We all have goals for our web ventures. We want to generate leads, establish customer loyalty, improve our customer service effectiveness, make sales, improve our brand recognition, and/or all sorts of other great things. Those of us who are lucky enough to already have some cash flow have many advantages, such as being able to bring in experts in certain areas to help us with marketing copy, SEO/SEM, usability, behavioral tracking, and all the other little elements that go into making a successful web site. Those of us who are smaller, though, have a hugely different advantage... our web sites have someone who loves them.
For you larger companies... you pay all sorts of people to do all sorts of things, but who are you paying to love and nurture your site?
Today I'm taking off my "Stockbridge Truslow" hat and putting on my "Bo Grumpus" hat. This article might seem like it's all a bit obvious. You might read it and say, "Yes, yes - I know all that!" But at the end of the day - what are you doing about it?
Everyone "Does", But Who "Cares"?
I see it all the time -- we have a bunch of people who are making in excess of $30 per hour. Maggie says, "I was looking on the home page and noticed that the Sign Up Now! link on the left menu goes to a page that is throwing a 404 error." Bob says, "Yep, I see it. And I fixed it." Then, three weeks later, an e-mail comes from a customer that says, "Help! I keep trying to sign up, but I keep getting a Page Not Found Error!" So, Pete in sales says, "Hey, I thought you guys fixed that a few weeks ago!" Everyone rushes to the home page and tries it - the link works fine. "I dunno - it works for me. The customer must be doing something wrong!"
Maybe someone bothers to try to communicate with the customer and find out more information about what they did to get the 404 error. If they are lucky, the customer might be able to clue them in - and they might also get lucky enough to have a customer who will even bother to try. In any event, eventually it will be discovered that the link works fine on the home page, but it is still broken on every other (or at least certain other) pages on the site.
Is it Maggie's fault for only saying, "It's broken on the home page?" and not checking the rest of the site before creating the task for Bob? Is it Bob's fault for fixing it, but not ensuring that the fix applied to the entire site? Who's fault is it in the first place?
And, more importantly, why did this happen?
It happened because everyone is thinking in terms of a specific objective. Maggie noticed the broken link (for whatever reason), and Bob is only paid to fix the things that are broken - he's not paid to find them. All he cared about was fixing the one issue. There is no one on the team who is paid to "care" about the site - it's just there.
I'm not sure if this is something that is becoming more and more prominent, or if it's something that I am just noticing more since I'm starting to get older, and grumpier, and more disllusioned by human nature in general. Out of the 4 projects I've been working on in the past few weeks, exactly one of them have properly and completely finished the task list I submitted. Of the three who didn't, one of them got defensive at me for over-explaining a part of the task - yet that was the only part of the task list that was completed properly. The other two followed the "letter" of the task, but because I didn't explain it completely enough, no one cared enough to actually look at "why" I was assigning the task - they did what Bob did, above, and simply did exactly as I told them - no more.
No one cared.
It's the Journey, Not The Destination
Sort of. It's the journey to the final destination. Everything else is just a "waypoint" and if you reach a waypoint and don't do all that you need to do there, you aren't taking the best route to the final destination.
We all have goals, but what makes things successful is to not only do the best to make the journey toward those goals complete and efficient, but it's also in plotting your course. If I say "We need into the city. Go grab my keys in the kitchen," and you plot the shortest direct route, you might bounce off a wall a dozen times before you make it to the doorway. And then, once you get there, if you grab the keys, but don't bother to grab the wallet they are resting upon that contains my drivers' license - you're going to have to make the trip to the kitchen again to get my wallet for me.
When I sent you to get the keys to the car, you only thought about the "get my keys" part of the task. You didn't think about the "we need to go to the city" part of it. You didn't care - all that mattered was getting my keys. But, if you had actually taken a moment and cared about the complete task at hand, you would have known that we aren't going anywhere without my wallet and you would have just picked it up and brought it with the keys.
Can't Buy Me Love?
According to dozens of pop music lyracists, you can't buy love. In business, we have to. If everyone in your company is walking around grabbing keys and forgetting the wallet, then you are paying a $60 an hour person $120 for a job that could have been done by someone else in half the time. So, even if you have to pay a person who has a little "love" for the project $100 an hour - you are still coming out ahead. All the skills in the world are useless without the passion to make it go.
And that, Dear Reader, brings me to the point of this article. Unemployment is at nearly an all-time high in the U.S. for sure and in many countries around the world. This means that there are lots of people who are hungry - people who are looking for that position where they can find a little passion about something and use their skills. Or, maybe they need to refine their skills - but at least they have the passion. It might take someone who cares 20% longer to get my keys, but they'll come back with the wallet. And, now is the perfect time to be out there looking for these people.
If you're one of the people working at a job and you are feeling like you want to just stand up and shout, "Hey, find someone who cares!" you need to keep something in mind. Whether you like it or not, you are being paid to care. And if you don't do it, your boss just might find someone who does.
