About a year ago, my friend and boss came to my house to observe a day of work with me. It was a great day and we got a lot done to make the workflow a lot simpler and streamlined. He was able to see what could be automated and what might be causing duplicity when it wasn’t necessary. I was so happy with the changes we were able to make and I think he agreed that it was very productive. And when that day was done, we mentioned how helpful it would be for the founder and CEO to do the same thing since a lot had changed since he was the one doing this side of the business.
It took a bit of time to coordinate when he would be able to shadow me for the day, and since then my job responsibilities have changed, but we were finally able to make it happen earlier this week. My friend who shadowed me last time was there for the full day and the CEO/founder was there for the second half of the day. And again, it was a really productive time.
Since switching to doing more administrative tasks, I have noticed more things that could be done differently or easier. But a lot of changes needed to be made once the shadowing day happened because we all wanted to make sure that we were on the same page and that the changes we were making wouldn’t affect anyone’s workflow. But I think the bigger part of it was having the CEO/founder understand some of the requests that myself and my co-workers had about changes because I knew that the roadblocks we were encountering were things that he hadn’t experienced in the past.
I’m so grateful that everything went smoothly and that almost all the changes I was hoping to see happen did happen. I think it can be tough to explain what we wanted to see changed over a Zoom or phone call. But once someone is there in person and sees the exact workflow that we go through to accomplish some things, then they understand what is happening and changes can be made. And there were new changes suggested by the CEO/founder and my friend that I hadn’t even considered before that would make things easier for myself and my co-workers when we needed additional information. And once they suggested it, they were very simple changes. Most of the time, it was just moving information to a Google Sheet that the rest of us could access or putting things in a new order so we could see the most important information first and the information we don’t need to see would be out of the way.
Even though most of the shadowing was during just half of the day, I think we got a lot accomplished, and only a few things were left to be handled at another time. But we’ve also already discussed that there will need to be another shadowing day soon because there will be some new team members joining that will need to observe and contribute to this coming up plus some current team members that we realized should have been there to help with some of the other problem-solving.
I know I’ve said this before, but I’m really lucky at the day job I have now. I’ve been able to basically create my own job position within the company and I know that my input and ideas are valued and heard. And they also know that this is a day job and not necessarily a career, so when I have wins in my acting career those are celebrated and not seen as issues. I am working more hours than I ever did, but at least I’m still working from home and I have been able to focus on the work that I enjoy doing more and helping to make changes that benefit everyone within the company. I don’t think I could ask for a better situation for my job right now, and I am so happy that this shadowing day resulted in a lot of positive and productive changes.
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