Are you an engineer or a technician working for an MSP? And are you feeling micromanaged? Technician micromanagement at MSPs doesn’t get enough coverage, even though it cripples teamwork and performance.
Managers and dispatchers are valuable members of a team. Sometimes, when managers become too involved in their team members’ work, they start micromanaging their employees instead of providing guidance.
How does micromanagement show up?
Are you feeling like somebody less technical than you is telling you what to do? You don’t know how long a task should take? Are you working out of your email inbox, calendar, or even from chat messages?. Team members describe the dispatcher or service manager as the “ticket or time Nazi.” When you concentrate on trying to finish up a task, you constantly get interrupted. All these things are signals that you are a micromanaged technician.
There are many different reasons why this can happen. For instance, dispatchers are trained to paint everyone’s calendar green and fill your day with tickets. They are also trained to hit their metrics of utilization; they want information and good data, fair enough, but it’s much better to choose a task, start it, work it to competition, and then find the next task to do. In reality, multitasking has a huge negative impact on your productivity.
Why is micromanagement not the best option?
Clients don’t value it, all that they want is their stuff to be completed. All these internal scheduling, meetings, and follow-up procedures are invisible to them. When technicians are micromanaged, they are more likely to make mistakes, miss important information, and are less efficient; it takes time to get back into the flow, and anxiety and overwhelm go up. Friction and tension between team members grow, leading to overwhelmed technicians who aren’t also motivated to do their job.
What would happen if:
- You could stay in the zone and reduce multitasking.
- You feel like management has your back rather than cracking the whip.
- You feel like you can provide suggestions to improve the flow of work, and they are listened to and implemented.
- Time entry is easy – not something to stress about at the end of the day, week, or pay period.
The solution is to flip things on the head. Instead of using utilization to get flow and quality, use flow and quality to drive efficiency and increase profitability. Thanks to Kanban boards, a visual tool that follows the Kanban principles which is effective in keeping teams organized, collaborating, and informed, you will be able to better manage and optimize how your work progresses from stage to stage.
How could Kanban boards by TopLeft help you?
The Kanban integration by TopLeft for ConnectWise and Autotask offers you Kanban boards for visualization and easy management. You will be able to see multiple tickets at once. You can quickly improve your productivity, visualize today’s priorities, and stop feeling overwhelmed.
We’ve built TopLeft, and here are five reasons why techs and engineers love it:
- Visualize all your work in one place with project tickets highlighted.
- Limit work in progress. Easily see everything in your court to finish. You can focus on finishing work before starting new work.
- Manage the flow, not the people. Without Kanban, most teams need the equivalent of an air traffic controller to prioritize work and look at the bigger picture.
- Tight feedback loops between each step.
- Work together to improve! After visualizing work, the team can work together to improve efficiency.
No more micromanaging and clicking deep into the PSA. Find work for today in only one page.
Schedule a demo to get started on this journey!