The Work Nobody Sees

There are some things you only notice when they're missing. Coffee is one of them.

At WriftAI, I've learnt pretty quickly that we don't want to run out of it. Time is difficult to manage. Coffee, thankfully, is my problem.

If the coffee is there, nobody thinks about it. They just pour a cup and get on with their day. If it isn't, people tend to notice fairly quickly.

A lot of my work at WriftAI is a bit like that. The best outcome is often that nobody notices you did anything at all.

The boring stuff matters

There are probably a dozen things I do during the week that would be difficult to explain at a dinner table. I usually get to the office before everyone else, which means I get a pretty good head start on the things nobody else has to think about.

Is the Air Conditioner working? Is the water dispenser behaving itself? Did someone's laptop decide it doesn't want to cooperate today? Are we running low on something? Did the vendor actually do what they said they would?

None of these things are particularly interesting. But they have a habit of becoming interesting very quickly when they're not taken care of.

A broken Air Conditioner at 2pm is suddenly everyone's problem. A laptop that won't work can hold someone up for the day. A vendor who doesn't show up can turn something simple into a surprisingly long conversation.

A lot of my day is spent somewhere around these things. Fixing what's broken, following up on what's outstanding, and generally trying to make sure the small stuff doesn't become a distraction for everyone else.

It's not glamorous work. It's also not the kind of work anyone really notices when it's done. And I'm starting to think that's a pretty good measure of whether I've done it well.

Fixing the five-minute problem

You've probably heard of the two-minute rule: if something takes less than two minutes, just do it straight away.

I've started thinking about the opposite problem in my work. If something takes five minutes every time, maybe it shouldn't be a five-minute task in the first place.

We had a simple example of this at WriftAI. When someone took office equipment home, they'd message me and I'd log it. It worked perfectly well.

But I kept doing the same thing over and over again. And eventually I started wondering whether I needed to be doing it at all.

So I changed how we handled it. Instead of everyone messaging me and me logging it manually, there's now a simple way for the person taking the equipment to record it themselves, and I get notified when they do. It's a very small change.

But I think that's what I like about these things. You don't always need to find a big problem to solve. Sometimes you just notice something you're doing for the tenth time and wonder why you're still doing it that way. Five minutes isn't much. Until it is.

I probably know someone

One of the funny things about my job is that I don't necessarily need to know the answer. I just need to know where to find it. Or, more often, who to ask.

Over time, you collect a strange amount of this stuff. Who to call when something breaks. Where something is kept. Which vendor handles what. Who knows how a particular thing works.

And then you start getting questions.

“Do you know where this is?”

“Who should I talk to about that?”

“Can you help me with this?”

Sometimes I know the answer. Sometimes I know who does. Sometimes I have absolutely no idea, but I know where to start looking.

And I quite like that part of the job.

There's something satisfying about being able to point someone in the right direction and get them moving again. You don't always need to solve the problem yourself. Sometimes knowing where to start is enough.

I suppose that's another thing I've picked up along the way: you end up knowing a little bit about a lot of things.

Not everything needs fixing

One of the things I didn't quite expect when I started working in People & Ops was how often people would come to me just to talk.

Not about a process. Not about a laptop. Not because they needed something from the office. Just to talk.

Sometimes someone's had a rough day and needs to get something off their chest. Sometimes something at work has been bothering them for a while and they aren't really sure who to talk to about it. And then there are the occasional misunderstandings.

Two people can have the same conversation and somehow walk away with completely different versions of what happened. I've found myself somewhere in the middle of those conversations more than once, trying to work out what actually went wrong.

Usually, there's no grand solution.

Sometimes someone just needs to say something out loud. Sometimes a few questions are enough to get to what's actually bothering them. And sometimes two people just need a bit of help having the conversation they probably should have had in the first place.

I've come to quite like that part of the job.

There's something satisfying about watching a conversation go from “this is a problem” to “oh, I think I understand what happened.” And then everyone gets back to work.

A good day is pretty uneventful

When I think about what a good day looks like in my job, it's probably not very exciting.

Most of the day stays flat. The small blip is something getting sorted before anyone notices.

The Air Conditioner is working. Nobody is waiting on something they need. Things are where they're supposed to be. A question gets answered. A conversation gets had. And then everyone gets on with their day. I think that's what I've come to like about this work.

A lot of it happens quietly. You sort something out, move on, and eventually realise that nobody had to think about it again.

There's no big moment at the end of the day where you can point at everything and say, “Look what we accomplished.”

Sometimes the best thing you can say is that everything worked. And maybe that's enough.

There are plenty more things that need doing around here. If that sounds like your kind of work, come build with us.