Which is better? Organize around people for their work or work for people?

All right, we've got kids around at the moment, we're in lockdown day number three Daenam.

For something like that.

It's okay.

It's Byron Bay, it's not so bad.

I went surfing this morning, and I didn't do very well.

I didn't drown, which was awesome.

But my, my usual board is seven foot eight.

And the other day, I must have come in and hit the sand and snapped off two of the fins.

But I've actually got a problem of I can't get the little bits out, but one of my neighbors is a really good surface.

So I'm going to head over after this and say, Hey, do you know how to get these little broken bits out so I can replace them? But the interesting thing that I want to share with you was not locked down and not surfing.

But how do you organize the work of your business? I was working with a client today is having a lot of trouble.

And I was like, oh, okay, well, let's have a look.

Let's see, I see how you set it up.

And what's happened is He set up people.

So every person has their own work and their own tasks to get through.

And I was like, Okay, we got some problems here.

First of all, it's not clear how they should actually do the work.

And there's a lot of kind of stuck ones where it's like, okay, stuck, but there's no documentation about why I got stuck, or, you know, what needs to happen in order to unstick it.

And it's quite chaotic.

And what I what I realized, in looking at us like, well, this is one way to do it, we can organize around the people, but it might be a far better way to actually organize around the work.

And that is the basically the system's Hey, what are the what are the tasks or what is the what is the work that needs to get done and looking at as a particular kind of units, instead of a person doing a bunch of work? Now, there's a couple of advantages to this.

One is that it enables you to see what work is actually getting done, rather than what work the people are kind of doing, it actually gives you a visibility on like, Okay, this is the work, when you see whether they've begun that system, whether they've finished that system, whether they're progressing through that system, this is all very hard to see if you organize by people.

So my my take on this is that it's far better to organize by the work.

And the work could be anything from defining an avatar, two, creating a sales funnel to running an advertising campaign, creating an advertising campaign, to fulfilling on a product or a experience through to how you do your accounting.

But all of these are systems or work entity like the chunks of work, rather than people that are listed per person with a whole bunch of tasks.

It's got some other advantages in that if somebody is away, if somebody is headhunted, if somebody quits, then it's much easier to sub someone in and say, Okay, while while we're missing this person, you can bring someone across, if you set up your work consistently.

Like if you set your work up the same way, then you become far less dependent on someone knowing how to do things, because somebody else can come in, and they're familiar with how the work is set up rather than the specifics of that work.

But it's like, okay, I know that every time I come to a piece of work in this business is going to be set up the same way.

This this is this is a very useful thing in your business.

It gives you redundancy we had at the medical center.

I was working there yesterday.

And we had chaos.

Why? Well, because three receptionists were away.

And they they, I was like in retrospect afterwards, I was like, wow, we are not handling as well, at the Medical Center.

I'm like, I got to work with these guys to say, hey, when this happens, let's this is what we should do, which is basically dropped down to a minimum viable operating system for that section of work, like get rid of a bunch of other stuff, direct it all into one place, manage from there, but it was really interesting to see, because there was no system around work.

It meant that some people stuck on their jobs, even though there wasn't a lot to do there.

But other people were getting smashed.

And this This is the challenge when you organize around people that it can create very uneven levels of work, which leads to resentment and raise the people gone.

This sucks working here.

If you know I looked at I looked at the two people getting worked and they were having really rough days while one of the other team members was having a pretty good day and I was like, hang on, this isn't good.

Why aren't we deploying that person? Who's not working so hard back into do the work that the other two were suffering with, instead of keeping them in their job in their role, which is not that busy.

And I'm like, Ah, this is the problem that you face.

When you organize by people.

If you're like, people, your job is this, your job is this your job is this but when life happens, which it invariably does, and things go wrong, and people don't show up, or people quit, or people do whatever people do, you know, people are hard people.

Managing people is like herding cats, it's really hard.

Managing the work is easier because you can get people into that work, you can read employ your workforce, particularly if you set it up.

So that someone is not, doesn't have to have specialized knowledge, they just no need to know how the work is set up the same every time.

It's not the same work.

But the structure for how you do your work is the same.

This is something that you should work on.

This is something that you should spend some time on, look at looking at how you set up the overall structure of your work, particularly if you're wanting redundancy, if you're wanting to be able to redeploy people into work, when there's problems, it's all well and good when business is going great, like super easy if we've got all seven receptionists, but when it drops down to four, or drops to three, all hell breaks loose.

And this is the problem that my other client has as well, which is organizing around people instead of organizing around the work.

I hope that helps you.

I hope you your mind is standing open and I had even the question how are we organizing ourselves? Are we organizing around people? Are we organizing around the work and what needs to change? If you can see the advantages, which I hope you do in organizing around the work? I think it's a far superior methodology.

I think it has a lot of advantages.

If you want some help with this head over to systemio.dev.

Thanks for tuning in today.

I hope you enjoy today's episode.

I certainly enjoyed making it for you.

And we're continuing into this journey about learning about how systems consistently create results.

So see you tomorrow.