Scalable Marketing Series: #2 Achieve Administration Flow

This is the second post in Calipso’s Scalable Marketing Series where we explore the concepts we adhere to when advising our Business Development clients. Today we look at administration and discuss why and how to achieve effective work Flow to maximize productivity.

Have you heard of Flow in the context of getting work done? Flow is the concept of going through your work day with the same sort of confidence and ease that most people have when they breathe, walk or do a number of other simple tasks. When employees achieve flow in their jobs, they are able to produce for their businesses with minimal effort. In such an environment, productivity rises and morale is easier to maintain. That’s why Calipso recommends that businesses implement administrative routines that allow employees to flow through their day. How? By using division of labor based on who flows better in each task.

Roger Hamilton, author of Wealth Dynamics and a major proponent of flow, has spoken a lot about flow and how to achieve it. He has identified and defined five elemental personality types and suggested optimal organizational roles for each. That concept can be explored here in more detail. For illustration, let’s look at how a coastal clean-up organization divides labor in ways that allow for flow and administration to happen at the same time. It all starts with two leaders, one distributing bags and gloves to some and pinchers and gloves to others.

When employees flow in their jobs they produce for their businesses with minimal effort. In such an environment, productivity rises and morale is easier to maintain.

The other leader distributes clipboards to one in every four volunteers. During the clean-up process, teams of four are divided into two people who forage for rubbish, one person holding the bags and one person with a clipboard recording the amounts and types of trash being put in the bags. At the end, one leader collects the bags (now full) and puts the pinchers and clipboards back into the inventory. The other leader adds the quantities of each type of trash and enters them in a database. Notice how the concept of division of labor allowed the clean-up event to happen without any one person having to stop flowing in one task to do another completely different task? How different would it be if everyone where a trash picker with their own bag and clipboard?

Like the clean-up example, an efficient sales team can collect statistics using different personnel than it uses to do the day-to-day prospecting. The result is more flow, more scalability and, most importantly, more productivity.

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