Treating customers well

Just had to comment on a pleasant experience today with a large company. It’s not every day that you deal with a customer service department in a huge company that actually treats you well, solves your problem for you, or even gets back to you on the same day that you contacted them. All that happened to me today in my dealings with Amazon.com. I had purchased a DVD TV series for several hundred dollars back in May of this year, and it arrived in Oslo in late June when we were on vacation in Germany. Unfortunately, the post office in Oslo only allows the packages to sit in their buildings for fourteen days, so as we were on vacation for about this amount of time, the package was returned to Amazon before I had a chance to pick it up. I contacted Amazon in mid-July to register this incident as a return, and received an authorization number so that I could track the return process and when the package was logged in as ‘returned’. As it took almost eight weeks for the package to arrive in Oslo initially, I figured it would take about the same amount of time for it to arrive back in the USA from whence it was shipped. Due to other matters, I didn’t have a chance to check on the status of the return until today, three months after I first contacted Amazon. I wrote to the customer service department as the package had not been returned by me but by the post office, so that the return process was irregular. I received an email within a few hours from not one, but two customer service reps, within a few hours of each other. The first one wrote to me to tell me that the package had been returned and that it would be no problem for me to get my refund. The second one wrote to tell me the exact amount that would be refunded and how my Amazon gift card and credit card accounts would be credited. No fuss, no bother, no ‘please contact this or that person’ in a long chain of persons, no recriminations or criticism on their part concerning the irregular return process. Rather, personal emails to me that said that they understood that I was disappointed that I had not received my package and that the refund process was initiated and that it would not take long for me to receive my refund, respectively.

How great is this? This is a huge global company at this point in time, and yet they managed to get back to me the same day I wrote to them. Not only that, they managed to resolve the situation immediately. I am a regular and good Amazon customer and have been since the late 1990s. I have never had a customer service problem with this company, which in and of itself is pretty amazing. Their efficient, fast and friendly customer service ensures that I remain a loyal customer. Why is it that they manage this absolutely crucial aspect of running a business—providing excellent customer service--whereas other companies fail so miserably? At Amazon, it seems that the customer is always right. At least that’s been the case in my dealings with them. It just goes to show that just because a company is large doesn’t mean that we need to abandon all hope of being treated well as a customer. I hope their policy of treating the customer well continues. 

Lean Mean Fighting Machine

Christine Koht, a Norwegian media personality and program leader, is also a columnist for A-magazine, Aftenposten’s weekend magazine. Her column this past Friday was about the Lean management philosophy, how it has invaded Norwegian workplaces, and the effect it has had on many employees, whom as she described, are just so tired of being told how to be better. She lectures and entertains at many different workplaces around the country, and described how many of the employees she meets in her travels are feeling these days about their workplaces (translated from Norwegian):

‘I travel quite a lot around this country, entertaining at different workplaces, and everywhere I go I encounter the same ideal—continuous improvement. Counting and measurements and endless documenting are presumably what it takes to find out how everything can always be better. But everyone is so tired of it. Doctors and plumbers, engineers and teachers--all of them are finding that their workdays and their job enthusiasm are being drained dry by the perpetual need to document everything they do’.  

I have to admit that this was the first time I had ever heard about this management philosophy. First it was New Public Management (NPM), now it's Lean. So I decided that it’s time to read up on these business philosophies that have taken over the workplace. I’ve already written a post on New Public Management. Actually, we're knee-deep in NPM in the public sector and rather stuck there, so how did Lean get a foothold? I am interested in these philosophies because I see what they are doing to workplaces. The first thing that came to mind when I saw the word Lean was the old expression ‘lean mean fighting machine’. And it seems that this management philosophy is all about reducing waste and continuous improvement, so that your company ends up ‘fit for fight’—a lean mean fighting machine in a competitive global economy. It seems to have started as a management philosophy for manufacturing—how to improve efficiency of production by focusing on waste reduction. For the life of me, I cannot imagine how this philosophy can be applied to public sector organizations. For one thing, it is the exact opposite of NPM as far as I can see. Correct me if I’m wrong, but NPM has only led to massive increases in layers of administration and administrative positions—too many chiefs and not enough Indians, in other words. So if Lean is now the management philosophy of choice—what possibilities exist to eliminate waste? Should the Lean business consultants, strategists and gurus start by ‘removing’ the very layers of administration that NPM set in place? Because anyone with an ounce of common sense can see that it is the exponential growth of administration that is clogging the system, reducing efficiency and causing waste. The administrators need to administrate and to control the employees who are doing the actual work. The numbers of actual workers are decreasing relative to the number of administrators set in place to administrate them.

I also see what these different trends in management philosophies have done to workplace leaders, how desperate some of them are to effect change, any change, in a panicked attempt to leave a legacy behind them when they go. They also have to be able to say to a new employer—‘I managed to implement this or that change in my former workplace, and it’s working very well. I can do miracles with your workplace if you only give me a chance’. Or I can at least imagine that this is what they are desperate to achieve, otherwise why do so many of them—men and women alike--look so harried and haggard? When you meet with them, they come up with yet another idea for how you can be better, how you can improve your workday, how you can best serve your workplace and those ideas are completely different than the ones they were so adamant about your accepting just a year ago. And when you remind them of what they insisted upon a year ago, they get irritated and don’t want to hear about the past. The past for them is the past—gone, non-existent (as though it never existed), passé, and a taboo topic of conversation. It’s all about relativeness (changing with circumstances) these days. When you remind them that you personally might want to learn from past mistakes, they don’t want to hear that either. They also don’t want to hear that you want to take your time now in making a decision that will affect how you perform your work duties for the next few years. They just want you to accept what they want you to accept—NOW. It doesn’t matter if they change their minds again in six months. 

When will workplace leaders realize that efficiency is the last thing that results from incessant poking and prodding and change? Employees work best and most efficiently in an environment that lets them do the job they are paid to do, in other words, in a stable and supportive environment. They work best in an environment where the infrastructure in place supports them in their quest to do a good job, rather than hindering them, as is often the case in overly-bureaucratic and overly-administrated environments. There is no stability in an atmosphere of constant change, in an environment that incessantly pokes and prods its employees at every turn in an effort to get them to produce more and to be more efficient. There are many employees who have done a terrific job, who have produced for their companies, and who are tired. Just plain tired—of being told they haven’t done enough, that they aren’t good enough, that they need to change, that they are resistant to change, that they are too set in their ways, or that they need to just ‘adapt’ to yet another way of looking at their job. What if the new management philosophy could be one with a laissez-faire focus, one that led to appreciation of employees and to company management which understood that employee competence and expertise are the reasons that employees were hired in the first place, which understood that ‘more and better’ all the time doesn’t lead to efficiency and that if employees are appreciated that they will produce in ways that a company could only dream of? What if companies understood that enough is enough and that better is often the enemy of good, and that more means never enough? Management should back off and let employees be. But that would mean treating employees like adults and not children. Are company managements up to that? Only time will tell.

I’m not arguing against all forms of self-improvement; I’m actually a proponent of self-improvement in the personal arena. By that I mean—striving to be the best person you can be in the situations in which you find yourself. We can always learn new ways of looking at things, always have new and different responses if we’ve learned from our mistakes. My problem is when self-improvement/job improvement is forced upon you by people who have little to no idea of what they’re doing and who have no idea of who you really are or of what you need in a workplace setting. So let’s see if I can get this right. If I need advice on how to be a better scientist, I will consult a highly-successful scientist, not an administrator. Likewise, if I need advice on how to be a better friend or spouse, I’ll consult people who have good track records in both departments or who work in the psychology and social work fields, but not an administrator. By documenting all that we do, administrators conclude that they know us and that they are competent enough to tell us how to do the jobs we were hired to do. But they are not. However, if I need help with balancing a budget sheet or with filling out a complicated form, I’ll consult an administrator. But that is very seldom. So perhaps these management philosophies are more about finding valid work for the administrators to do. The employees they are administrating know for the most part what they are doing and why, and how to reach their professional goals without administrative interference. The more time we spend on administrative tasks, the less time we have to work at our real jobs, and then productivity and efficiency fly out the window. 

Be careful what you wish for

Whenever I look at the statistics for the blog posts I’ve written, I find that posts about modern workplaces are among the most popular. I guess this shouldn’t surprise me, because we spend a good portion of our lives in our workplaces, so it’s not strange that we want to both understand and feel a part of them. I’ve spoken to many different people lately, both here in Norway and in the USA, and the thoughts, complaints, and experiences they share mirror my own. There have been huge changes in our workplaces just during the past ten years. It seems to me as though they have happened gradually, but the overall effect has been jarring. And if I am honest, I know that with each change that occurs in my own workplace, I am pushed out of my comfort zone yet again. The time allotted for engaging in and experiencing a new comfort zone gets shorter and shorter. The idea I suppose is that we’re not supposed to ‘get comfortable’—the new way of thinking is that it’s bad for productivity and efficiency. Modern workplaces are about change—change at any cost, change for change’s sake, change for the sake of modernization, change to meet the needs of the future, change to improve the quality of workplace life for employees, change to deal with an aging employee population—there may be many reasons for change. After having been pushed and prodded for the past several years, I am finally awake to what is going on around me, and I find that I am beginning to get some kind of overview, a bird’s eye view as it were, on the whole thing. But I am a long way from understanding it.

What I can surmise from all the changes is that many of them are about control—controlling huge organizations, be they universities, hospitals, corporations—it doesn’t matter. The growth of administration to effect this control has led to micromanagement and dissection of all that we took for granted before, all that functioned without us really knowing how or why. And since it functioned, we really didn’t have to know how or why it did. We trusted that this or that particular system (ordering, accounting, invoicing, archiving) was run by people who knew what they were doing, just as we knew what we were doing in our own spheres. It was fine to ‘take each other for granted’, respect each other’s differences, and go on about our daily work lives. Since the ultra-business people with their new management trends have taken over, we are forced to acknowledge their presence, forced to interact with them on a daily basis. They want us to know they are there—not that they are there to serve us; rather that we are there to serve them. They want to be acknowledged for all they do and they want us to know that they are in charge. So now we know. Now we know the answer to the old joke—how many people does it take to screw in a light bulb? How many people does it take to order a computer, or three items needed for work, or to create an invoice, or to create and fill out a work order so that eventual work can be planned? An easy answer is now six or more people, if you’re lucky. Administration grows exponentially. I’m guessing that the jobs of the future are in business administration. Young people should take notice.

Many of the changes are also about creating a lack of accountability. What do I mean by this? You can no longer relate personally to one individual who might be able to help you. The impersonal shield as I call it goes up the minute you ask to speak to one person who might know the answer to your question. You must rather deal with six or more people whose names you will never remember. And that’s the point. Or if you get an email from one of the six, it is with a cc: to the other five, so that you will never know with certainty that the person who wrote to you is the person you should deal with in the future. In this way, no one person is accountable; no one person can be blamed if a problem should arise. But this also means that no one person can receive the honor for a job well-done. They must all share it communally, like it and keep quiet if they don’t.

This lack of accountability is also part of what I call the dilution effect. Call it spreading out the blame, the praise, the responsibility, the actual job tasks—whatever may be involved. No one person can be responsible for one specific job anymore—that would be tantamount to giving full control to one individual, and that cannot be tolerated in modern workplaces, because that would give one person autonomy and a sense of well-being. So the job is diluted out, which leads to a thinning-out of its effectiveness, much like what happens if you dilute the concentration of a medicine that might help you—if it’s too dilute, it loses its effectiveness. I don’t blame the people who sit in these positions—they are told what to do by their superiors. But it’s a sorry state of affairs we’ve reached when high levels of competence and expertise are no longer encouraged. What’s rather encouraged is team-playing , sharing the expertise and diluting out one’s competence and accepting that it should be this way. What happens to a company or to a society when competence is diluted out in this way? Can we trust that teams of people with limited information about their individual jobs can fly, drive or manage the planes, trains, or companies of the future, respectively? Personally, I want to fly in a plane that I know is in the hands of fully-competent individuals, so that if something happened to two of the three pilots, the remaining one would be fully-competent to tackle the situation alone. Ditto for a train. Ditto for a company.  

What is our role in creating the current situation? I wonder. The old adage ‘be careful what you wish for, you might get it’ comes to mind. Have we wished for some of this? I think the answer is yes. I think unwittingly, every time we said that we wished there was a more defined system for this or that, every time we worshipped on the altars of productivity and efficiency, every time we wanted to give up some autonomy because it was too tiring to think or do for ourselves---we were wishing for someone to come along and take control for us. Call it a collective wishing. We may have bought into the business philosophies that talked about how much more effective everything would be after a huge merger. We wished for that effectiveness. It seemed like a real solution, even when we were already productive—we wanted more. But nothing that gets to be the size of a bloated whale or a huge lumbering dinosaur can be effective. Bigger is not always better. Is it always wanting more, better, bigger that will destroy us? Or turn us into bloated whales and lumbering dinosaurs? We are not meeting the needs of the future in this format, that’s for sure. 

Feeling useful

It’s been a while since I’ve done as much physical work as I did today and during the past two weeks. Our dining room renovations are finished for the most part (there are still some small jobs to do), so much of the physical work today involved hours of cleaning and vacuuming—floors, walls, furniture, books—anywhere where the fine white sand and dust from all the sanding and construction work had settled. As far as I can see, it seems to have settled everywhere! But today was amazingly effective, as was this past week. I have to emphasize that the efficiency is at home, not at work. That’s because I can plan the work at home as I like, no one is standing over me assessing my productivity and efficiency except me. I’m my own slave driver. I don’t need others to do that job. But the wonderful efficiency I experience at home is in stark contrast to the inefficiency I experience at present on a daily basis at work. How is it possible, is what I’m always asking myself? I’m still waiting for my budget problems to be corrected (going on two years now); I informed my superiors that my budgets were incorrect and they sent the message further and the mistake is still not corrected. I am having problems with one email account and don’t know who to talk to about having it fixed. I need to order supplies but the person who normally does that is on sick leave and has been for a while. The other day I went to make a telephone call out of Norway (work-related) and was interrupted by the operator who promptly told me that I needed permission from the accounting department and my superiors to make international calls. This was new to me and since I’m not sure who to talk to, it’s easier not to make any calls. The hospital is apparently in dire straits these days—no money---so they’re adopting desperate measures to reduce spending. All hiring has been stopped. It will be interesting though to see if the hospital will continue to hire administrators. It seems we cannot have too many of them and we cannot live without them. Here’s a joke (of my own creation)—how many administrators does it take to order, purchase and screw in a light bulb? At least six if not more—one has to look at the work order, another has to approve it, another has to order the bulb, another has to send the invoice to the accounting department, another has to pay the bill, and another has to file the paid invoice. And of course I forgot—the delivery department also has to get involved in order to deliver the bulb, and then someone has to install it.

I really enjoyed working hard and efficiently today. I felt useful—to my home, to myself, to my marriage, to my life and to my future. That is what I thrive on—feeling useful, feeling that the work I do is useful. Seeing the results, seeing the clean and organized home, seeing the finished renovations, the painted walls, the sanded and lacquered floors. 

I could start a consulting business to organize people’s homes. I think I would be good at it. I like the work—sorting through papers and files, categorizing things, seeing the neat results (literally). Hours pass in this way and it’s pleasant, at least to me. I know that a lot of people hate to clean and organize. But we grew up with the Catholic philosophy—“cleanliness is next to godliness”—it was talked about in school. Makes sense to me. It doesn’t mean that I have obsessive-compulsive disorder or that I have to clean on a daily basis. It’s enough to get the major stuff done and out of the way, and that can be a couple of times a year at most if it involves sorting and organizing. Getting things accomplished in this way clears the mental path for other projects on the waiting list. I hate procrastination above most things, and I knew too many procrastinators in my earlier years. It’s just to ignore them and keep on. I hope my work life goes back to being efficient. It was so efficient and streamlined for many years; then came the mergers and the efficiency and productivity got shot to hell. I hope the tide turns and we go back to a daily work life that makes sense and that makes me feel useful again.