Tuesday, 1 July 2014

A gherkin epiphany - look around at what you do

Well, not quite about gherkins, but lem'me tell you...gherkins will feature!
To be honest, this post is really about the theme of "helping".
It is something we here in the business I work for, do very well. It's a common trait for everyone that works here - we're doers and thinkers and helpers - fantastic combinations to have in any organisation, ours more so than most especially given how quickly this business changes. To give you an idea, we do electricity, gas and telecommunications including ultra fast fibre and ADSL/VDSL.
It is incredible how quickly roadblocks we find here become opportunities, mistakes become positive learnings, and the untenable can become tenable, even an advantage.  Yup, my workplace is filled with amazing people doing amazing things. But I'm not here to blow hot air at you. Not my style.
This post on "Helping" is simply a bit of an eye-opener for you. I use this story I'm about to tell you to illustrate just how much of an impact you can have in your job, no matter where you stand in any organisation, no matter what your role is.  It's also a story I reference to illustrate just how powerful a change in focus toward "awareness to help" can be.
Read on, you'll pick up what I'm putting down by the end. Promise.
THE STORY
A fair few years back a major international airline employed a softly spoken, Joe-blogs-blue-collar working man who nobody would have considered smart. He hadn't finished school and worked for the airline as a cleaner, his boss didn't really give him the time of day.  It was this softly spoken man's job to collect the finished plates of food at the end of each flight and clear them back in the terminal for the plates to be washed. Not a particularly glamorous job, but certainly essential to the ongoing running of this multi-million dollar business.
For years, this man simply boarded the plane, wheeled out the plates in their container and scraped them clean, stacking them up for washing. He did this ten times or more a day. Very quickly this repetitiveness became instinctive, he no longer had to think about what he was doing anymore – he just simply did it.  Like a robot, same task repeatedly.
However, one day after the CEO of the airline informed everyone of a global fuel crisis and asked everyone to look for efficiency, he happened to notice the amount of gherkins left on the plates.
Every time he cleared the plane as he always did, over half of the plates still had the gherkins left on them. He raised this with his direct supervisor, who ignored him and told him not to worry about it - they were only gherkins. A week or two passed until the CEO raised the efficiency speech again and this man finally summoned up enough courage to speak up – he went straight to the airlines CEO direct.
The CEO immediately took the cleaner seriously and in no time at all, that cleaner saved the airline well over $200,000 per annum. 
Because of gherkins.
"So?" I hear you ask. "What does this mean for me?"
Easy. You can contribute to your businesses success more than you know - it's just a matter of changing your perception to what you can see...and having the courage to speak up.  
If you're lucky, you won't have any supervisors/leaders like the one who ignored the cleaners suggestion.
Most jobs have KA's - "Key Accountibilities" or set expectations on what is expected of you - things you are graded on. 
How great do you think it would be if you identified efficiency in your job? Forget the kudos, think personal pride!
So go on – have a look around at those tasks you do every day and see if there's anything there that can be improved and see how much it would take to get it done.
Who knows, maybe you'll have a gherkin epiphany yourself.

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