Latest / That Real Estate Tech Guy / Why Your Best Employee Might Be Compensating for a Broken System

Transcript

Why Your Best Employee Might Be Compensating for a Broken System · That Real Estate Tech Guy

• 0:00
  This is type of work happening inside your business right now that probably doesn't appear on your organizational chart. It probably isn't in anybody's job description, and it may not even appear in your process much, but you are paying people to do it every single day. And in some businesses, I think it might represent one of the biggest opportunities for AI labor.
• 0:26
  It's the work that happens between the work, the checking, the chasing, the remembering and reminding, coordinating, noticing the figuring out what happened, then moving information from one place to another. All those little interventions people make all day long because they know that if they don't do them something, somewhere, it's probably going to get stuck. And I think this work is incredibly easy to miss, because when we think about how our businesses operate, we tend to think about the work we've formally defined.
• 1:07
  Sales sells customer success, looks after customers, finance, handles billing operations, keeps everything running. And inside those departments, people have responsibilities. But that's the business as we've described it. It isn't necessarily the business as it actually operates. Let's think of something. Imagine you have an operations manager. Let's call her Sarah. Now, Sarah is really good at her job.
• 1:39
  In fact, she's one of those people you'd probably describe as indispensable. She knows how everything works. She knows the customers, the systems, the team. And if something goes wrong, Sarah normally knows what to do. So let's follow Sarah around for a day. She comes in first thing in the morning. And besides coffee, she checks what happens yesterday. And she notices that one customer hasn't completed something they were supposed to complete.
• 2:11
  Nobody has necessarily asked Sarah to check that. She just knows that if they don't complete it, something else is going to get delayed. So she follows up. Then she sees something in the CRM that doesn't look quite right. She checks another system and up. The information is different. So now she has to work out which one is correct.
• 2:35
  So she messaged someone in sales. Now sales explains what happened and Sarah updates the information. And then somebody asks you a question about another customer. Now Sarah remembers this customer has a slightly unusual arrangement. Now that information probably exists somewhere. Probably. I mean, maybe it's in the CRM, maybe it's in an email from three months ago. Maybe it's buried in slack.
• 3:04
  But Sarah remembers it. So she tells them what they need to know. And a little later, she notice something hasn't moved. There's a task sitting somewhere that should have been completed yesterday. Sarah checks who owns it. She messages them. They thought somebody else was handling it. So Sarah works out what happened, figured out who actually needs to do it, and gets the work moving again.
• 3:28
  Then later finance messages. Or they've received something from a customer, but they don't have the context. They need to understand it. Sarah does, so she explains it. Then a customer issue appears, and technically it belongs to customer success. But Sarah knows there's some history here. So before customer success response, she makes sure they understand what happened last time.
• 3:51
  And this continues all day. Sarah checks, she notices, she remembers, connects, explains Chase's intervenes. And. And if you ask Sarah, at the end of the day, what did you do today? She might actually struggle to give you a particularly impressive answer, because a lot of what she did doesn't look like a major piece of work. She wishes she sent some messages, check some records, answered some questions, followed up with a few people, fixed a couple things.
• 4:22
  But now imagine Sarah disappears for two weeks. What happens? Things start getting missed. Customers don't get followed up with work sits. People make decisions without context. Two systems disagree and nobody notices. Someone assumes someone else is handling something. A customer gets a response that makes perfect sense based on the information in front of the person responding, but makes no sense if you know what happened three months ago.
• 4:54
  Suddenly, everyone realizes Sarah was holding a lot of this together. Now, obviously that is an extreme example, but I think there are Sarah's in almost every business and they don't necessarily work in operations. It could be sales customer success, finance, admin. They may be a manager and assistant, they could be a founder, but they're the person or the people everyone goes to, and they need to know what's actually going on here because these people are good at what they do.
• 5:28
  The business works pretty seamlessly, but there's something really important happening underneath that. Sarah isn't just performing her normal and formal responsibilities. She's compensating. She's compensating for gaps in the arc. And that's the part I think we miss, because the easy conclusion from the story is Sarah is incredibly valuable. And you know what? She probably is. But I think we need to ask a different question.
• 5:59
  Why does Sarah have to do all that work in the first place? Why does Sarah have to notice the customer hasn't completed the next step? Why does she have to remember that this particular customer has an unusual arrangement? Why does she have to check two systems to discover they disagree? And on and on and on. Those aren't criticisms of Sarah.
• 6:22
  The questions about the business, because every one of those activities is work. And if you don't recognize it as work, you can't really design it. I call this invisible work. And invisible work has a way of accumulating everywhere. Think about how often someone in your company says, I'm just checking or wanting to follow up. Or do you know what have I?
• 6:47
  Let me check the other system. You know. Wait. Hang on. I remember those sentences. They sound completely normal in most businesses and and individually they usually represent really small amounts of work. Like two minutes here, five minutes there. Slack message, an email, a phone call, quick check here. But if you multiply that across every person in your organization, every day, on every customer opportunity transaction, every handoff, suddenly it isn't tiny anymore.
• 7:19
  It's an enormous layer of labor sitting underneath the formal organization. And I, I think this matters enormously when we start thinking about a I. Because if we only look for AI opportunities inside the work we've formally documented, we're going to miss a huge part of the business. Now, I'm sorry to interrupt this amazing conversation, but I wanted to make sure you knew that smart phone, the only phone system built for real estate investors, connects to the best in class real estate.
• 7:52
  Invest in CRM. And because as its my show and I am co-founder and chairman of Smart Phone, I got some great deals for you. Click the link make. Take advantage of 5000 minutes free calling with smartphone. The only phone system built for real estate investors. Click and call. Close more leads back to the show. We'll look at Sarah's job description and we'll see her formal responsibilities.
• 8:20
  And we'll ask, what can an AI agent do here? But Sarah's job description probably doesn't say. Remember, information that should have been available somewhere else? Probably doesn't say chase people when the process fails. It probably doesn't say reconcile information across systems because nobody knows which is correct. And I'll bet you it doesn't say become the person everybody depends on because you understand all the weird little ways the business actually works.
• 8:49
  But that may be a huge percentage of what Sarah really does. Now, I want to be careful here. The answer isn't great. Let's get an AI agent to chase everybody instead, because then all we've done is automate the compensation. The business has a structural problem, and we've trained an AI agent to compensate for it faster. That's not necessarily good architecture.
• 9:16
  The first thing we need to do is understand why the invisible work exists. Now, sometimes the work itself is legitimate, some something genuinely does need to be monitored, and or AI exception genuinely does need to be recognized. And if that's real work, then let's make it visible. Let's define the responsibility. Let's decide who owns it. Maybe it's Sarah.
• 9:40
  Maybe it's another person. Maybe it's an AI agent. Maybe it's shared execution between the two. But at least now we're making a deliberate decision. Other times, the invisible work exists because something else is broken. Sarah's moving information because the systems don't. Or she's reconstructing context because context didn't travel with the work she's coordinating. Because responsibility is unclear. She's checking because no one else is monitoring whether the expected outcome happened.
• 10:13
  Now, in those cases, the opportunity might not be to assign the invisible work to somebody else. It may be to redesign the architecture so that work no longer needs to exist. That's why I think invisible work is such an important thing to find, because it tells you where your business is, relying on people to compensate for the way the organization has been designed.
• 10:38
  And people are really, really good at this. We adapt, we notice, we remember, we create workarounds. We learn that if we don't message Mark twice, the thing probably won't happen, right? We learn the CRM isn't right, or we learn that this customer wants this and we learn finance needs to be told this, and eventually those behaviors become normal.
• 11:02
  Nobody thinks of them. They're just how things work around here. But that phrase should make you really curious, because how things work around here often contains a lot of undocumented effort. And AI gives us an opportunity to see that really differently. Not because I agents can simply take it all over, but because once intelligent execution is no longer tied exclusively to people, we can start asking why this work exists and how it should be handled.
• 11:36
  I mean, think about Sarah again. What if an AI agent had responsibility for monitoring whether expected customer actions occurred? What if they recognize when something hadn't happened? What if they maintain the relevant context? What if they could recognize the information in two systems? Conflicted and initiate the appropriate resolution? Some of the work Sarah currently performs might become an explicit responsibility for an AI agent.
• 12:06
  Some might remain with Sarah because she's the best suited to perform it. And some might even move between them. Some might disappear entirely because we redesigned the infrastructure that created the need for it. That's much more interesting than can I automate Sarah's job, because, again, Sarah's job isn't really the thing we're trying to understand. The work is. And this brings us back to something we've been building throughout this series of videos.
• 12:38
  In an earlier video, I talked about taking the job title off and looking underneath it. This is the next layer. Even when you pull apart the job description, you still haven't necessarily found all the work because some of the work only becomes visible when you watch what actually happens when the process goes wrong, or information is missing. When a customer does something unexpected, and two responsibilities meet when something should happen but doesn't.
• 13:08
  When somebody says, don't worry, I'll take care of it, that's where I want you to look. And there's a really simple exercise you can do in your own business. Find the person everyone goes to when something gets stuck. You probably already know who they are. Maybe there are a couple of them and don't start with their job description.
• 13:28
  Don't ask them to list their responsibilities solo. What they actually do. Every time they check something. Write it down. Chase something. Write it down. Remind somebody. Write it down. Recover missing context. Write it down. Reconcile information. Write it down. Every time they notice something, nobody ask them to notice. Write it down and then look at that list. And for every piece of work, ask, why did this need to happen?
• 13:54
  That's the important question. Not could I do it? We already learned why that's the wrong place to start. Ask why the work exists and maybe you'll discover an important responsibility nobody has formerly owned. Maybe you'll discover something that an AI agent could take responsibility for. Or you've discovered a broken handoff. Or you'll discover that information isn't available when it's needed, or that the systems aren't doing the right job.
• 14:23
  Maybe you'll discover work that shouldn't exist at all. This is part of what I mean when I talk about work architecture in the AI workforce. Because before you can redesign work, you have to be able to see it. And the formal organization only shows you part of the picture. Your organizational chart shows you where people sit. Your job descriptions show you how you've bundled responsibilities.
• 14:47
  You're process maps show you how work is supposed to move. But if you want to understand how your business actually operates, you also have to look at everything your people do to make those structures function in the real world. Because some of the biggest opportunities for AI labor aren't sitting neatly inside a job description waiting for you to automate them.
• 15:11
  They're hiding in the gaps, in the handoffs, in the remembering, the checking, the chasing in all the little things your best people have learned to do. Because they didn't do them. The business wouldn't work. And once you can see that work, you can finally decide what should happen to it. Some of it will belong to people. Some of it may belong to AI agents.
• 15:36
  Some of it will be shared and some of it should disappear. But first you have to see. Thanks for listening to another amazing episode of that real estate tech guy. Head over to that real estate tech guy.com to check out all episodes and get special discounts on tons of awesome real estate technology platforms.