Turns Out, My Employees Didn't Want to Text Me Either.

"I didn't want to bug you." I cannot tell you how many times an employee has said that to me over the years, and it was usually about something I absolutely did need to know.

By Jade Valore, founder of DeskPanther and co-owner of Rad Coffee. 🐾

Something broke. We were running low on something. A piece of equipment was making a weird noise. They noticed something during their shift that needed attention. But it wasn't exactly an emergency, so now they had to decide: do I text Jade about this or not? And honestly, I never loved that they had to make that decision in the first place.

I run multiple coffee shops. I have employees, managers, vendors, a family, and approximately 900 other things happening at any given time. My team knows that, so I've gotten plenty of "sorry to bother you," "I didn't want to bug you, but," and "I know you're busy." The funny thing is, they weren't bothering me. They were doing their jobs. The problem was what happened after the text.

One Text Was Never One Text

Let's say a blender starts making a weird noise. I get: "Hey Jade, the blender is making a weird noise." Okay. What kind of noise? Grinding, clicking, screeching? Is it still blending? When did it start? Which blender is it? Did you unplug it? Did something fall inside? Can you send me a picture? Actually, send me a video so I can hear it.

Now the employee is stopping what they're doing to answer me, and I'm stopping what I'm doing to troubleshoot it. Maybe I send the video to somebody else. Maybe the next shift comes in and has absolutely no idea this conversation happened. A repair request just became twelve text messages between three people.

Out-of-stocks were the same thing. "We're almost out of vanilla." Okay, what does almost out mean? How many bottles are left? Did you check the back? How much is up front? When is the next delivery? Did anyone already order it? Is another location sitting on six bottles while this store has one? Then I'm texting back: did you check the back room, how many are actually left, send me a picture, can you check the other shelf, did anyone order more.

Nobody did anything wrong. The employee noticed a problem and communicated it. The system just sucked.

"I Didn't Want to Bug You"

This is the part I didn't really understand until we started changing how we communicated. I thought I was tired of all the texts. Turns out, my employees didn't want to send them either.

They don't want to interrupt me during dinner to tell me we're getting low on cups. They don't want to wonder whether a broken piece of equipment is important enough to text about. They don't want to send me four follow-up pictures because the first message didn't have enough information. And I don't want them deciding something isn't worth bothering me about and finding out three days later that we could have handled it when it was still a tiny problem.

So the answer couldn't be "text me less." I needed to give them somewhere better to put it.

The Question Shouldn't Be "Should I Text Jade?"

This is one of my favorite things about watching my own team use DeskPanther now. Something breaks? Put in a repair request. The request asks for the information we're going to need anyway: tell us what's happening, add the details, send the photo, send the video. Now I can actually see and hear the problem without starting an interrogation in a text thread.

Running low on something? Report it as out-of-stock. Tell us what it is and what's actually left. Now the information has somewhere to go instead of becoming another message somebody has to remember.

That's such a small change on paper. In real life, it's huge. Because the employee doesn't have to think: is Jade busy, is this important enough, did somebody already tell her, should I wait until tomorrow. They just report it. That's their job. The system handles where it goes next.

This Is Really an Appreciation Post

Building DeskPanther has made me appreciate my team in a completely different way, because they're the ones actually testing whether any of this works. I can sit at a computer and think a workflow makes perfect sense. Then an employee uses it during an actual shift and suddenly we find out whether it really makes sense.

They've shown me what needs fewer steps, what information they're naturally looking for, what questions we keep asking after something gets submitted, and what works when the store is slow versus what works when there are 20 drinks on the screen. And they've made me realize something about all those years of texts.

They weren't the communication problem. They were trying to communicate inside the system I gave them.

Sometimes that system was a group chat. Sometimes it was a text. Sometimes it was a picture followed by six questions from me. Now we're building something better together. My phone is quieter because of it, but my stores aren't communicating less. They're actually communicating better.

And to every employee who has ever started a message to me with "sorry to bother you": you weren't bothering me. We just needed somewhere better for the information to go. Turns out, you wanted that too. 🐾