My mail is delivered to a community box at the corner, but I had the delivery person come to my door to collect 68 cents in postage due. To make it even more ridiculous, there wasn’t any postage due — it was just marked that way — because someone at the Post Office did not recognize one of their own stamps! It was a 2-ounce stamp and the delivery person thought it was “not a real stamp,” but she wouldn’t believe me and took the letter back to verify and re-deliver tomorrow. OMG.
How much organizational time is wasted on such petty matters — not just at the Post Office but in your organization as well? Consider whether you have policies or procedures that cost you more in staff time than they produce in return, not to mention how they aggravate your customers in the process. I’ll bet every organization can come up with at least one process to discontinue or modify.
People would pay more attention to how time is wasted — when collecting 68 cents, sitting in meetings, or preparing unread reports — if there was a direct and instantaneous cash outlay for payroll. Just because there isn’t doesn’t mean the cost isn’t incurred. Time really is money.
