Customer Experience Design

They can't be trusted ...

The company that I work for has just decided to block all staff access to social networking sites like Facebook. Here’s the important part of the note.

This week, we will be advising employees that from 15 October 2007, they will no longer be able to access social networking websites, such as Facebook, from their work computers. Any employee who has a valid business reason to access such sites needs to talk to their line manager and then contact their IT Service Desk to ensure they are not blocked. From 15 October, access will only be reinstated if there is a valid business case, backed by line managers.

Now I have no doubt that somewhere there’s a report which shows that X number of staff have spent Y amount of time on sites like Facebook in ‘work time’ and using work computers. Multiply X by Y and suddenly you’ve got a problem.

Maybe it happened something like this.

Manager 1 – ‘Hey we’re paying these people to work. Not to spend valuable time messing about on social sites’.

Manager 2 – ‘Yeah, we’ve gotta do something about this’. Can’t we just put a firewall in place and block access for everyone’.

Manager 1 – Yeah, that would do it. Let’s just stop them from being able to visit the site.

Manager 2 - OK, I’ll get right on it.

I’ll give the people involved (almost certainly more than two) credit for asking aloud the question of whether this was the right solution, and was it really wise to create such a sweeping decision. But the fact that they’ve decided that it is the right solution really worries me.

Now if you’re part of a brutal military regime or an unelected dictatorship such as exist in Burma, North Korea or China then such a policy can probably be justified. Hey, if I was a brutal dictator then I’d probably think that it made perfect sense to prevent the masses from having unrestricted access to the internet. Can’t have any of this free will nonsense getting in the way can we?

But in a UK based financial services company this type of approach feels a little heavy handed.

Here’s how I would deal with it.

Find out how many staff are spending how much time on Facebook.

Find out which members of staff are spending lots of time on Facebook. Now ‘lots of time’ is a bit vague – so use common sense. I’d probably go for something like anything over 30 minutes a day to begin with

Remind staff that the internet is made available to them as part of a suite of tools provided to help them do their jobs effectively.

Remind them that the right of access shouldn’t be abused – and that spending large amounts of time on social networking sites would count as abuse (unless of course their role is to trawl social networking sites in order to find out what’s being said about the company).

Contact anyone via email who has high usage of these sites and remind them of the policy in a more direct way. A kind of ‘hey we know what you’re doing, here’s the evidence. Now stop’.

Monitor their usage after this warning – along with everyone else’s. And if they don’t abuse it again then job done. If they do continue to abuse it then take appropriate disciplinary action ranging from removal of internet privileges through to dismissal, depending on the seriousness of the abuse.

What you shouldn’t do is tar everyone with the same brush and treat them like school kids who can’t be trusted. And ask them to provide a business case as to why they should be treated like adults.

None of this is about food

Of course it doesn't. The fact that there's a menu implies that there are several options to choose from.

I guess that plenty of the time we pick the things that seem safe - either we've done them before or they are the expected thing to choose. Organisational culture and behaviours often drive the choices that people within it it make.

But what if you want something that isn't on the menu? What if your organisation needs to start making choices which are completely different from those that it's made in the past? What if the things you've picked are no longer good for you? What if they're actually killing you?

It's a massive challenge to get conversations going about things that should be on the new menu. To make others in the company buy into the new choices and what they provide. And to reject what they've had in the past. If you've always chosen the equivalent of organisational steak in the past, then why would you want to choose something different?

The bigger challenge though might be to try and do away with the menu altogether. It's a fixed device. And changing from one fixed device to another is hard. A constant diet of change management can be unsettling.

Better then to build the capability to build and create individual dishes as need and opportunity arises. To adapt them when it's appropriate. And to discard them altogether and make up something new when necessary.

Thinking not included

I bought a sandwich for lunch today. The cost was £2.40. I gave the young girl at the till two £2 coins. I was expecting to get £1.60 back.

She did a little bit of a double-take after she'd rung up the amount, and then she handed me £4.60 in change. It comprised one £2 coin, two £2 coins, a fifty pence coin, and a ten pence coin.

I smiled and said that it was too much. She smiled back and said that it was the right amount. She even turned the display on her till so that I could see it. It said £4.60.

I pointed out that she had given me back more money than I'd given her. Plus I still had my sandwich.

She said that yes it was a bit weird, but her computer clearly showed that the change I was entitled to was £4.60. And she'd been told to trust the computer.

I asked her what £4 minus £2.40 was. She said £1.60. I told here that this is how much change she should give me. She told me she couldn't because it would mess up the till.

We talked for a little more. Eventually she gave me the right money.

It made me think. How often do employees do really stupid things to customers because of some process or system? How often do employees simply fail to turn their brains on in order to challenge an instruction to do something that is plainly wrong or ridiculous? How often do companies and their employees simply follow the dotted lines in terms of how they service their customers?

The reward of happy exhaustion

"Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's when you've had everything to do, and you've done it."

Margaret Thatcher

What masks do you wear?

People wear lots of masks. We all do it.

• We pretend to be happy when we're sad.
• We pretend to be upset when we're happy.
• We pretend to like something when we don't.
• We pretend we do or don't care.

People like pretending

This happens just as much in the work place.

Lots of people put on masks to try and appear to be something they're not.

Like the middle manager who pretends that he's really focused on delivering first class customer service, and who then gives the game away by creating and enforcing dozens of petty bureaucracies which stop his staff from delivering on what he's says is important.

Like the senior manager who says she wants her business unit to lead in the way in customer centricity, and who then spends almost no time developing and implementing policies which will help her customers.
Like the team manager who says that he's a people person, and who knows almost nothing about the individuals in his team and would be sacked in a second by his team if they had the ability to do it.

The problem with many of the masks that we wear is that they slip. They crack. They don't hold up under close scrutiny. They crack under pressure.  But often when we see this, we put on a mask of our own. The mask that ignores what we see. Or which lacks the courage to say what needs to be said. Or which simply longs for the quite life.

But to change things we need to discard the masks. We need to see things for what they are and we need to challenge things when they're not as they should be or as they have been promised . It's called integrity and moral courage.