Have “Excuses” Crept Into Your Business And Life?

Initially the excuses may have sounded reasonable and even expected, but have the words like “Due to Covid” become entrenched in your business and your conversations?

We have all had to deal with the disruption and consequence of change, but some government departments, council activities, big businesses, institutions, and organisations have used Covid to mitigate their responsibility for delivering value, service, efficiency and productivity. This is particularly bad in organisations where there is poor accountability or some sort of limited choice or a monopoly. ALL of us have been impacted by forced restrictions and the consequence of increased government control and mandates which at one point may have been relevant.

But have you accepted them into your psyche? It is now time you started to challenge them and everything that feels like an excuse as we must challenge ourselves to change to succeed in a Covid inclusive world?

Disruption over a prolonged period undermines and destabilises many of our business and customer routines. This then renders the measurement metrics we have set up to measure them as obsolete, as many of them don’t compare anything of relevance i.e. the previous year or comparable circumstances. These obsolete metrics encourage us to verbalise more excuses resulting in us and more people in these organisations believing and accepting them as enough.

Examples of such data collection and measurements that didn’t serve us were things like, scanning in and vaccine pass checking long after the data was no longer being used and contact tracing which was clearly obsolete.

I have heard these justified as not adding cost, but data collection costs time and money, steals focus and efficiency, stop doing anything you are not using or getting value from!

I went to the two banks I have accounts with mid-March 2022, to get 100 x $5 notes for a marketing campaign. To achieve that, I had to go to six bank outlets. Four ASB branches in varying locations were closed to customers. Even though they had people inside, they had signs up saying they were closed due to the bank’s Covid Red Light System policy, they refused any sort of interaction. Two TSB branches were open, but the Takapuna branch could only give me 40 x $5 notes, their excuse also being due to Covid when clearly it had nothing to do with their inability to provide the required service.

I drove across town to the Newmarket branch where they had not heard of any such nonsense and gave me what I needed.

I highlight this example of the ASB bank and TSB branch conveniently using Covid to reduce their service for their own convenience, however the consequence to me was a job which should have taken 45 minutes taking 5 times that.

Are excuses holding you and your business back? I would say they are the NEW epidemic we are now facing!

• Yes, we are having to change,
• Yes, it can be difficult and likely cost us time or money,
• Yes, we will make mistakes,
• But making EXCUSES shows we don’t own our effort and that could be perceived as we don’t care enough to give good service.

When we don’t own our effort and the consequences, it is very unlikely our people or our business will do better, try harder and improve. This will result in a loss of connection with your customers and when the opportunity arises, they will stop buying from you. It isn’t always that the competition needs to be better, in fact the catalyst may be the inflationary market, with many people’s discretionary spend already having reduced. This may mean reducing the frequency of how often they go out for a drink or dinner which means they will not return to businesses that aren’t offering good customer service – too busy making excuses.