Last year I merged my GAMA travel and a week in Phoenix into one two-week megatrip. Going away on a two-week trip when I’d never previously been away from the business for more than four days was terrifying. One of the things I asked my managers to do to put my mind at ease was to send a group Facebook message to me and the other managers telling us briefly how the day went and what everyone did.
The trip went great. I kept a list on an index card and found that after two weeks, my input was only needed for three minor things. When I got back, I realized how useful those daily messages were. The managers loved them, too, and we’ve been doing them ever since.
How: We use a Facebook group chat. We limit it to just me, my wife, and our three managers. If you’ve got a smaller staff you might consider having every employee in this chat, but we have a whole-company employee Facebook group for that sort of coordination, and I don’t like bothering a 16-hour employee with notifications while they’re out living their lives. If you don’t use Facebook, a Google Hangout works great, too. There are other third-party collaboration tools out there for folks that don’t want to use Facebook or Google. I could see the need for an alternative increasing with the size of your staff.
Why:
- Keeps you, the owner, informed at a high level of what’s going on. This message is a good opportunity for an employee to give everyone a heads up about something that is important but isn’t time-critical.
- Keeps managers (or employees) in the loop on non-crisis items.
- Provides employees with a motivation to accomplish something every day: My employees know that if sales were poor, they should have something to show for all their time at the end of the day.
- Provides a way for my managers to keep me and each other posted about ongoing problems and our progress on them. For instance, an intermittent sewer gas leak we’ve been trying to track down, or an employee who got a poor evaluation and is getting special attention until they’re back on track.
- Gives managers that never work with each other a venue for socialization, no matter how limited.
- If you don’t have a remotely-accessible POS system, this is a good opportunity to get the daily totals.
The daily check-in really should remain very simple. My current opinion is that you should resist the temptation to make an end-of-the-day questionnaire form that must be completed. If you trust your people to run your store without you, you trust them to know what is important and what is not. Here’s an example of the daily reports that we give:
As an aside: You know what’s NOT mentioned in that update? Anything about video games. That’s because they’re that easy. If you’re going to GAMA, you should come to our Video Games presentation.
That’s all I’ve got. I look forward to seeing many of you in Vegas next week!