One of the most common questions I am asked by the entrepreneurs I advise is why employees lose their attitude towards quality. It is common for people to start with great enthusiasm to participate in quality, but then the company faces problems to maintain the attitude or to retain working in our organization the personnel who, after showing satisfactory results, by not receiving support from the organization go in search of better job opportunities in other companies.
In the more than 13 years studying service quality, we have perceived that there are penalties suffered by company personnel that inhibit or kill their attitude towards the quality process.
PUNISHMENTS?
During our thousands of talks with employees, we discovered that in many cases, if not almost all, the staff not only felt that their effort for quality was not recognized, but also openly stated that the company was taking actions that inhibited their taste for quality. job; In short, they received nothing good in return and something bad: punishment.
What would you think people who did whatever it takes to benefit a customer and who receive punishment (rather than reward) for doing so will do? I do not guarantee that you will want to do it again, or I cannot guarantee that you will want to continue with the organization for much longer.
I ask you to put yourself in the shoes of your employees in the following cases:
A. They are called to attention for making a concession with the client
Sometimes to satisfy a customer (maximum quality objective) it is necessary to make some compensation or some action outside of procedure. Punishing this will reinforce the idea that the customer is not important, or that the employee cannot make decisions, and their attitude and interest will go down the drain.
B. There are no special considerations
Sometimes satisfying customers requires additional time and effort on the part of a collaborator, and if this effort does not deserve the appropriate concessions from the company, then he will feel that he is experiencing a punishment that drives away his desire to continue acting properly. We can say that there are several modalities:
- They are entitled to a reprimand for being late (even if they leave late), when sometimes recovering a client involves investing them in additional time than normal hours. If an employee has to leave later than normal and by mistake some other occurrence arrives late the next day, he is entitled to a punishment without even noticing his effort from the previous day.
I can give more than a hundred examples, but I will only comment on one. One time in mid-1999, I was advising a small electronic parts marketing company that was eager to improve service to its distributors in the country and Latin America. I still remember that we had only taught the initial courses so we could not achieve much yet.
However, I remember well one day when some big orders came in from South America (a special order that was almost five times the size of an average one) and the customer wanted it urgently, before the end of this week. Several people had to be assigned to meet the important demands of the customer.
Several people volunteered to help fill this order. The next two days they had to leave after 11 at night (their departure time was at 7) in order to meet the client and benefit the company. Two of the ten people who participated in this special request, had the audacity to be late on the third day, perhaps 30 minutes, and the operations manager decided to return them to their homes without pay (and today the bosses say that there are times of entry but not exit…).
The CEO endured the executive's decision, and two people who had participated in making the company make a profit were harmed.
These punishing executives argue that it is a matter of discipline and that someone should not be allowed to get out of it. Of course, these rules are for commoners, because employers, managers and supervisors can do so without receiving any punishment. Needless to say, the staff were never late again, but they were not again interested in serving customers well. Even some collaborators from that occasion are no longer in the company.
Who lost the most? The customer, of course, lost, and so did the company. Not to mention the employee. Of course many executives do this and then complain about the bad attitude of the employee, or that there are no committed employees in our country. Be? The inflexible discipline inhibits the attitude of the personnel that - as I understand it - is what companies are looking for.
- Permissions denied. We also hear a large number of committed employees complaining that the company is not reciprocal with them: despite complying with the regulations, when they require special permission to perform a personal procedure (sign tickets, go to the bank, visit a family member in a hospital, etc.) is not authorized.
Then the employee feels injustice: companies can have special needs, urgencies and requirements, but employees cannot.
In mid-2000 we performed a measurement service for a cleaning services organization (outsourcing) and received a large number of complaints from employees and customers. Customers of this company complained of high staff turnover, which seriously affected the service they received.
For their part, the company directors argued that they could not find committed and professional people, something normal in their industry.
However, in researching with the company's customers and with employees who have not yet left the company, we discovered that the problem was that staff were constantly being punished. During the measurement we discovered that, due to the high turnover of personnel, it was frequent that the remaining personnel were asked to double shifts to fill the empty places; and although they were paid for some extra work, the dissatisfaction of internal customers (employees) appeared when after two, three and even four weeks of doubling shifts almost every day and working on their weekly rest day, they were presented with a personal and family emergency or they needed a permit, but it was flatly denied.
Result: many collaborators did not want to continue doubling shifts or working on their day off - thereby damaging customer service - or they left in search of another job.
If in the end who shows the attitude or changes jobs is the collaborator, then we should be more concerned about knowing what he feels, what he thinks and for what reason he acts in one way or another.
- Time is not paid to the employee. Sometimes employees just want to get back some of the time they invest for the good of the organization. Denying them this (leaving one day early, taking a vacation, etc.) also drives away their enthusiasm.
C. They are not given compensation for expenses incurred
And we are not talking here about overtime pay, but about the fact that leaving at 11pm for the benefit of quality implies having to fork out the cost of a taxi, or staying without dinner one night because of arriving home late, or having to fork out for anything on the street for dinner. Then, the opinion of your collaborator will be that a satisfied customer is a benefit for the organization, but not for him. No one that I know will give the best results if instead of benefiting you it costs you. Would you do it in their place?
D. There are policies and procedures that harm staff and the customer
You will not believe it, but we have observed organizations where policies and procedures - which are supposed to facilitate work and offer quality services -, instead of promoting the effort of the staff, lead them to fall off the cliff.
A company in the pharmaceutical industry, where employees had a canteen service within the company, had a policy for the distribution of staff in the three established meal times, with the idea that demand was balanced.
However, when creating the policy they established a rule that - seeking order and benefit - only caused staff discomfort and in many cases problems for customers: employees were assigned a certain meal time and could not change it almost under any circumstances; Even later, it was regulated that they had only five minutes of tolerance to get to the dining room, and those who did not arrive in that period could no longer enter, and unfortunately they could not even attend at a later time. That is, they would not eat.
If the employees, trying to satisfy customers, were a little late at lunchtime, they would be left hungry.
E. More work, same pay
The punishments mentioned by the surveyed employees are many, but perhaps one of the most frequent is that giving good customer service generated an unwanted punishment: increased workload. It seems common for employees who tend to improve clients to 'fit their teeth', asking for more work than they are supposedly assigned to.
Either because a colleague does not know how to perform a certain task or because he is missing, but in the end a collaborator has to do more than the others, and this does not bring him any benefit: neither in salary (it is a lot to ask, surely) nor in permits nor in special considerations; not even in payment of additional expenses.
We mean when we give someone more work for a specific temporary situation. For example, there are restaurants in which when the cashier is missing, a waiter or floor manager has to carry out that job and his own. Needless to say, it will be difficult for you to fully comply with both, especially if you know that there will be no special retribution. And worst of all, you get called out for neglecting your own activities.
F. More clients to serve, same salary
In some cases, a higher workload is not something temporary, but permanently, on the grounds that one person is the best fit to serve important clients. If someone has a greater workload than their co-workers in the same or similar position, and their pay is the same, then they will feel it as a punishment not as a privilege for their performance.
Sometimes we fall into the mirage of wanting to give good results and abuse staff with skills, they are disappointed and in the end we all lose.
G. A bad supervisor
Sometimes (quite a few, by the way) we punish staff with a new boss instead of helping them to achieve better results, it hinders and demoralizes them in their work to satisfy customers.
There are supervisors who do not consider that clients are important or that the staff are not qualified or, in the last case, who are not good leaders, both because they are not trained for it and because of their idea of what a boss implies. Many talented employees feel punished by bad bosses, and some do not work the same, others look for another job.
CONCLUSIONS
In short: if an employee does not receive a reward for working in favor of quality (bonus, salary, prize, time compensation, etc.), and also has to disburse his money to cover the imponderables and, finally, receives punishments and reprimands, of course he will not have the slightest interest in continuing to show that interest in the future.
What is also true is that many of the punishments mentioned are generated unconsciously by the leader. Do not worry if it has already happened to you, better take care so that it does not happen again: you will no longer have forgiveness.
The enthusiasm for quality must be nurtured in each person so that it is not lost, and it all depends on us as leaders. You decide: we promote quality or we continue to punish it.
