How to stop being asked incessant questions

[ThomasRichard]

I manage a small team (6 people at the moment). From the moment I walk into the office to the moment I leave, they're coming at me one after the other with question after question after question. I told them this morning that I was just about to phone my own boss and two of them literally jumped out of their chairs because they were so anxious to ask me just one more thing.

It's all work-related but it's driving me nuts. I'm so far behind with my own work and can't sit down for 10 minutes at a time without someone wanting something. I've booked a weekly one-to-one catch-up with each of them and blocked out a day where I work from home so I can be free of interruptions but it's not enough. It's getting to the point where I can feel my temper rising because it's utterly relentless.

What do I do?

OMG I swear you're me!

You have my complete sympathy. Sounds like you're doing the right things but how about a morning huddle? No chairs, stood up so it doesn't take long but a quick Q&A and what's everyone on with and does anyone need any help before I get my head down as I really need to concentrate on something (hint hint!)

Yup, a morning huddle would be a good idea.

Most of the queries are when they're in the middle of a task but want to check they're doing the right thing before continuing, or who to contact to get the information or how exactly they should interpret something, given the history etc. It doesn't take long but added together it takes the majority of my day.

Q&A every day sounds good. Do it as a team but don't you answer any questions unless no one else knows the answer or someone gives the incorrect answer or it needs expanding on.

It may help the team to build confidence within each other so they get used to asking each other questions rather than you. Will also improve everyone's knowledge as they are all hearing the answers.

Can you train your administrator up to unofficially "triage" and prioritise the questions maybe? It depends on their ability I guess, or maybe upskill a member of the team as your deputy?

That's a really good idea. Someone will usually have the answer in all but the most complex, history-dragging cases. Confidence-building will help them to realise that too.

I'm definitely building up my administrator to manage a large amount of the day-to-day data so that they can deal with external queries. The internal queries are more technical so she's not really the right person.

I would love to have someone to train up to be in a deputy position and I'm trying to do that with a couple of them now. All the starters I'm getting from April onwards will be permanent employees. The slight problem with the existing team is that the majority are contractors on rolling 6-month contracts. That should change this year and I'm hoping to transfer the majority of them onto permanent contracts but there's no guarantee they'll take the pay-cut to do so, so I might need to replace them with new staff.

It does sound a difficult set up OP, and you sound like you're trying really hard to manage it well. You have my sympathy. Some great suggestions by pp.

You're not obliged to accept any meeting requests. This whole 'book a meeting if you don't reply within 1 second, escalate to your boss the second after that' stuff sounds very passive aggressive. Isn't your boss getting heartily pissed off with every man and his dog asking him/her questions whilst you're in the loo or on the phone? What would happen if you simply declined all these meeting requests?

Part of the problem is that your team is simply growing too quickly. No-one could manage 7 n00bs all at the same time, with almost no-one with any experience besides you to help them learn the ropes. And the fact that they're contractors, WTF! This is is a never-ending cycle of onboarding.

I would be tempted to address it with them directly. Here's the situation: you all have multiple queries, and they are taking up 75% of my day. I have to find time to do my other stuff as well. I recognise that you are all new and you need my support, but how can we manage this better together? Let them come up with some solutions to the problem.

The only person with any experience isn't in your office, which is a problem in itself. Could this person come and work there one day a week to field some of the questions as they come in?

Not being available on IM and not answering emails must be very frustrating for the people depending on you, even though I can quite see why you're doing it. I do think the key thing is to discuss the scale of the problem with them. They need to understand what the impact of their neediness is.

If the office is open plan, can you direct the person with the question to someone who you know knows the answer.

The type of work sounds experienced based so training isn't going to solve the issues. You need to change the culture so instead of them automatically asking you, they ask each other as their first port of call. This will also be good for your staff development.

It may be worth setting up something for your new starters so they have a 'buddy' to go to with any queries. It's impractical for so many members of staff to be going to one person for every question they have.

I have this too. It's so exhausting. One person appears at my desk several times an hour sometimes. It's difficult to escape in a crowded open plan office.

New people are great but absorb so much time initially- I've got a new recruit at the moment who's taken almost 2 days to complete a task which should have realistically been possible in a couple of hours. Understand they're learning but it's a bit of a worrying sign at this stage (and they were given access to plenty of support.)

Management is really tough sometimes. I do often wonder if it's worth it.

The contractor thing is more than a bit mad. It started off because to offer a competitive salary for those positions we would have had to firstly increase my own and my line manager's salaries significantly (by about £15k) and there was so much change within the company that that was never going to happen. So we couldn't offer a competitive permanent rate, were told to use contractors instead and so we pay them all 3x my annual salary instead

Managing your staff IS your own work, not something that gets in the way of it.

You need to look at your work processes and your staff training and your documentation. Solve the actual problem, not the symptom.

And why are you taking on so much work that you have no time to manage? You don't sound like you want to actually manage!

Something that could help: my line manager talked to me about some things I'm asking for help on prematurely and set one of my objectives as working on doing them more confidently.

So your job has gone from 2 people to 14 in 18 months?

From reading your posts here are my suggestions:

1. Start to empower them to not only have confidence in their abilities but also to become used to finding things out themselves. At the moment you are clearly the go to. How about when they come to you with a query, say you will tell them how you'd handle it but first you'd like to hear how they suggest it should be handled or who they think would be the person to approach/enlist for the answer/action. By getting them to run through their problem solving with you, either you will say 'yep excellent I'd do similar, off you go' or you can just praise them for having a go then guide them to the right answer after. By doing this regularly you should see improvements in their confidence and in their skillset and they should come to you less as a result.
2. I had a manager who used to say to me "never come to me with problems, only solutions". Now this baffled me as I always thought "but I'm coming to you because I don't have a solution!" I'm someone who genuinely never ever approaches management unless I have no choice. I am a totally independent worker. A manager used to go on leave and never tell me who to contact in their absence yet I'd know of emails to the rest of them team with this info. She mentioned it once and simply said she knew chances were I wouldn't need to contact anyone as I'm self sufficient. My point in saying this is, once you've built up their confidence and empowered them more, you need to work out the ones who continue to always be quite needy versus the ones like me as you in effect need to know when their approach to you means they're genuinely stuck as opposed to needing a gentle nudge of encouragement.
3. You mention a load more new starters imminently. Can you get one or two of your current team to train the newbies on the stuff you've trained them on to date? Then you pick up from that point onwards.
4. Blocking out unavailable time is perfectly acceptable providing you are accessible for a genuine emergency though be clear with then on what constitutes an emergency.

Id get a whiteboard up in the office. Every time someone asks a question stand up infront of the whiteboard, get your team to grab a notebook (a specific one they log all their info in) and do a mini training session with them.

This is the question. This is the knowledge required. Write it down. Refer to it in future.