Have you ever sat in line at the drive-in waiting for someone, anyone, to ask you for your order? Look at what is happening: The reason you’re in the drive-in line is you’re in a hurry. You don’t have time to park your car, go in, wait for a waiter to bring you a menu, look at the menu, wait for the waiter to come back, order your meal, wait for it, eat it, wait for the check, pay for it and leave.
No, you’re in a hurry, yet there you sit, waiting for someone to ask “May I take your order?” You have a sense of urgency. The person on the other end of the intercom? Not so much.
Just about everywhere you go these days there seems doesn’t seem to be a sense of urgency. Maybe the reason for that goes something like this: “I get paid for being here 8 hours, not for how much work I do.” Another one goes like this: “I’m busy. They can wait.”
To make matters worse the places where you find a lack of a sense of urgency part of the reason is that it’s communicated to employees by their managers. You ask to see the manager to complain and ten minutes later he or she appears. You, and by extrapolation, other customers, are not a priority, therefore no sense of urgency to respond.
Not at FedEx.
The first day I met the Director of Courier Operations at FedEx I noticed a sign on his desk: “If we don’t do our job today, we’ll be out of business tomorrow.” And he believed it. Fail to pick up and deliver packages on time, especially when your motto is “It’s there by 10:30 or it’s free” and you quite possibly could be out of business in a day.
It wasn’t the only place I saw that sign. It was everywhere.
There is no company I know of that is more clock conscious than FedEx, and there is just one clock: The digital clock in every building, in every office, on every wall, counting down in hours, minutes and seconds, the time left before aircraft must be in the air to deliver their packages on time the next day.
That clock does more than let everyone know how much time is left to do their job. It creates a sustained sense of urgency because without it FedEx could never achieve their goal: Deliver those packages by 10:30 AM tomorrow. No one at FedEx puts it off until tomorrow.
Does your order entry, receiving, put away, picking, ship staging and shipping pulse with a sense of urgency? Are orders routed and prioritized for efficient picking? Do order pickers move swiftly and surely through the warehouse as they pick inventory for shipment? Is your inventory mapped so the most frequently ordered items and most urgent items are closest to shipping? Do your employees and managers share a sense of urgency?
That sense of urgency at FedEx creates an environment for building teamwork: Everyone knows what they have to do and they know they can’t do it all themselves. The only way to succeed every day is to not just work together, but find better ways to work together.
If you want to gain a unique competitive advantage over your rivals, nothing beats a sense of urgency and making it part of your culture.
Next up: COMMITMENT TO QUALITY
