by Kyl Ringo
Software breaks down barriers between staff, equipment they use
The toner is low in the fax machine, and the new guy is cluelessly staring at the blinking light.
Somebody is paying him.
The printer is down.
Three employees hover over one computer trying to remember how to reroute to a different machine.
More time (read: money) wasted.
The receptionist, who normally handles 12 incoming calls while juggling several other tasks simultaneously, is out sick - and the company is expecting a call that could forge its future.
The temp is a deer in the headlights.
Ellen Cockshoot (Hughes) can solve all these problems for $49.95. She has worked in hundreds of offices as a temporary worker, for both large and small companies, over the past 15 years. She discovered simple problems can be enormous headaches because too many businesses are willing to sacrifice lost time and productivity to spare them the pain of creating an office procedures manual to prevent those nightmares.
Cockshoot, now owner of The McKee Co. a publishing firm, has done much of the work for them.
Office Wizard is software available on CD-ROM that produces a comprehensive office procedures manual without a company having to devote enormous amounts of time and resources to the job. It is versatile enough to be useful in just about any office in any kind of business.
The software uses a template compatible with several word processing programs (Microsoft Word and Corel Word Perfect) to guide users through the process. When they're done, each employee has a copy stored on their computer.
Employees simply fill out the template or portion of the template that is related to their job, explaining how best to perform tasks and where things can be found. One person doesn't have to complete the entire template, and Cockshoot recommends that it not be done that way.
When an employee is sick, on vacation or moves on, less company time and money is spent training a temp or a replacement.
Office Wizard does the job instead.
"By being organized, people are a lot more productive," Cockshoot said. "It just stands to reason.
"I was thinking about a book, but I finally came up with the template because since I worked in all these different offices, I knew it would be different for all of them.
A 1995 survey done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on employer-provided training showed American businesses with 50 or more employees spent $37,061.259 yearly to train employees. That amount does not include the cost of familiarizing temporary workers with skills specific to individual companies. The BLS estimates in a 1999 study there were 1.9 million temporary workers in the U.S., the most current available information.
During a six-month period of 1995, the training survey concluded companies dedicated an average of 44.5 hours to training employees - and 31.1 hours were informal training.
Computer training was most common, followed by professional and technical skills.
Bonnie Culver, a legal administrator at Dill, Dill, Carr Stonebraker & Hutchings, a Denver-area law firm, trains new employees with the Office Wizard.
"Our law firm is just growing and the job market is tight," Culver said. "Every time we would lose someone, we had to train someone new. We really didn't have the time for that.
"Now, I no longer have to train people. I give them the Office Wizard, and it takes care of it.
Cockshoot has seen just about every kind of office problem imaginable. She began keeping lists of problems to include in the template. With the Office Wizard, everything from the correct way to answer the phones to technical questions dealing with electronic equipment can be answered in seconds instead of waiting for the resident expert to get back from lunch.
"It helps them get over that proscrastinating block that people hit," Cockshoot said. "They say, 'Man, I'm not going to do this duty for a while because it will take me a whole day to rethink how I did it six months ago.'
"This way they already have it written down so they can to it. Voila. |
