Formats and Creativity

Have standard formats and you'll save time. Surely you are busy. Business needs to be scalable. You need to achieve more out of your employees, time and the money invested in business. Having standard formats and templates to do things would definitely help you do all this. 

You can have a standard presentation to introduce yourself to customers. You also can have standard spreadsheets to present your analysis. Managers provide their team members with presentation templates for their review meetings so that everybody presents in the same format. 

And for the team members, it's convenient to open the last meetings presentation, make a few changes in data and present it again. 

You can have standard replies to mails in one file from where you can quickly copy, paste and save time of writing it all over again.

You do this to your colleagues and customers and others do this to you. 

Call up the Customer care department of any organisation a few times and you'll discover that all of them would say the same lines with the same intonation. Most of the organisations provide their customer care employees a script to read for each call they attend.

But there is a problem with this cost and time saving approach. Formats can help you standardise things and save time, but it can never let you add a personal touch to the customer. It cannot build relationships. And it does not foster creativity. 

Formats can help you to be more efficient but not effective. 

Shun the format. Overcome the format culture and let your team add a part of themselves to their work.

You may have guidelines instead of formats.