Bad Optimizations in Business and Life

You're probably doing some optimizations that you shouldn't. In both your business and your daily life.

The good news is, you can improve that. 

Let’s go through some typical business optimizations I've seen other people do or done myself that were, in fact, terrible and how to turn them around.

Bad Optimizations in Software Businesses?

I’ll start with a big question.

Do bad optimizations even exist?

Yes, they do, in both business and personal life.

For example:

Say, you decided to be adventurous during lunch and now have a bad case of food poisoning. To deal with this situation you would optimize by buying toilet paper in bulk, wouldn't you? Pretty straightforward.

That is not the best optimization strategy. (Beef, bison, and bacon are the solution here, but that’s beside the point.)

In business, however, identifying a problem you are against is far less obvious than having food poisoning and buying toilet paper. 

Let’s take some examples.

Example 1

Your business works in customer support through ticketing but is overwhelmed with too many tickets and little customer satisfaction. To mitigate that, you conclude that hiring more support agents is an ‘obvious’ optimization strategy. 

That would be a basic bad optimization strategy.

So to take it a notch higher, the better option would be automation ie, a chatbot. You create a chatbot that will handle the initial load, and go your merry way. Problem solved, right?

Yes, but no. 

I don't know about you, but in 99% of the instances I have interacted with a chatbot, it didn't quite seem to solve my problem fully. In the end, I often found myself wishing I had interacted with a human.

The best plan is simple. Talk to your customers. 

Figure out:

• What UX do you need to implement?

• What software do you need to update?

• What processes do you need to change?

With the fixes, your customers will get to understand your software or business better, reducing your overwhelm from the very source. 

It sounds obvious, but often the most obvious solution is the one that goes ignored.

Read: Optimizing customer support with screen recording

Example 2

I once spent a crazy amount of time optimizing our culture document at BaunIt. Organization procedures, behavior, productivity, etc. 

I continued to optimize it because one of our employees kept misbehaving and I wanted to put that to a stop without him losing his job.

However, the best strategy was to fire him. 

He was an awesome guy, and firing him was difficult. But he wasn't a good worker and I couldn't change him, so he had to go.

Nobody said optimizing is easy. Understanding that hard decisions need to be made for the well-being of your business is crucial.

Read: Onboarding and Training New Remote Employees in a Virtual Environment

Example 3

Some of the businesses I have worked with optimized cost -at all costs.

While cost management is a priority for a business and without it, you could go bankrupt, excessive account optimization is detrimental.

What ends up happening is:

• The business owner soon finds themselves losing valuable employees because they don't pay them enough.

• They are forced to replace and train a new employee every few months as a result.

In short, it sets you up for the endless hamster wheel of sifting through resumes to find equally valuable employees or training newbies. 

If your goal is to increase in growth, that is no way to run a business. The outcome is almost always a bigger expense.

Optimize Employee Workflow

I've seen many businesses in the industry stagnate or run themselves down because they keep having to get new victims.

I mean employees.

Instead,  it is better to optimize for the value you get from your current employees. 

Think about it like this, optimizing your employees' workflow, processes, and intelligence would probably be much easier, faster, and will get more done so that they are worth more to you and in their resumes. 

This way, you empower each other and everybody wins.

It sounds trite, but it is true. 

Of course, this goes both ways, with companies and employees.

I have had experiences with employees who tried to squeeze money out of me by registering a day’s or two days of work for a half-hour’s task worth of work on our project manager platform Goleko, which taught me to be vigilant about bad apples in my business. 

And how did I manage to curb all that?

Well, that will be in a future article.

Read: Hiring Great Software Developers from lesser-known areas

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For these and more thoughts, guides, and insights visit my blog at martinbaun.com.

You can find me on YouTube.