By Laura Schmitz
As many of you know, I travel a lot. I almost always rent a car and have come to some conclusions:
1. Best City with no traffic any time of any day: Reno, NV
2. Worst City for traffic: Atlanta, GA by far worse than NYC or LA or Paris or London (it once took me 3 hours to go 8 miles in Atlanta on a Tuesday; I’m renting a ten-speed from now on.)
3. Weirdest highway entrances/exits: Toss-up between NH, Milwaukee, WI and TX
4. Nicest and most Courteous drivers: AR & OH
5. Best Drivers (in as far as they know the rules of the road like how to merge, etc.): WA
6. Worst Drivers possibly in the world: My home state of MN, it doesn’t matter where you go; the Twin Cities or in the most northern rural cities, they can’t drive!
Whether you look at the passive aggressive speed monitors who hang out in the left lane at 54 mph staying right next to the guy in the right lane or the ever annoying who speed up just as they’re supposed to yield to the merge or those that simply don’t pay attention to the Road construction signs (all 10 of them in ever increasing size, blinking patterns and neon indicating a closed lane); they still wait until they’re going to run over a cone before they get over. Keep in mind that there are 2 seasons in MN: Winter and Road Construction; so this is a good 5-6 months each year. But what’s really got me going is a new phenomenon: NEVER using a blinker. I mean, all of a sudden, you’re driving along and out of the corner of your eye you see a car drifting your way and lo and behold they’re in your lane about 2 inches from your bumper. It’s maddening! Do Minnesotans not know about this great, timeless piece of technology called a blinker that allows them to alert other drivers as to their intentions to switch lanes or take an exit or turn? Do they think that like headlights this has gone automatic and the car just KNOWS to signal for them? Every day I experience my heart skip a beat as I envision the 10 car pile-up that was just miraculously avoided because some moron didn’t use a blinker and without looking just veered into the next lane.
So, I do have a business parallel to talk about (thanks for letting me get all of that inner road rage off my chest).
Just like the blinker in your car, the signals you send when utilizing the technology you have invested in can be used to indicate to all the other drivers in the business where you’re going. Software is great (I happen to think that Avionté is some of the best software out there), but if it isn’t paired with a solid base of process and procedure, it’s just like the MN driver weaving in and out of traffic like an out of control race car driver. Without process, users don’t know how to be most efficient or effective; they become aimless drivers on the highway, nearly avoiding collision all day long.
From applicant to candidate to placement, do you have a process that everyone is following? From prospect to customer to placing an order, do you have a process that everyone uses? Avionté has great functionality to base these processes around, and we continue to improve upon it. Are you up to speed on everything that Avionté has to offer to enhance your everyday processes? Are there things that you’re doing that are kind of a nuisance but you have just gotten used to doing it that way or didn’t have the time to see if it could be done better?
Now is the time. I’ve had the pleasure of visiting and working with clients in the past couple of months to do consultations and refresher training and with even just a few tweaks to process have seen companies increase their productivity and retention by utilizing what had always been there for them to use.
Please contact me today if you’d like to talk about your process, workflow and procedure to ensure you’re getting the most out of your investment but also signaling to your staff the best route to take to reach the ultimate destination: success.
