Saturday 17 March 2012

Priorities

Where must the line be drawn, our list of jobs to be completed is almost endless (even more so than the DIY jobs around the house!!), but what must come first?

Revising Company Policies, Maintaining the Company Website, On-Going Marketing Campagin, Networking, Existing Jobs to be issue, reviewing software and making technical amendments, CPD, professional applications..... the list goes on and that is just from a business perspective.

We all naturally revert to type and complete the jobs we enjoy doing before tackling those less 'interesting tasks'. In some cases the answer is fairly clear cut, if you have a deadline to meet for issuing drawings then you must concentrate your efforts there. In an ideal world we'd have an army of staff all enjoying a certain aspect of the work whom we could delegate to - and yes completing a blog is probably not the highest priority, but it's straight forward with children running around.

Luckily I have a week away working coming up so I think I"ll be knocking off a few of the jobs on the list, but another possibly alternative is information sharing with similar companies - each concentrate on a different element of the 'business' side of operations and share the results??

Saturday 3 March 2012

Policies & Paperwork

Everyone wants something be it an Environmental Policy, Health & Safety Policy, QA Policy, Insurance Policy!

Does the one cap fits all really work, or do we need a rising scale depending on the nature of your work and the level at which you work at. From my stand point our environmental impact whilst present is fairly insignificant - fuel to travel between office & site, energy to run the office, and paper to produce plots, then any environmental impact caused by our suppliers. It may be me being blind to the obvious but there is very little to be done to improve this or mention in an Environmental Policy!

Health & Safety - paper work gone mad. Yes it is critical to all businesses, but please let common sense prevail. I'll happily follow site rules laid down by others but I'm not wearing a hard hat on every site I attended especially when the owner of the house is in shorts & t-shirts gardening not ten metres from me!! In this instance even hi-vis seems a little OTT but there has to be a line somewhere. I once covered a job where is was a requirement to wear hard hat, gloves, goggles, hi vis top & trousers at all times when on site - that included at 2am driving down the road laser scanning whilst the road remained open to everyone - they did relent on the end and allowed us to put the hat, goggles & gloves on only as we left the vehicle, but only after a heated argument.

QA - Enough said, we all live a die by this and it's one of the few policies which I believe can be constant no matter what the level of the company.

You may have noted I'm not a fan of paperwork unless it is necessary in the line of the job. However I must embrace the trend now and set to on revise and developing all of our company policies in line with continued growth into more mainline industry.

More details of the services we offer, and examples of our work can be found at www.rlsurveys.co.uk, or you can keep in touch with us on LinkedIn, Facebook (www.facebook.com/rlsurveys) & Twitter (@RLSurveys).