Maintenance

When something is broken, fix it. That's the whole point of this week's post.

It can be hard. Budgets are demanding sometimes, quality repairmen can be hard to find. But the fact is, few things will destroy your employees' motivation faster than dealing with broken stuff. If they see you don't care enough about the business to keep it in good repair, why should they? Or worse, if they think you don't care enough about them to provide a functioning work environment, you could be facing a mutiny.

I once worked at a store where the touch screen on one of the registers would stick. You'd touch a button, and nothing would happen. You'd have to bear down, or lightly touch it. There wasn't any consistent solution to getting it to work. Once it did register the touch? Often times, it registered more than one. Instead of one junior bacon burger, you just rang up fifteen. It was an extremely frustrating situation in the middle of a lunch rush.

Management was aware of the problem, but not inclined to fix it. They were “too busy to call the help desk.” There “wasn't enough money in the budget” for a new one. They “weren't even sure” who to call to get it fixed. So the problem festered, until eventually a crew member struck the screen in frustration, cracking it. It took about two days for a tech to come out to repair it, and the full $2000 repair bill made sure no one bonused in that store for the quarter. The frustrated employee was let go, which was a huge loss to the team.

The real irony? We found out from the tech these screens go bad all the time, and had someone called the Help Desk a replacement would have been sent out, free of charge.

Or take another example, where the air condition vents were dripping water onto the floor. This was in a pizza shop, where there's a lot of flour dust around. The little water puddles, plus the dust, made for extremely messy floors. Not to mention the annoying fact that people born in America aren't used to having the ceiling drip water onto them. As the situation dragged on for weeks and weeks with no word from the company on whether or not it would be fixed, morale dragged. It grew increasingly difficult to get a decent closing mop job: “Who cares? The floors will just look like shit again thanks to the water puddles.”

It eventually took a conversation with the owner, who placed a phone call to the management company of the strip mall the store was located in. Citing the lease agreement, which clearly stated the management company's responsibility to maintain facilities, the shop's owner was able to get the problem resolved. But not before customers witnessed several irritated outbursts, and saw days of filthy floors.

It may be an expensive hassle to fix the problem, but you cannot allow a problem to perpetuate indefinitely. The longer it runs, the worse it gets and the worse the side effects get. Employees and customers know a well run operation when they see it, and they won't hesitate to leave a poorly run one.