chapter 7

sangria, sippy cups, and jesse ventura
autonomy versus standards

in news stories that had the Twittersphere absolutely buzzing (there’s no better word for it), two of America’s largest casual restaurant brands—Applebee’s and Olive Garden—managed, in separate incidents, to serve alcoholic beverages to a fifteen-month-old and a two-year-old, respectively (alcoholic margarita mix in a sippy cup to the fifteen-month-old; sangria to the two-year-old), between late March and early April 2011.1 In a more deadly incident, one of a string of similar incidents at medical facilities, the Fresno Community Regional Medical Center in December 2010 gave Elena Silva an accidental 300-milliliter, instead of the intended, similar-looking 300-unit (6-milliliter), dose of the blood-thinning drug Heparin. In other words, Ms. Silva received fifty times what had been prescribed, thus making Heparin toxicity a “significant condition” contributing to her death.2

Does this mean the cheery service professionals at Applebee’s or Olive Garden enjoy giving toddlers a buzz? Or that community hospital nurses don’t care whether they’re administering a lethal dose of blood thinner? Assuredly not. Rather, I believe the mixups were due to a lack of standards. The kids got the booze, I’ll bet, because the restaurants lacked appropriate standards for how to store and administer similar, mixup-prone drinks. The hospital apparently overdosed Ms. Silva because it hadn’t worked out standards for how to distinguish similar sounding, but very different, dosages.

patting down jesse ventura

By January 2011, former Minnesota governor, Navy Seal, and professional wrestler Jesse Ventura was fed up. Security alarms had been ringing for him in airports ever since his artificial hip replacement surgery in 2008, leading to full-body scans and pat-down body searches. When Ventura tired of this extra, intimate attention, he filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security, asking a federal judge to issue an immediate injunction against “warrantless and suspicionless” searches.

This seems an unfortunate and disconnected customer service scenario, regardless of where you come down on the constitutional merits of Ventura’s case (and, in fact, as we go to press, Ventura’s case has been thrown out for “lack of jurisdiction”). It seems clear, even self-evident, that former U.S. governors, even former-wrestler-former-governors with-oversized-personalities-and-weakness-for-conspiracy-theories, are unlikely to present a risk of terrorist activity. You could argue that back when Mr. Ventura was Minnesota’s highest elected official, he had the means at his disposal to wreak more havoc than he’s likely to accomplish today taking a workaday commercial flight.

It’s a simple matter of record that Ventura sets off metal detectors because of his titanium hip implant. So why’s he being forced to undergo full-body scans or pat-downs at the airport, two to three times a week, on the nonbasis that he’s “setting off the alarm,” which, among other downsides, would seem to be a colossal waste of time for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA)?

One word: The people who work in the airports lack autonomy. Without autonomy, they not only can’t give fantastic customer service; they can’t even give reasonable baseline customer service. It’s against the rules.

Beating Little Kids at Chess

When I watch employees refusing to give way to customers in disputes over small charges, rushing shoppers out the door when it’s closing time, and engaging in a thousand other petty, by-the-book behaviors, it troubles me because it shows such an obvious failure of leadership, a management that has discouraged pro-customer autonomy and failed to help employees understand their purpose in the organization. What’s going on here is that someone has built or, as likely, allowed by default a company that functions the way you teach little kids to play chess.

You know how little kids are taught to play chess? You tell them a pawn’s worth a dollar, a knight three dollars, a rook, five dollars, a queen, eight bucks. This, up to a point, is smart, teaching kids what adult chess players instinctively know about the relative value of pieces. But the flaw in the system becomes quickly obvious and makes it embarrassingly easy to wallop kids at chess if this is all they know. A kid might gleefully proclaim in temporary triumph, “Heh, heh, heh, I’ve got twenty-five bucks worth of your pieces,” but you’ll be able to calmly and cold-bloodedly reply, “Well, yeah, that’s true, but … checkmate, buddy.”

It’s hard, when you’re taught to play chess this way, to understand the concept that the king has no definable value because it has infinite value. Likewise, until an employee is taught her relation to the organization’s ultimate goals, the same is true, with the customer standing in for the chess king. If your employees don’t understand their purpose in your organization and have the power and encouragement to act autonomously to support it—sacrificing a few pawns, so to speak, when necessary to protect the customer—you’ll lose the game, checkmated by customers who defect.

the case for autonomy in customer service work

The case for giving employees autonomy in how to carry out their work has been backed up for half a century by psychological and management research. It may surprise you just how strong the case is—until you look in the mirror and think about what you would require to do great work face to face with customers every day.

Why autonomy? First off, people need a reason to wake up in the morning—and “they pay me” is hardly the ideal alarm clock. Think about it this way: Let’s assume an employer pays approximately the same wage as competing employers do. But the employer also prescribes exactly how the job should be done, when it should be done, and where it should be done. Does this employer’s approximately-the-same-as-everyone-else’s wage really carry the day in this situation? Unlikely. An employee with half a brain (and, by and large, that’s the minimum cranial content to look for in an employee) will sprint to any employer offering more freedom, freedom that includes:

image Flexibility in when the job gets done (don’t tell me that parents who need to work an unconventional schedule are lesser workers; it just ain’t true).3

image Even more important, flexibility in how the job gets done: both on a day-to-day basis and in having a part in designing the overall structure of the work activities. This is an ethical imperative. If you don’t involve people in designing the jobs to which they devote their waking hours, you’re using employees as mere tools, for their labor. Even though you’re paying them, this kind of using of people is unconscionable.

Second, a company needs the ability to respond to the unpredictable, ever changing, intensely individual, nuanced desires of customers. Remember our statistic from Cornell’s Center for Hospitality Research: There are an estimated five thousand customer/employee touch points every day in a business such as a moderate-sized hotel. There may be fewer touch points in your business, or, heaven help you, there may be more. To handle each of those touch points correctly requires an exceeding amount of psychological and intellectual flexibility, which will be hindered when employees know that management puts primary value on conformity. While many companies speak of employee empowerment, they tend to compensate and allocate pats on the back differently: Did an employee make the numbers this month (even if he had to finesse the books by pushing bad events to next month)? Did he get everything—sorta—shipped on time (even if it means he didn’t take that extra minute to verify a shipping address and save the customer a lot of grief)? Did the employee get customers off the phone in the call center “on time” (even though lingering longer could have led to a greater potential bond with the company)?

Employees selected, oriented, and reinforced properly, surrounded by peers of the same caliber, will thrive when given significant autonomy. Otherwise, they’ll wither. There are dozens of studies to support this, inside and outside of business life.4

You want customer relations to be on the shoulders of your employees. But as long as you’re defining every little thing, and rewarding/punishing based on seemingly arbitrary and thus, inevitably, gamed criteria, you won’t get them to carry that responsibility. Their viewpoint will soon resemble the jaded flight attendant’s attitude on a big, legacy carrier who told me the other day, “The more emphatically Management comes up with new i’s to dot and t’s for me to cross, the less seriously I take them. I know these rules will be gone within the year, and a new group of regs will take their place.”

The Spitting Image of a Great Employee

The range of how much or how little a single employee can contribute to an organization and its customers is as broad as the range of human possibility. I think of someone from the world of science, physiologist Ivan Pavlov, as the exemplar of this—the spitting image, as it were.

Pavlov’s research was supposed to be limited to an analysis of the saliva of dogs after they were fed. It was outside Pavlov’s purview to even notice that the dogs salivated in advance of the food being delivered. In fact, by making note of this unexpected phenomenon, he made his job messier, the experiment less straightforward. Yet because Pavlov was a curious fellow, whose elective efforts had been unlocked, he changed the nature of the experiment and discovered the concept of the conditioned reflex—and a name for himself that still, well, rings a bell.

How do you develop your employees into game changers like Pavlov, unlocking their elective efforts? This is a big question, but the answer starts the moment you hire a new employee. This is the time—during the disorienting “orientation” period—when you can make the biggest strides, by ensuring that every employee immediately understands her underlying purpose in your organization and appreciates its importance to the company and its leaders.

An employee has both a purpose—the reason why the job exists—and a function—her day-to-day job responsibilities. For example, in a health-care setting, “to create successful medical outcomes and hospitable human experiences for our patients” might be the employee purpose. “To change linens,” by contrast, might be that same employee’s function. A properly trained and managed employee in this setting will know—and be empowered—to stop changing linens if creating successful medical outcomes or being hospitable requires a different action at the moment.

Creating such an employee will be an ongoing process but is best begun at this new-employee orientation, which should be led by someone at a very high level in the company (the CEO or someone whose outlook has been personally molded by the CEO). During the orientation, the purpose of the employee should be stressed, while making it clear that she will be celebrated for rising to her purpose in the organization, not scolded for being a few short in the number of linens changed.

the need for standards

Standards help ensure that every part of your service reflects the best way your company knows to perform it—a prescription that your autonomously performing employees can then feel free to adapt to suit the needs and wishes, expressed or unexpressed, of the customers they’re actually facing at the moment.

The summary statement for a standard should briefly include all three points below:

1. Why the service is of value (why we’re doing this in the first place)

2. The emotional response we’re aiming to have the customer feel

3. The expected way to accomplish the service

Point three should be formulated in a manner that allows judgment and discretion to be used in all but mission-critical (Heparin dosing and alcohol-in-sippy-cup) situations.

What follows is a practical example of how a company might summarize a single standard:

image We answer all web-form queries in a speedy, personable, non-automated fashion that assists and reassures, binding the customer or prospective customer to our company on the first response.

image The response time will be within thirty-five minutes.

image The initial answer provided will either be complete or, if that’s not possible, will couple a partial, brief answer with a promise of a comprehensive future answer within a specified time frame. In that case, expert assistance will be requested internally, but the initial respondent will own the follow-up until completed to the customer’s satisfaction.

standards and autonomy: the hybrid path

In many contexts, when asked where I stand on employee autonomy versus the enforcement of standards, my one-sentence response is “In most situations, I favor standards accompanied by the reasoning behind them and autonomy in how they’re carried out.” It doesn’t work so well, continuing with the example of the web-form response standard, to tell an employee to “answer customer queries any time you want,” because answering customer queries promptly is a crucial part of giving great customer service; it can’t be left to this level of potential variability. Yet it also doesn’t work to say to an employee, “You have to hurry and check this function off your list, or you’re in trouble.” You’ll end up with cursory replies, as the employee misapprehends the reason he’s responding, which now becomes not to take care of the customer, but because he’s checking something off a list to avoid angering his boss.

This is why, for many situations, the hybrid path I suggest is the correct one. Explain your reasoning to employees: “We need to answer customer inquiries faster than anyone else, because our studies, last undertaken fourteen months ago, demonstrate this as one of the top five controllable factors in making a sale. The response needs to be friendly and professional for that reason as well.”

Then, define any unclear terminology:

image “Faster than anyone else” means within two hours for an initial query, and within fifteen minutes for a follow-up query related to the initial query.

image “Friendly and professional” means to “use your best judgment” but also to “avoid the following list of phrases and consider the substitutes listed below instead.”

Finally, you need to measure and, as needed, reinforce the standards.

The next time you see reports about companies that are ostensibly “all autonomy,” look a little closer. Nordstrom, for example, is often reported to have no employee manual other than the single phrase “use your best judgment at all times.” This is not entirely accurate: Nordstrom is a company supported by rigorously maintained standards and training. Or look at Zappos’s reported social media policy of “be real and use your best judgment.”5 This is indeed its policy—to an extent. But only to an extent: After all, it’s a publicly traded company and would be at significant risk without the standards it has implemented to protect against the untoward release of information.6

Employee autonomy—“using your best judgment”—is extremely important to delivering Nordstrom-quality customer service. But it mostly comes into play on the more complex and unpredictable tasks, of which there are many: selecting the items for a customer’s wardrobe makeover, walking the line between honesty and not insulting a customer when she’s trying on clothes, finding ways to go the extra mile for a customer. All of these tasks require an enormous amount of autonomy to succeed and a properly hired and trained staff to make use of that autonomy. For example, do you know who’s legally responsible if a common carrier (UPS, DHL, FedEx) leaves your Nordstrom delivery in the rain and your $200 dress shoes are ruined because you pre-signed that it was OK to leave the package? Well, it might be you or it might be the common carrier, but it’s absolutely not Nordstrom. Yet, when this happened to me, not for an instant did my salesperson7 consider saying “You need to file a claim with the truckers.” She said, “I’m so incredibly sorry that happened, and I’m bringing over a brand new pair of shoes—will you be home in forty-five minutes?”

But at the same time, many things at Nordstrom and other great companies depend on standards. For instance, paging in a Nordstrom store is superior to the way it’s done most anywhere else. But not because employees autonomously, spontaneously decide to do it better each time they page, but because someone at Nordstrom thought through what a paging system should sound like from a customer’s perspective and then standardized it. Reworking the idea of a paging system to put what a customer would want to experience (less auditory clutter in the store’s soundscape) at the center, Nordstrom eliminated all mention of where and whom its paged employee is to call. All you hear is a single statement of the employee’s name: “Jamie Johnson.” [How can this work? The employee calls in to a central number, states her name, and is directed to the appropriate extension by a professional operator.]

Systems and Smiles

Carl Sewell long ago titled a chapter “Systems, Not Smiles” in his classic book Customers for Life. He explained his point like this: If the food in a restaurant is lousy, no matter how much the staff smiles and apologizes for it, you’ll likely not eat there again.8

Of course, Carl’s kind of right. But the flip side is that without those smiles, nobody wants the service experience in the first place. As restaurateur Danny Meyer in contrast puts it, the two things people want from the hospitality experience are a sense of acknowledgment and, on returning, a sense of being remembered. Both of which, I would say, are best delivered with a smile.

My formula, accordingly, has always been systems and smiles.

Not too many companies are good at both. A few years back, my family was planning to move just a few miles and a local moving company was recommended to us. The movers’ smiles were as broad as the day is long—I assume that’s why the company got those recommendations.

Somehow in the sea of smiles, I missed a fact about its operating procedure: Our dozens of boxes had approximate names scrawled on them like “girl’s bedroom,” “his office,” etc. But there was no numbering system, no real tagging system. In other words: no way to prove if every box had made the move. Or hadn’t.

This situation seemed all right (again, the smiles went a long way—too far, I guess, in a sense), until we found ourselves missing something, a small work of art we’d bought years ago, precious to us for nostalgic reasons.

Could the sweet little local moving company help us? Uh, no. There was no way to trace where, or when, or even if a box had gone missing. There were no smiles anywhere once this reality sunk in.

Systems and smiles—the two will take you a long way. More than twice as far as one or the other.

pour lion and pepi

Autonomy and standards aren’t necessarily opposing forces. At the old Ritz-Carlton, the lion lovingly etched in the side of each wine glass served two purposes: (1) the lion promoted the brand and (2) the tiny, engraved tongue of the lion served as the pour line, helping to ensure that the appropriate amount of wine was served. Ask Ritz-Carlton employees of that era, and they’ll still point with pride and a sort of insider’s knowingness to this subtly reinforced standard.

Why did the Ritz-Carlton’s employees take pride in something that actually reduced their autonomy? First, because protecting Ritz-Carlton assets (in this case, wine) was a stated company value (see Chapter 5). And variations—inevitable when you don’t have a pour line—are one of five key defects tracked in the Toyota-inspired Ritz view of the world. A companywide understanding of this as a goal, taught at The Ritz-Carlton through the acronym “Mr. Biv” (avoiding Mistakes, Reworks, Breakdowns, Inefficiencies, and Variations in work processes), makes all the difference in instilling the value of a standard among people who otherwise value autonomy. In addition, the elegant etched-lion implementation of the standard, on the “tip of the tongue,” so to speak, let employees uphold the standard without appearing slavish.

In more life-and-death situations, you would think that just hammering in the standards would work: “Don’t mix up the Heparin doses—OR ELSE!” Unfortunately, barring Colonial Williamsburg–style stocks being moved onsite, this works less completely than one would expect.

What does work when you need to enforce standards? Consider my acronym PEPI (pronounced “peppy”):

Purpose: Employees have a clear sense of purpose—and how the standard fits into it.

Enforce intelligently: Keep things visual, train, and reinforce.

Peer pressure: Positive peer pressure is a must.

Input: Employees are able to have a say in the refinements, changes, and even possible future abolition of the standard.

conveying standards—and maintaining autonomy

What’s the secret of conveying standards? Most of all, you need to set your people up to succeed, with the patience and good steering that keeps everyone working toward the same goal. Let me close this chapter with a story that illustrates the adaptability and steady hand that can be required for conveying standards successfully.

Isadore Sharp tells the story of training staff in service standards and how this can be accomplished even when the staff themselves, drawn from the local population and chosen for traits rather than for prior experience, have never experienced such service. Sharp himself only realized how much patience and understanding this can require after he visited an under-resourced island where his company, Four Seasons, had recently built a resort.

I ordered room service. A young lady came in with my order and set it up on the terrace. “Where did you learn to do this?” I asked her. “What job did you have before?”

“Oh, I never worked before,” she told me. “This was my first job, sir.”

“Then how did you learn to do this? There are a lot of items, and everything’s here, placed exactly as it should be.”

“Well, sir, they taught me everything.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “How did they do that?”

“They let me take everything home for me to practice with my family,” she explained.

I began to realize what John [Strauss, the manager in charge of training at this resort] had meant by patience and understanding. He had put in place a training program for people with absolutely no conception of international hotel service; let alone how to achieve it. He had done this through judging, by attitude, whom we should or shouldn’t hire, then patiently helping them understand how and why we did things, and doing this in a way that wouldn’t make them reluctant to go on asking questions until they got it right.9

While allowing employees to take work home with them may not be what’s called for in your situation, creating an environment where asking questions and making mistakes is absolutely encouraged and support is provided by peers, may be exactly what you are looking for.

“and your point is?”

image Your employees need to understand their purpose in your organization and be given the power and encouragement to act autonomously to support that purpose, or you’ll lose customers from your lack of flexibility. Employees hired, oriented, and reinforced properly, surrounded by peers of the same caliber, will thrive when given significant autonomy—and wither otherwise.

image All pay being approximately equal, an employee will sprint to the employer that offers more freedom.

image You want customer relations to be on the shoulders of your employees. But as long as you’re defining every little thing—and rewarding/punishing based on seemingly arbitrary criteria—you won’t get them to carry that responsibility.

image The orientation period is when you can make great strides toward getting the most out of your team. This orientation should be led by the highest possible level in the company (ideally, the CEO) and stress the purpose of every employee, while making it clear an employee will be celebrated for rising to her purpose in the organization. (And won’t be scolded, for example, for being a few short in the number of linens changed because she stopped to help a customer in need.)

image Standards help ensure that every part of your service reflects the best way your company knows how to perform it, a prescription that is then modified to the best of the ability of your autonomously performing employee to suit the needs and wishes, expressed or unexpressed, of the actual customer the employee’s facing. The summary statement for a standard should include the following:

• Why the service is of value (why we’re doing this in the first place)

• The emotional response we’re aiming to have the customer feel

• The expected way to accomplish the service

image When you need to enforce standards, consider my acronym PEPI (pronounced “peppy”):

Purpose

Enforce intelligently

Peer pressure

Input

image Training for standards requires patience and flexibility: setting your employees up to succeed.

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