I’ve heard it a thousand times… Communication is the key to success. No matter what avenue of industry, work, or even personal life you are in, this statement rings true. At home, communication between my wife and I, as well as our network of friends is always the easiest thing to forego and not want to spend time on. Once this easy path is chosen the work kicks in because one side of the team doesn’t know what the other side of the team is doing. Most of the time this works for us, when it doesn’t I quickly realize it would have been a better solution to discuss everything rather than assume or just make a vague attempt at what I think we need to do.
As for the network of friends, one of the best things I have learned is, we are not alone… Chances are, if you enjoy doing something or talking about certain topics, even if you are struggling, there is someone, you probably even pass them every day and don’t know. Heck, I even found a group of people that like to get outside of their comfort zones and exhaust themselves physically and mentally through rucking. The fact is, my network of friends is like my council on tough decisions or even daily life recaps, as humans we need other people and interaction is in our being.
At work, this need for communication is just as important. During times like we are currently experiencing thanks to the pandemic, we may be seeing a worst-case scenario when it comes to communicating since we have split into shifts and moved to remote work.
We have blogged before about our response as a company, we have successfully been ahead of the curve on response and how we handled our staffing as well as social-distancing before these “rules” were put out. The largest hurdle for my team was the separation and not being able to easily discuss together due to separating into two shifts. Sharing applications, or problems customers may be experiencing with each other is one of our strong suits. To be able to collaboratively use our experiences to build the best solutions or see improvements was cut in half.
So how have we been able to keep helping customers the same as before when we are divided among two shifts? In case you can’t guess, it is an abundance of communication. We use every tool available to us every single day to effectively discuss what is going on between shifts as well as seamlessly transition notes so a customer who may need contact with both shifts isn’t re-explaining themselves in the afternoon. Is this easy? No, in fact, we haven’t performed flawlessly this entire time yet we have always kept one focus at the forefront.
We do not want our customers to experience anything different or have any additional hurdles to getting the product they need to maximize their compressed air operation. In fact, if you have noticed a change I would love to discuss it with you personally. You see, we can’t improve without evaluating the methods, just like the 6 Steps to Compressed Air Optimization, you have to know where you are starting, then fix the leaks.
Brian Farno
Application Engineer
BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF