Are You Always Available?

 Learning how to deal effectively with other people is one of the Solo Elite 4 Fundamentals. People skills is a broad term tossed around. What does it mean? In my opinion, it's the ability and skill to effectively build relationships with other people so that they know, like, and trust you. I want to focus on one people skill today. It's responsiveness. How responsive are you to customer inquiries and complaints? If you have employees, how responsive are you to their questions? What about your personal relationships? How responsive are you with your spouse, children, parents, siblings, close friends, church and other acquaintances? What boundaries do you have? What standards do you have? I'm going to focus this episode on helping you develop a single boundary in your communication and responsiveness. Are you always available in your business 24/7? Do you have an off switch or a boundary for personal time? What is an appropriate reply time? Let's dig in!

I need to first take you back in time. I found this article from a staffing company that is very interesting about business-as-usual before the advent of email. The article references two old-timers in corporate America. The lawyer said this. "The difference between the 1990s and today is that things move more quickly, the primary advantage being the ability to attach documents. Here today, there today. Fax machines suck, have always sucked, and will always suck. But I see the Federal Express driver a whole lot less these days." A business consultant shares her perspective. "Then, in our prior email-less world (gasp!). Mornings consisted of riffling through your inbox of hand-scribbled notes from your colleagues and phone messages from callers interpreted by an assistant. Can you imagine it? You responded by scribbling the responses and dropping them off in everyone else’s inbox. You wrote lengthy letters to clients, dropped them in the U.S. mail, and waited 7-10 days for a response. All letters were official, on letterhead, so everything was written formally. No mistakes. No sentence fragments. At this pace, the quick decisions we are accustomed to today were more than hard to come by. Modern workers, especially those who have never lived in an email-less workplace, could not imagine functioning like this. Still, just as email has solved a lot of our problems, it has undoubtedly created some as well. Messages from clients and colleagues come by email, but they are sent and opened around the clock. You are on 24/7! You write to clients as quickly, briefly, and often as informally as you do colleagues.”
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The lack of technology and universally understood business hours provided built-in boundaries on our expectation of responsiveness. Everything back then was 7-10 business days when mail was concerned. This is up to 2 weeks! Can you imagine having to wait that long for a response now?! Most business communication was done formally and at much longer response times. That was normal. That allowed workers to be off the clock after they left the office. There were other forms of communication back then too. There was something called a phone and an assistant. The boundary and expectation was simple. You make a business call to the assistant of the business person you need a reply. They took a message and you would hear back within a few days. 48 hours was a reasonable expectation. If you waited longer, you'd consider it poor responsiveness. If the written communication took longer than 7-10 business days, you'd again consider this poor responsiveness. Both are bad.


Read the rest of this episode on the Smart Cleaning School website