About work interviews.
As the name says: mainly for operational efficiency, you interview each person about their daily workflows and find points to improve.
I recently did work interviews and helped with process improvement. I had some fresh realizations, so I'm writing them down.
The first time I did work interviews was at the company I joined as a new grad.
My role was a bit unusual, and soon after joining I ran out of work.
With no work, I had to create some — so I requested work interviews to learn the work of various business units and people.
I walked around branch offices, got meeting time from other departments, did a lot of interviews, and wrote reports.
— On trust
First: work interviews depend heavily on trust between interviewer and interviewee.
Back then, most people were meeting and talking to me for the first time, and I still remember how many looked suspicious when a young new-grad kid requested a meeting.
Not getting a reply to a greeting was common. That was a somewhat shocking experience. I still recall it sometimes.
Luckily or not, I was always inevitably the youngest wherever I went — so I might get looked down on, but never deferred to.
Meaning: compared to a sudden visit from an important older manager, I was relatively easier to talk to.
Even with strangers, if you don't first build an easy-to-talk relationship, it won't go well.
Work interviews aren't one-and-done — and they aren't special either; even in daily work, when issues come up you need interview relationships as needed.
Often, after a relationship formed through work interviews, someone would contact me on another day during work and ask for workflow improvements.
Showing improvement results from the interviews mattered, of course — but more than that, I don't think it would have happened without trust between "me" and "that person."
As a premise: you never know if an improvement will actually land, so without a relationship the cost of reaching out exceeds the expected value.
In other words, you first have to create: cost of contacting < expectation of improvement.
— On freedom
For work interviews, decide only the broad flow — don't lock a fixed template.
Connecting to action is a must, but if you fix a template you risk just reading prepared questions aloud, so I keep freedom high.
At the same time — something I also felt often later when I took on coaching work — narrowing freedom lets "assumptions" slip in.
"Assumptions" meaning: say someone living alone feels lonely and wants a pet, and you reply, "Yeah, coming home to a pet running up to you sounds happier than living alone."
Here the listener imagines loneliness of living alone, and assumes "a pet running up when you get home would fill that loneliness."
The chance you've correctly interpreted their feelings is low.
At minimum you need to ask "Do you feel lonely living alone?" and dig into their thinking.
I treat work interviews not as surveys but as an extension of conversation.
— Not only improving the work itself
When you interview about work, it sometimes lands not at concrete process tweaks ("we could improve this flow like this") but at something more abstract.
For example: start by building a relationship with your manager ○○ where you can chat casually.
That's also useful for reducing the risk that I, as an outsider, misread reality and propose misguided improvements.
In that case I hand the ball back to the person and their manager, set another meeting, and ask how talking went — then listen to progress.
As I wrote under trust: increasing relationships inside a company where people can request improvements from each other multiplies improvement impact over the medium term.
— Center what must be done
Lastly, what I personally think is the most important axis in work interviews.
When I interview, I try as hard as possible not to ask "what that person wants to do."
I run work interviews centered on "what must be done."
That doesn't mean refusing to fulfill their hopes, of course.
The purpose of work interviews is, needless to say, improving workflows — and you have to push from a whole-system view.
It's not a suggestion box. Digging into "what I want" also has a high risk of drifting into complaints.
Even if you ask what they want, it often can't be realized, frustration builds, and there's little point.
Ideally "what must be done" comes first, and "what they want" is aligned to that.
And when realizing what they want, individuals should spontaneously request and consult the right people — I don't think a setup where others fish it out of them is desirable either.
For now, something like that.
No matter how many times I do work interviews, I get new insights and learn.
Basically, most people rarely get time to think about what's important but not urgent.
On that, there's an episode I like from the book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.
From memory (sorry if fuzzy): as a student the author visited a company for a research report and interviewed a division head.
He asked simple questions like "What's your company's goal?" "Who are your competitors?" "What are the challenges?" and dug in.
After the interview, the division head said something like: "This interview was really valuable. I rarely had time to think about such important questions." He was moved.
That felt like a very suggestive episode, and I always recall it when doing work interviews.
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