Your job isn’t dating you. It’s not going to marry you and make commitments to have and hold to honor and love.
Your job is a place where you trade time for money.
I love public art installations. They’re so much fun especially when you stumble across them unexpectedly. As I did with one at the Food and Drugs Administration’s offices in Silver Spring, MD (where I recently started working.) There is a whole part of the building covered in people. Tiny, plastic people.
It’s a beautiful exhibit I’m happy to be able to see in person so the least I can do is share these photos of it with you. This display is part of the GSA’s Art in Architecture program. This one is from Do Ho Suh.
When I start a new job supporting people with technology I look for the excited. I look for the passion. I look for people who care about the work and about the mission.
I’m often disappointed.
I find people going through the motions. I find people who have given up and given in to the rote memorization of their lines. They answer phones and reply to emails. Not with any urgency or excitement but with disdain.
The joy is gone. If it was ever there to begin with and I ask myself if I’ve made another mistake. I keep looking for people who care about their work. And I’m looking in all the wrong places.
There is a certain challenge to supporting people within a rigid structure such as government. The tools are limited. The ways are structured and set forth, usually long ago. But there’s still room to make the work easier.
There are places to supply information and point people in the right direction. There are ways to decrease the number of calls and give those who want to seek knowledge a place to find it.
Where is the wiki? Where is the knowledge base? Why are support techs asking others for emails? Why does a new member of the team have nowhere to go to get the information they need to excel?
The easiest thing a support team can do is create a centralized place to store information, tips, fixes, and other vital knowledge the team needs. This is the first, and usually, last place a support tech should go for answers.
Step 1: Create a team knowledge space.
Be it a Sharepoint site or a wiki. Start small, with a collection of documents or a One Note notebook. Start somewhere and put everything in one place.
It will help the seasoned support staff because they won’t have to hunt for their past work. It will be right there. It will help the new support staff because they have a place to start looking before asking questions. They have a place to read and learn and get up to speed faster.
Step 2: Create a place for customers to get answers.
I don’t know how many times I’ve answered the same question by copying and pasting emails to customers. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the same questions asked and answered because the customer has nowhere to get this information.
By creating a place for the customer to help themselves, it will not only cut the number of support calls. It will help the support techs because to write good documentation, you have to fully understand the product you’re supporting.
Step 3: Consistent Improvement
Neither of these resources can be built in a day. They will be built over time. The team will build the structure they’ll use internally and keep changing it until they get it right. Nobody knows how to build a perfect system from the start. By building a living system, it will improve and become the support resource the team needs and relies on.
The same thing goes for the customers. In the beginning the space can be stocked with documentation that already exists. Collect everything that gets sent out to the customers and put it there. Give it a home. Put a URL on it. Send the link to people instead of the content.
A link can be shared and bookmarked. An email is designed to get lost under the mountain of other identical text.
This is what I believe in and this is what I am going to build.
How do you take a $35,000 investment and turn it into nearly $800,000,000 in sales? You pay your employees. You pay them twice the national average and you keep paying them to be the best.
Container Store founder and CEO Kip Tindell explains that the secret to the company’s high wages is what he calls “the 1=3 rule,” meaning that one great employee will be as productive as three employees who are merely good.
As a result, Tindell feels he gets ahead by receiving three times the productivity of an average worker at only two times the cost.
“They win, you save money, the customers win, and all the employees win because they get to work with someone great.”
He also has a plan to keep those great people by continuing to pay them well through raises.
Tindell then keeps these “great people” by giving them annual raises up to 8% of their salaries, based on their performance.
Not one-time bonuses, but real raises. This investment in the employee by the company tells the employee their company really cares about them and wants them to stay and be happy there.
Many people don’t love their jobs, but they’ll work hard if they feel the company is investing in them as much as they invest in the company.
“Everybody loves to say that it’s not all about pay,” he explains. “But pay is more important than most people realize, particularly if you’re trying to attract and keep really great people.”
It’s all about the money. Every time I’ve changed jobs, even jobs I loved, it was for considerably more money.
Money opens doors. Money is the great enabler. It allows me to save for retirement, afford insurance, and contribute to my savings account.
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