Context
I’m the
managing director of a domiciliary care company. We have never been under any
illusion that we are only as good as the quality of the people who deliver our
care services. In this respect we are no different from any other business to
the extent that all businesses are dependent on the quality of their staff.
With businesses in the service sector, however, where there are no products
being supplied – the quality of the business is wholly determined by the
quality of the people supplying the service.
Businesses
often pay lip service to the idea that their staff are their most valuable
asset. We don’t. Our starting point for running the business is that we realise
only too well that without our customers our services
would not be required, but we realise equally as well that we are only as good
as the services provided to our customers by our care and support workers. For
those reasons, we have a right to be very selective in the
people we choose to provide
those services.
Some people may call us choosy; some people may call us
picky, some may even say we are impossible to please. Most certainly we are
very particular when it comes to selecting the people whom we are prepared to
send out to care for our customers; without any doubt, we are very demanding in
the qualities we look for in our carers, I certainly would not say that we are
impossible to please; we are, however, never satisfied with second best.
What
qualities, therefore, do we look for when we select care and support workers?
I’m not talking about the technical side of care. All the skills you need to be
able to deliver care itself are ones that can be acquired. Such skills as the
correct way to use a hoist, to prepare food and assist with medication can be
learned. I am more concerned in this article, and other articles that will
follow, with the things that are much more difficult to teach. Time management
is the first of those qualities I’m going to look at. In other articles I’ll
look at such qualities as communication, people skills and dealing with
paperwork.
Time
Management
I was
once given some great advice: never be on time; always be early. Now I have to
declare a particular prejudice at this point. If there is one human
failing more than any other that I find that I am increasingly highly critical
of – to the point of outright intolerance - it is poor punctuality. My critical
stance is such that I will devote a separate article to punctuality; however,
the overlap between time management and punctuality is manifest.
Let me
tell you a true story about a very good friend of mine. I’ll call him David. He
and I met about twenty five years ago when we shared an office together.
Everyone liked David. He was friendly, good company and a constant source of
good humour. David, though, had two major problems in life: he could never (and
I mean never) do anything to time and he could never say no.
Everyone
in the company knew that if you asked David for anything he would always say
yes. And everyone knew that if you asked David for anything you would not get
it on time. You would always be chasing him.
What
people did, of course, was to give David deadlines several days and sometimes
weeks in advance of when the true deadline was. In a short time, this just had
the effect of bringing everybody’s’ deadlines forward and did nothing to help
David. After a while, David’s line manager decided that it would be good for David
to go on a time management course.
The time
management course just made things worse. One morning, I found David frowning
over a list he was drawing up. He looked unhappy. I asked him what was wrong.
He explained that he had been advised on his time management course to draw up
a to do list and prioritise the jobs he had to do on any particular day. The
problem was that he was now taking over an hour (sometimes up to two hours)
each day deciding what should be on his list and in what order of priority they
should appear.
I’m not
saying that time management techniques are not a good thing: they can be. I’m
not saying you should not adopt some of these various time management
techniques: you should if they work for you. What I am saying is that you need
to be selective: and know when to say no.
Let me
make the point again. I’m not saying that time management skills should be
ignored, but they have to work for you. Different techniques work for different
people. This is put very well by dumblittleman.com:
“Time
management is a skill that takes time to develop and perfect. It also is a
skill that is different for everyone. Your best bet is to try a variety of
different approaches until something clicks in your brain and sticks in your
routine.”
http://www.dumblittleman.com/2008/02/11-solid-ways-to-improve-your-time.html
And you
need to know when to say no because of the nature of psychological time. You
need to be able to say no so that you can focus on doing the things that are
most productive. And what is most productive may not be drawing up to do lists.
Chronological
Time and Psychological Time
Chronological
time is the same for all of us. One day is one day; one hour is one hour, and
one minute is one minute. We are all equal in the amount of time available to
us in a day. Psychological time varies from person to person, and varies for
each person according to the activity. As entrepreneur.com explains:
“In real time [psychological time], all time is relative.
Time flies or drags depending on what you're doing. Two hours at the department
of motor vehicles can feel like 12 years. And yet our 12-year-old children seem
to have grown up in only two hours.”
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/219553
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/219553
You will
be very familiar with the idea of psychological time, or real time. Remember
how slowly Christmas used to come around when you were a kid? How quickly does
it come around now that you are an adult? And it is because of the way
psychological time varies that you must learn to say no. You may think that you
have plenty of time to complete a task, so it’s fine if you add on one more
little job. Then the time you thought you had is just gobbled up.
Time
flies when you are having fun. When you are having fun it is easy to lose track
of time. When you lose track of time your time management ability is at risk.
As a care and support worker you never want to be in a position where your time
management skills are at risk.
Carers
and the Duty to Say No
The
nature of care work is that it is fluid. The calls that a carer has each week
are unlikely to remain the same week in week out. Customers change the times
that they want calls; carers go on holiday and go sick and cover is required,
new customers are taken on and old customers, for various reasons, end their
calls.
If we
offer calls to you as a care and support worker and you accept our offer, our
position is a very simple one: you have a moral, obligation to us and to the
customers whose calls you have agreed to do to carry out those calls on time to
the very best of your ability.
Once you
accept the commitment of a care call, a large number of people come to rely
upon your carrying out your call. We rely upon you; your customer relies upon
you; your customer’s family rely upon you; other cares rely upon you, and other
people dealing with your customer that day may rely upon you. That’s a heavy
weight of responsibility.
Let me
emphasise something: you have no duty to accept our offer or work. You do have
a duty to decline our offer if you know that you will be unable to fulfil your
commitment.
Once you
have committed to doing calls you are under a duty to decline any other offer
of work (or any other offer for whatever it may be, even if it is an offer of
fun where you know time will fly) that might prevent your completing the calls
to which you have committed yourself. I won’t pursue here the point about
promising to do work and then reneging on that promise – that’s for another
time. I’m more concerned here with taking on too much.
How to
Say No
I’m not
for one moment going to tell you that this is easy: it’s not. David used to
find it very hard to say no because he was quite simply a thoroughly nice
person. He hated the thought that he might offend people and he always wanted
to help but he ended up offending them anyway and not helping them at all.
The truth
is that there is no easy way to say no. When it comes down to it there are two
approaches you can take. You can beat about the bush and offer all sorts of
explanations about why you can’t do something, or you can come straight to the
point and just say no. I’m not saying that you should be rude: far from it. You
should be polite but firm. As Celestine Chua puts it:
“The
simplest and most direct way [is] to say no. We build up too many barriers in
our mind to saying no. ...Don’t think so much about saying no and just say it
outright. You’ll be surprised when the reception isn’t half as bad as what you
imagined it to be.”
Organising
Your Time
One of
the most organised people I have ever known worked in marketing. She used to
organise her time by using an electronic diary. She would shade out chunks of
time in various colours that related to the different activities that she had
to do. It worked for her. I don’t recall her ever missing a deadline or
forgetting anything.
Different
techniques work for different people. If you know you have difficulties
managing your time, you need to find the thing that works for you. If you
simple cannot organise your time, then however strong your other caring skills
are you will be lacking an essential quality that we look for in all our carers.
You may
have heard of the 80:20 principle. In
short, this principle tells you that 20% of the tasks you undertake are vital
to your productivity. The other 80% of your tasks, whilst not trivial (although
some will be) are the ones that make you least productive. The 80:20 rule has
its roots in economics but it has very real world applications, as Yaro Starak
explains:
“The good thing about the 80/20 rule is that you don’t
have to understand statistics to be a believer. Yes it has foundations in
economics and yes, it was ‘proven’ using statistical analysis by a man named
Pareto, but it is not meant to be understood only by economics professors.”
I’m not
convinced that it’s possible to prove the 80:20 principle. However, I think
there is plenty of evidence that many of us are prone to waste our time on
things that make us poor time managers, like my old friend David’s writing out
his to do list. Identifying some of those time wasting activities can help
improve time management. But it is ultimately down to you to identify these
things.
Conclusion
Let me
finish with the point I made at the beginning. Our starting point for running
the business is that we realise only too well that without our customers our services would not be required, but we realise equally as
well that we are only as good as the services provided to our customers by our
care and support workers. For those reasons, we have a right to be very
selective in the
people we choose to provide
those services.
The point is a very simple one; if you cannot manage your
time you will be incapable of providing the outstanding service that we have a
duty to provide for our customers and they have a right to receive.
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