There’s a scene in the movie “Tommy Boy” where the snotty David Spade character tries to teach the thick-headed party boy boss’s son about the one-and-a-half-percent carrying charge for merchandise in the Callahan Auto warehouse.
“Let’s try an association,” the Spade character says. “The average person uses 10 percent of his brain. How much do you use? One-and-a-half percent.”
Well, anyway, the common belief that the average person uses just 10 percent of his or her brain is a myth. But odds are most of us use no more than 10 percent of the electronic brain of the computer that sits on our desktops.
Watching the young
I’m reminded of this often when I see my son working on the computer at home. He gets things done so fast my head spins; he seems to know all the shortcuts so that he can do basic things like finding and opening files, organizing pictures, and conducting Internet searches in half to a third the time it takes me.
Of course, I spend most of my time writing (typing) in a word-processing program. It’s not as if I need to know multiple software packages to do my job. But I’m pretty sure I don’t use even that one program to full advantage. So I wonder, what about business owners and their office staffs who probably work with software for word processing, spreadsheets, databases, accounting, dispatching, page design and slide creation (for marketing materials), and more.
Software today is to a great extent simple and intuitive – if you know the basic Windows or Apple operating system, you can get reasonably up to speed on most programs without a lot of help. Still, to what extent are your people really proficient versus just getting by on what they’ve picked up by themselves? What percent of that computing power are they really using?
A revelation
I remember the first company I worked for that used electronic communication extensively – this was in the early 1990s. They offered a couple of in-house courses on their e-mail and calendar systems. I was doing all right with both, I was busy with my job and didn’t feel as if I had a half-day to spare for training. But I took the course anyway. It opened my eyes.
About once every five or ten minutes I found myself saying silently, “You mean I can do THAT?” Things I learned in that course saved me an absolute ton of time from that point on. And when I got my first home computer (around that same time) I made it a point to take the tutorials on the software that came with it. Again, I was surprised at what I could now do with the machine, and how fast.
Today, I know I could benefit from some professional instruction in the software programs I use, and probably from learning a few tools that I don’t use now, or use sparingly, but are common currency in business.
How productive?
It makes me wonder: How proficient are most people working in critical office functions for service contracting businesses? A good deal more proficient than I am, no doubt, but how much do they really know and use versus what they could or should?
Have you assessed your people’s computer skills lately? Is it possible that if given some formal instruction in the programs they use, they could get their work done faster and more accurately and use new productivity tools they have not been using up to now?
Maybe the modest tuition and a few hours off from work to attend software-specific classes at a local technical college would be a wise investment for your key office team members. Maybe some additional training from your provider of routing or dispatching software would help you take performance up a notch.
I am by no means suggesting that your people aren’t up to the task. I am simply asking if your company is really getting the most from your electronic tools. Are your people using just a small percentage of that computer’s brain? And if they could use a bigger slice of it, how would that help your business?
