The No Tool Zone

Anyone ever wonder what happens to that new worker you just hired, so willing to give their life for their company?  A few weeks pass (maybe months if you are lucky) and the worker you just hired has lost that gung-ho attitude in favor of that dismal attitude of other employees.  Dr. Deming would often be asked in his 4-day seminar about what an organization should do about all the dead wood in their organization.  In which he would reply, “Did you hire the wrong people or just kill’em.”  The suggestion for this article is . . . we just kill’em.

Service executives and government management seek ways to “motivate” employees by:

• playing games
• coaching sessions
• setting targets offering rewards and incentives
• personality studies
• working in teams
• performance appraisal
• individual and team recognition

The problem with these approaches is that 95% of the performance of any organization is attributable to the system, not the individual (only 5%).  So to address the problem that I see in organizations we are mostly working on the wrong things.  The poor work design, entrapping technology, targets and incentives that inhibit service to the customer, management decisions about the work they do not understand, etc. . . . all play roles in creating what we call the system.  This leaves our front-line worker with little opportunity to be accountable or innovative when the decision-making has been separated from the work.

The targets and incentives drive the wrong behavior. Achieving targets and the incentive captures all the focus of the individual’s creativity robbing the organization of potential innovation breakthroughs in service or product.  To achieve the target for the reward or to avoid a “coaching” session usually involves some type of manipulation or cheating on the part of the worker at the expense of serving the customer or exerting energy to innovation or improvement.

Another method to limit the importance of the worker has been through entrapping technology, scripts, policies, procedures, standard work and other efforts to “dumb down the front-line worker.”  Kind of reminds me of Geico . . . “so easy a caveman can do it.”  All these things in service industry make it almost impossible to absorb the variety of demand that customers offer putting the worker in a state of flux, do I serve the customer or these stupid mandates my management has given me?  Technology is typically brought in by command and control management and thrust upon the worker telling them that it will get better when they get used to it.  The worker continues to be accountable for the work where they have no say in the decision-making.

The question around customer experience is why customers don’t trust brands the same as 10 years ago.  Service has been in a decline for longer than that, the mantra for command and control thinkers is I must cut costs and in a management paradox have increased costs and worsened service to customers.  If a service organization wants to communicate authenticity, energy and trust to customers we must return the front-line worker to the forefront  . . . only they can deliver these things . . . they are the humanator of bad service and increased costs.

How do you unleash the humanator?  We first must understand customer demand and purpose, and measures that matter to the customer.  Employing purpose and measures where the work is done allows the liberation of method by the front-line worker.  Innovation, value and profit from the newly engaged front-line worker is accompanied by business cost reductions.  A well-served customer is less expensive to serve than a dissatisfied one.  It is not the zero-sum game of a trade-off between service and costs that command and control thinkers believe it to be . . . good service always costs less.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt.