Employers who can't trust their employees vs. those who can

In "Management's role in passionate users" Kathy Sierra presents a continuum illustrating how different management approaches lead to different levels of passionate, engaged employees:

IMPOSSIBLE: Make sure employees know that you don't trust them... and watch their every move. Deal harshly with rule-breakers, and reward the ones who never question authority.
Make sure employees know that they are important to the company. Back it up with employee friendly policies. Don't punish them for innovation.
LIKELY: Make sure employees know that YOU know they're trustworthy, smart, and capable. Treat them like they're the key to passionate users. Reward bravery.

When I was at Deseret Book I helped start WLS: "work less stupid". There were many policies and procedures built up over the years (largely driven by the bean counters) that led to all sorts of inefficient, tedious, labor-intensive processes, largely because said policies and procedures were built on the premise that employees weren't to be trusted.

Let me illustrate with an example. My friend DeAnn supervises the call center that processes all direct to consumer orders (mail, phone, etc.). Customers who were members of the bookclub (a program largely obliterated by subsequent strategic marketing moves), by default, had a $50 line of credit.

This $50 credit limit was set back in the early 1980s when the price of a hardcover book was generally still in the single digits. By the time the world was approaching Y2K the price of books had gone up significantly (many paperbacks were in the double digits, and most hardcovers were around $25). The default credit limit was never adjusted for inflation.

As the supervisor, DeAnn had the authority to release invoices of people who were over their credit limit. Which turned out to be the majority of all orders.

Suppose you had 700 orders that needed credit approval. Most all of them would be approved—either they were only a few dollars above $50, or they were long time customers who'd proven to be very reliable. Maybe there would be a dozen or so orders that you wouldn't want to release (instead contacting the customer for some other form of payment). How would YOU design the system?

If you didn't trust your employees to actually review each order, or to use their time wisely if they did not have lots of busy work to do, you'd build a system like Deseret Book had: the invoice numbers of the 688 orders to be released had to be rekeyed into a series of screens one at a time to be released (instead of just deleting the dozen from the batch of 700 and releasing the batch).

It would take DeAnn and her trusted helpers up to four and a half hours a day just to release invoices. Talk about a lack of trust!

The "work less stupid" approach leveraged the power of Tcl (and in particular Expect) to massively speed up the data entry. The steps became:

Log into the mainframe and "print" the credit limit exceeded report to the screen
Save the buffer to a file and pull it into Excel
Review orders, and delete the rows for the dozen that aren't credit worthy
Run the spreadsheet through an Expect script which logged into the mainframe, parsed the spreadsheet, and then automatically (at rapid speed) simulated the typing of the necessary keystrokes to release each invoice individually

We took what had been a four and a half hour (or more) job each day of data entry and reduced the data entry part to three minutes. That's working less stupid. And that's the kind of leverage you get with Tcl & Expect.

Of course we kept it all very hush hush at the time. We were afraid if the CFO found out DeAnn would have to go back to doing things the hard way, and I might face all sorts of reprimands for having written the solution. It was a well kept secret for almost three years until finally the old mainframe system was phased out (and Deseret Book got a new CFO who wasn't such a fan of busy work). None of the bean counters ever noticed that DeAnn's typing speed (when it came to releasing orders) suddenly rocketed to the stratosphere...

I imagine some of you have stories (either about being trusted, or a lack of trust at work), so feel free to leave a comment and share.

—Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, June 08, 2005 at 20:43

Employers who can't trust their employees vs. those who can

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