It hasn’t happened often over the past six years but now the kids are a little older, I’m often looking after them myself. Every time I come out of the blocks hard, lots of sweets, wrestles, games, hyper activity, great fun, until… the wheels fall off the fun cart… tears, throw downs. Fun turned into meltdowns. Tired; hungry, no not hungry; oh no more parenting (and not being the kid too) is required.
What I have learnt from these “big days” is there’s a need for warmth, vision, preparation, discipline, negotiation (lots of negotiation) and, yes, some more fun. The challenge I find is having all those skills running at the same time so discipline doesn’t need to dominate and take over from the fun.
It’s the perceived simple things such as language, tone of voice that gets us moving; using the word ‘team’ at the right time and in the right tone always raises our awareness of each other and gets us working together.
Being part of a growing family has its similarities to being part of a growing business; our ethos at Phocas is to ‘remain profitable and have fun’. At Phocas, we use our product to measure all areas of our business – Revenue Performance, Costs, Profit, Cash Flow, Budgets, Forecasting, CRM Opportunities, CRM Contacts, Hubspot Digital Marketing, Customer Reviews, Surveys, Technical Support, Professional Service Jobs, Development Activity. We make this data available to everyone in the business.
The source data is often different. For Phocas and the end user this doesn’t matter. The user asking a question has the benefit of going into one interface to find their answer. Within Phocas, we have links automatically going back into the source data systems to enable the end user to easily update records and notes.
With profit being a key measure, it's paramount to make data easily available - this entitles people to ask questions of the business and enables everyone to contribute new ideas as to how to make continual improvements.
This brings me back to my conundrum of do you need to measure fun?
In the raw sense, we could do this easily via asking questions through our Phocas survey module but is this really needed and does it diminish the meaning that fun has with people? No, Phocas simply leaves more time to enjoy your environment.
Have to go… another viewing of Mr Peabody and Sherman is on.
