An unfiltered view of customers, employees, and everyday operations can reveal what leaders rarely see from behind an office door.
Every business owner ought to spend some time sitting at the reception desk. Stationing yourself where the phone rings, visitors arrive, deliveries show up, job candidates walk in, salespeople make their pitches, and the business meets the outside world every few minutes. Most owners think they’re too busy for something like that. I’d argue they’re too busy not to.
Years ago, we ran out of office space at Zweig Group. Rather than squeeze another employee into a cubicle, I gave up my office so someone else could have it. For several months I bounced from one cubicle to another before eventually landing at the reception desk. It wasn’t exactly a promotion, but it did come with one unexpected perk. I controlled the music on an iPad that played throughout the building. If I wanted classic rock, everyone got classic rock. If I felt like alternative music, they got that instead. Or maybe it was classic country. To the best of my knowledge no one ever filed a formal complaint, although I’m sure there were people who would have gladly taken over DJ duties.
What surprised me wasn’t the music. It was how much I learned from sitting there. I wasn’t answering the phone because we had someone who was much better at it than I ever would have been, but I could hear one side of every conversation. I watched clients arrive for meetings, prospective employees show up for interviews, vendors wander in looking for someone they were supposed to meet, delivery drivers carrying packages that absolutely had to be signed for immediately, and the constant stream of people who passed through the front door every day.
I also got to see our own employees come and go – at least the ones who used the main entrance. It didn’t take long to realize there were several other ways into the building that became surprisingly popular with anyone who happened to be running a little late or wanted to slip out a little early. I wasn’t conducting surveillance and I certainly wasn’t keeping score, but it’s amazing what you notice when you spend months sitting in one place instead of tucked away behind an office door.
One thing became obvious almost immediately. We thought everyone understood the difference between Zweig Group and Mark Zweig, Inc. After all, one was our consulting company serving architecture, engineering, and construction firms, and the other was our design-build development and general contracting company. It all seemed perfectly logical to us because we lived with those two businesses every day. To the outside world, however, there apparently wasn’t much distinction.
Our receptionist fielded a steady stream of calls from homeowners who wanted us to remodel kitchens, add bedrooms, renovate bathrooms, or completely redo the house they had inherited from their parents in the historic district. They found “Mark Zweig” somewhere, picked up the phone, and naturally assumed they had reached a contractor. Instead, they found themselves talking to a consulting firm that advised AEC companies on ownership transition, recruiting, leadership, profitability, mergers and acquisitions, and a host of other management issues. Those calls never bothered me. They reminded me that customers don’t spend one-tenth as much time thinking about our branding as we do. They aren’t studying your organizational chart or admiring your logo. They have a problem to solve and they’re looking for someone who sounds like they can help.
The reception desk also exposed operational problems that somehow never surfaced in management meetings. In our case, I learned just how often the women’s restroom off the lobby had sewer backups. It wasn’t a rare event. It happened often enough that everyone working near the front of the building knew exactly what was going on before anyone from maintenance arrived. Eventually we had to tear out part of the lobby floor and rip up a section of the parking lot to replace the sewer line. I don’t remember that project ever making it into a strategic planning session, yet it had a bigger impact on visitors than many of the things we spent hours discussing in conference rooms.
Sitting there changed the way I looked at the company. The reception desk is where your culture becomes visible. Forget the framed mission statement hanging in the lobby. Watch how employees greet visitors. Watch whether they hold the door for someone carrying boxes. Notice whether they acknowledge the receptionist every morning or walk right by as if that person was part of the furniture. Pay attention to how job candidates are treated before anyone from management comes to get them. Culture isn’t what you write on the wall. It’s what people do when they think no one important is watching. The irony is that someone important actually is.
You also gain an enormous appreciation for the person sitting behind that desk every day. A great receptionist isn’t just answering the phone. That person is directing traffic, calming irritated callers, greeting visitors, screening salespeople, accepting deliveries, locating employees who seem to have vanished, keeping conference rooms clean, and solving dozens of little problems before anyone else even knows they exist. When they do their job well, no one notices because everything simply works. When they’re gone, everyone notices.
We spend fortunes trying to understand our businesses. We hire consultants, conduct surveys, build dashboards, measure KPIs, and disappear for strategic planning retreats. I’ve done all of those things myself, and they all have value. The problem is that every one of those tools filters reality before it reaches the owner. By the time information gets into a report, someone has summarized it, interpreted it, categorized it, and probably cleaned it up a little. The reception desk doesn’t do that. It delivers reality exactly as it happens, complete with confused callers, plumbing failures, late interview candidates, lost delivery drivers, and employees who think no one notices which door they use.
Technology has changed dramatically since my months at the reception desk. We have AI, chatbots, automated attendants, online scheduling, text messaging, and enough software to eliminate almost every human interaction imaginable. Yet when people are confused, frustrated, or about to spend serious money, they still want another human being. They want someone who listens, understands, and points them in the right direction. I don’t think that’s ever going to change, and I don’t think it should.
If you’ve never spent any time at the reception desk, do it. Bring your laptop if you must, but don’t bury yourself in your email. Watch. Listen. Pay attention. You’ll probably learn more about your business in a week than you will in months of management meetings. Along the way you may discover your branding isn’t nearly as clear as you thought, your receptionist is one of the most valuable people in the company, your employees know more entrances into the building than you realize, and your sewer line is living on borrowed time. If nothing else, you’ll at least get to pick the music for a while, and every business owner deserves one small perk.
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Mark Zweig is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com. |
