It is a typical Wednesday in your office, and you are trying to get your work done. You are typing away but are being constantly bombarded with, “Hey, I’ve got a quick question,” or somebody popping in your head or knocking on the door. You are not getting your work done because you are spending so much time putting out other people’s fires. If that sounds like your workday, it is time to create an official office interruption policy. In this article, we will share a few simple tips for creating your office interruption policy.
Establish Office Hours
You have probably heard of office hours and you may even have office hours in place to handle questions, but do you also have closed office hours? It is important to establish both closed and open office hours.
Open office hours are the times when you are available to take questions. During closed office hours, you are in your office working without interruptions. When you need to hunker down and give your focus to a particular project, closed office hours protect your time and signal to employees that they cannot interrupt your work.
Set Expectations
In your official office interruption policy, set the expectations for what employees should do before they ask questions. We require that employees do three things before asking a question even during open office hours.
- Check the Standard Operating Procedures. If they are wondering what to do with a client account that is overdue or how to perform a task, all of that should be documented in the Standard Operating Procedures. The SOPs should become your first line of defense so that people have a reference tool to go to that is not you. Having an SOP is super powerful. If you need help creating SOPs for your company, that is our area of expertise and I would love to chat about it.
- Google the question. There are some questions that you are not going to know the answer to either and you will have to Google it yourself. It is just as efficient for them to Google the question to see if they can find their answer before coming to you.
- Ask an available staff member. The keyword here is available. It is important to stress that if they need to ask someone, they should reach out to a co-worker who has open office hours or is available. Before interrupting someone, they should also consider whether or not the question is urgent and needs an immediate answer. If the question can wait, a better solution might be to add it to the agenda for the next team meeting.
Use Open Office Hours
After exhausting all of their resources including the SOPs, Google, and other team members, if the question cannot wait for a team meeting, the employee should come to you during open office hours to ask their question.
Do you have an office interruption policy? If not, it’s time to create one so that you can minimize distractions and better focus on your work.
To set up a time to discuss getting your policies and procedures written and organized so they can be used by your team, click here.
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