Employees Are Your Early Warning System
Train them to catch problems early and protect business continuity
Welcome to the Gazebo! Grab a cup and join me for some tips to help you succeed at the intersection of management, communication, and technology.
«Sneak preview of a topic from my upcoming communication book.»
This Week’s Summary:
Major problems can seriously derail business continuity.
Serious problems show early symptoms before they become major issues.
Employees see what happens every day.
Train employees to notice abnormalities before they become major issues.
Develop a culture that supports openness instead of fears retribution.
This all helps to preserve business continuity.
We owe a lot to the humble bee which has gotten a lot of attention in recent years, and for good reason. According to Judy Wu-Smart, a professor with the University of Nebraska- Lincoln, “Bees play an important role in the ability to inform us about the status of the environment. … We call them … ‘canaries in a coal mine.’ Bees can indicate issues with the environment typically before the issues reach human health.” In other words, when the bee population starts to suffer from a pollutant of some kind, it is an early indicator of something that, if not corrected, could eventually negatively impact human health. Resolving the pollution problem early saves the bees and avoids human illness.1
Image created by Ed Paulson using Copilot in Windows.
Why would she refer to it as a canary in a coal mine? You may be surprised to learn that canaries were an integral safety features for the coal mining industry up until as recent as the 1980s. Coal mines were dangerous places, and one of the common dangers was the odorless gas carbon monoxide. If gas concentrations built up to a high enough level it could be fatal to the miners. The problem was that the gas was odorless, and the miners had no way of knowing that gas levels were getting dangerous until it was too late. This is where the canary entered the picture.
Miners would bring canaries into the mine with them and regularly check the bird’s health. If the bird became unconscious, the miners treated that as an early indicator of gas buildup and took steps to protect themselves before it became too late. Just as the humble bee is currently an early indicator to scientists of a pollution problem, the canary was an early indicator to miners of a potentially fatal gas concentration problem. Problems with the birds provided an early warning of a more serious problem in the near future if corrective steps were not taken.2
Take a moment to reflect back on a time when you got bitten by a problem that could have been easily minimized had you known about it earlier. Think about the frustration you felt when you realized that someone had known about the problem early on but did not say anything. Or even more likely, they saw symptoms of the problem early on but did not realize that what they were seeing was abnormal enough to warrant additional investigation. It was only after the fact, in reviewing what had happened, that they realized that what they thought were “normal” changes were actually indications of an abnormality that eventually became serious.
If you think about it, you can only know something is abnormal when you are familiar with normal. What determines normal?
Is my fever high? When I take my temperature, I know that “normal” temperature is around 98.6 F (37 C). A temperature of over 100 F (38 C) tells me that something abnormal is going on with my body and I start monitoring for other symptoms to help me determine what may be happening.
Notice two things have to happen for this simple diagnostic process to function: 1) I need to know that 98.6 F (or so) is normal and 2) I need to have some way of monitoring my temperature or I would never know that the abnormal symptom existed.3
We aren’t born with the knowledge that 98.6 F is a “normal” temperature. We are taught this knowledge from a young age by our parents and doctors. If we were not taught to monitor our bodies for elevated temperatures, we would not have any advanced warning that we might be getting seriously ill until the disease had progressed to an advanced stage.
This happened to me when I was in high school. I walked around with a high fever for a few days, mostly because I wanted to do stuff with my friends, not realizing that my body was dehydrating at an abnormal rate. When I finally started to feel miserable, I needed to go to emergency where the doctor scolded me for not drinking more fluids when the fever came on. I had done just the opposite, drank less fluids, and the dehydration is what brought me to emergency, not the fever itself. One day later after receiving emergency IV fluids, I was ready to go home. The fever was a symptom that I had ignored. Now when my body temperature becomes elevated, I drink MORE fluids instead of less. Another lifelong lesson from the school of hard knocks.
Image created by Ed Paulson using Copilot in Windows.
Managers face problems all the time and problem solving is a critical management skill. There are no scarcity of methodologies and training available that teach the skills needed to solve problems after they present themselves.
Where are those teaching the skills focused on finding and preventing problems before they become newspaper headlines?
In my experience, business problems rarely show up unannounced. They usually offer clues (what I call “symptoms”) early on that something is not right. A major opportunity for management is developing a way of recognizing abnormal symptoms before they become major issues. Here is where your employees can play an important role, just like the canary in the coal mine.
Employees work throughout your organization, focused on their part of the overall business process. They should know what normal looks like for their areas of responsibility and will likely recognize when something is veering off course. They are in a position to recognize process abnormalities, but first they need to develop an awareness of what normal looks like. Then they need to develop some type of objective monitoring approach to check to see how close to normal things are running. Our minds can play tricks on us and the objective measure offers a check on our perceptions. This doesn’t happen by accident. It takes conscious analysis, effort, and planning.
There are tangible benefits to be derived from adopting a preventative perspective. A colleague saved one of her clients millions of dollars in fines and penalties by anticipating a future problem and embedding a process check for proper compliance with government required labeling. Some time later, as my client suspected might happen, someone in the process changed the label and was prepared to ship product out with the incorrect label, which would have been a costly financial and public relations fiasco. Her foresight caught the labeling “canary” before it became a problem. Where are yours?
You can start creating your own organization’s early warning system by taking the following steps.
First, define normal. This is where business continuity becomes so important. It defines an idealized flow that your organization should attempt to maintain. You can think of this as your “normal” state.
Next, consider the critical points where you would want to know if your idealized business continuity flow is off-course. What types of symptoms would you expect to find if things became abnormal enough to warrant additional attention?
Third, develop the monitoring systems and their associated reports to ensure that you catch when things become abnormal.
Fourth, ensure that the employees who monitor things understand the appropriate next steps to take when things need additional attention.
Notice that effective communication is essential for each step, the details of which will be provided in my upcoming book.
This type of change won’t happen overnight, and it can happen. It may require a cultural shift from one that reacts to problems (I call this the “billiard ball” approach to management) to one that anticipates the most likely problems and plans viable solutions.
Which is better? To know that gases can build up in a mine and bring a canary along to keep everyone safe, or to ignore the problem and deal with all of the moral and business issues that will arise from an avoidable gas tragedy? This is really an easy question to answer.
Have a great week and thanks for stopping by! ☮
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