Our need for speed
If you asked me at any point from 2018 – 2022 what was 118Group’s greatest strength as a company, I would have told you about our responsiveness or speed. I’d have proudly shown you the dozens of reviews we have where clients attest to our quick response times and speedy turnarounds. I’d also point to those reviews during every sales call with potential clients and emphasize our responsiveness as our unique selling point (USP). I’d tell clients that, unlike other professional firms, we typically respond to our client’s requests within 24 hours. I’d see the “I’m impressed” nod from the client on the other end of the screen and I knew that I’d hit a pain point.
Selling responsiveness to clients as our USP was a strategic decision made in a society that has come to expect everything quickly. Hell, responsiveness is what built 118Group. I was often told that the main reason clients were leaving their current web partner and coming to us was that it would take weeks for them to get things turned around. When I asked my network on Linkedin what was most important to them when it comes to working with a web partner, they overwhelmingly chose response times over design quality or technical knowledge.
I did everything right (or so I thought)! I listened to the market, I built a product that filled a need, and I highlighted this differentiator in our marketing and sales. As a result, 118Group has continued to grow and endure in a highly competitive industry during a time when many businesses struggled and failed.
I felt like a savvy businessman. Hold the applause.
An information autobahn
To deliver on our promise of being ultra-responsive to our clients, we needed to build an infrastructure that facilitates the rapid transfer of information across teams.
Freshdesk
The keystone upon which our entire information autobahn is built is Freshdesk, a helpdesk support tool that allows teams to share a joint inbox, collaborate on tickets (emails), and route notifications to varying team members. All of our emails (sometimes hundreds a day) come into a general “unassigned” queue that anyone on our team can review and either claim responsibility for or assign to the appropriate team member.
Slack
Freshdesk is great, but we needed a tool that would allow quicker communication with team members beyond tickets and emails. Instead of just adding a note to an existing ticket, re-assigning it to the desired team member, and awaiting their response, we needed to be able to grab each other’s attention more quickly.
We decided to introduce Slack, the popular instant messaging tool. With Slack, we could see who is online, send them a message, and notify them (via Slack’s famous “ping”), ultimately eliciting a response with less time.
SLAs
The most significant thing we did to drive speed within the company was to make fast the expectation. We came to expect shit to get done ASAP and our clients did too. By selling our clients on speed and setting the precedent for ultra-fast response times in our SLAs (service-level agreements), we sometimes found ourselves in the position of apologizing if a response ever took more than 24 hours. Nobody wants to disappoint the client so things are done quickly. This then further reinforces the client’s expectation of speed and so we create a vicious cycle with a punishing pace.
The price of speed
Everything in life comes down to trade-offs and opportunity costs. The old saying about eating cake is so simple and true that it hurts to even write it down. The real problem with trade-offs is not knowing what you’re trading off in the first place.
The hive mind
By focusing on building a system that allows for the rapid transfer of information across teams, we were building what Cal Newport refers to as a “hive mind” in his book A World Without Email.
A hive-mind work environment is one in which organizations use group chat and email as the primary means of communication and collaboration. This system requires synchronous communication between “nodes” (people) to function and it turns your team into human network routers, constantly sending and receiving information from other nodes.
There are several problems with the hive mind.
Shallow work
For one, it facilitates a constant chatter that inevitably leads to a significant volume of notifications, and since the hive mind requires everyone to be synched up and online, it creates pressure within the organization to respond to these notifications immediately. This pressure to pause what we’re doing and respond to the needs of the hive mind fragments our focus on deeper issues and more important work. We end up trying to squeeze the process of building a successful enterprise into the space between signals like messages and tickets, which might not exceed 15 minutes. No great company was ever built in 15-minute increments.
Reduced autonomy
Another problem with the hive mind is that it discourages autonomy. By having a system where you can quickly and easily get answers from others through the information autobahn, team members aren’t forced to research or develop answers independently. Further, your organization never needs to establish the proper systems for self-service such as a knowledge base or proper document storage since team members can skip straight to an answer via a team member. In any system, when you reduce the autonomy of the individual node by making it more reliant on the other parts of the system, you create a fragile network that comes to a screeching halt if any single node breaks. If any team member is unavailable or out of office, it can have an inappropriately large impact on the productivity of the whole.
Burnout
Finally, because the hive mind only works if the other nodes are active and receiving signals, it promotes an always-on culture in which team members feel a constant need to be available and responsive. This pressure leads to burnout as team members grapple with the need to transfer information and respond to notifications. Not to mention, being a human network router is simply not how humans flourish, and this can ultimately lead to disinterest or disengagement with the job.
Out tug of war
A real challenge for us as a company comes down to the fact that we run two separate business units with the same tools and team members. We design exceptional websites and we support & maintain them as well. While this makes for a solid business strategy, it can create a clash of cultures and priorities at the ground level.
We’re a support team
When you run a support business, the focus is on maintaining. The product has been built, the features and functions mapped, and the “success” state has already been defined. At this stage, the focus is on resolving problems quickly as they arise and it makes sense to focus on the speed and efficiency of your system. For a support business, having a hive mind that prioritizes speed is a feature and not a bug.
We’re creators
When you run a design business, the focus is on creating. Our job at this stage is to design a solution to the client’s needs that will achieve the desired outcome. Design operates at the intersection of art, science, technology, and perception making it a discipline that requires constant learning and growth on the part of its practitioners. This part of our business has suffered in the past with the hive mind approach and its costs outlined above.
We’re entrepreneurs
Lastly, we are in the business of business. We want to build a company that stands the test of time, satisfies the hopes and dreams of its team, and continues to deliver excellence to its client base and nobody has ever built a truly great company through notifications and messages. Ideas need to be shared, experiments conducted, disputes resolved, personnel developed, and a commitment to lifelong learning is bedrock.
Final Thoughts
I’m not yet sure how to reconcile these disciplines that while complimentary from a service-offering design perspective, diverge in regards to the workflows and expectations that make them successful. Perhaps it means separating the people and processes that run each business unit, but with such a small team in the first place, this feels crazy.
I hope that by first articulating the problem here we can better understand the problem and find creative solutions.
But no one will be sending us that answer in a ticket or a Slack message!