If you work in a big company, you will agree that the amount of extra work and add-ons that come from Head Office and Support Functions don’t stop.

Take the following emails:

“Please urgently confirm if the staff in your department have completed the 10 days of mandatory training for the year. In case it is not yet done, please send details of such staff, by EOD today -Training Team”

“The Fire Drill is scheduled on the 14th of the coming month. Please nominate 2 staff from your department for Fire Warden Training – Admin Team”

The above emails – while well-intentioned and essential – nevertheless feels like an interruption, and joins a long list of similar requests that keep coming.

As per an HBR article ‘A Plan for Managing (Constant) Interruptions at Work’ –

Employees today are interrupted every 6 to 12 minutes.

In another survey, referred to in the same article —

40% had more than 10 interruptions a day

15% had more than 20 interruptions a day.

The Problem

As a manager, when faced with such emails from Head Office and Support Functions, we take the easy way out :

We forward the email to our Assistant Managers and ask them to confirm for their respective teams.

The Asst. Managers in turn forward it to their Team Leaders (Senior Officers) to do the same and so on.

In other words, one task ends up interrupting everyone.

How can you manage these better?

The Solution

Appoint a ‘SPOC’ — Single Point of Contact — for each such activity in your department.

I recall sending the following email to my team, at the start of every year:

*****

Dear All,

As the New Year sets in, we need to appoint a ‘SPOC’ — Single Point of Contact — for routine activities.

The SPOC will coordinate on the assigned activity for the entire department (our 50-member team) and also liaise with the head office / support function on the same.

As of today, we require a ‘SPOC’ for the following:

1.  Training Coordinator – 2 volunteers
2.  Fire Warden – 2
3.  Administration, Stationery, & Printing – 2
4.  System’s IDs Reviewer – 3
5.  Attend Monthly meetings – IT Support – 3
6.  Business Recovery Plan Update (BRP) – 2
7.  ISO Audit Coordinator — 3, only Grade 3 and above can volunteer
8.  Audit Reviewers — 3, only Grade 3 and above can volunteer.
9.  Contributor for In-House Magazine — 1, someone with flair for writing
10.  CSR Activities – 2

The above shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours of your time, every month.

The above comes with an opportunity to exhibit your leadership and coordination skills and will also count in year-end appraisals.

Please send in your name by __ date.

I will review it, discuss it with your team leaders, and confirm by __ date.

Regards…
Manager

I recall getting whole-hearted participation from the team on the above email.

It provides them an outlet to channel their creativity and initiative.

*****

You can implement this anytime (from the present month as well)

If you have a small team, you can club some of the above.

Seek voluntary nomination, instead of upfront appointing staff for specific activities. That way, the person will feel a sense of ownership over the assigned activity.

*****

The SPOC – Single Point of Contact – concept reduces the level of interruptions significantly. Only one person goes around and collates the data.

I recall a manager who took over my department once I moved out. He mentioned with awe, “The SPOC concept that have you set in the team is wonderful”.

For sure, there will be other interruptions to your team as well.

But if you start with the SPOC – Single Point of Contact for common activities – concept, you will reduce 70% of the interruptions that your team faces in a day.

As the weeks and months pass, keep an eye out for potential SPOC ‘Single-Point-of-Contact’ activities, and appoint a team member for it.

Your 15-minute think-through will save hours of you and your team’s time, not to mention the stress of deadlines that usually accompany these activities.