Should You Purposefully Annoy Your Employees?

Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan offer an interesting anecdote in today's "How To Be A Better Boss" article in the Wall Street Journal.   Fisman and Sullivan write:

Employees often wish managers were a little more understanding, but people tend to associate the idea of "understanding" with "nice." A little well-directed pain can be a good thing in getting workers to focus on the tasks they might otherwise choose to forget, and to increase overall productivity.  Given that developers often prefer programs to people, Kayak founder Paul English says, making them deal directly with customers' questions drove them nuts. Once they heard the same complaint two or three times, the engineers tended to stop and fix the code. As an added bonus, after taking his turn on customer-service duty, an engineer can pass the phone—along with its grating ring—down the line for someone else to deal with.

What an interesting example!   Of course, the phone calls work for reasons beyond the fact that they annoy the software developers.  The phone calls create a direct line of communication between the developers and the users.  Kayak has removed all the information filtering that often takes place between the users in the marketplace and the developers back at the office.  Moreover, developers get a real sense of what is just a one-off complaint versus a real pattern.   Too often, someone can shrug off a complaint from the sales force as an "isolated incident."  However, in this case, the developers can begin to see that a pattern exists, and that the incident is far from isolated.   Finally, the developers share the pain here.  We don't have a few "problem-solvers" focused on fixing bugs.  We have all the developers addressing bugs.  Everyone is accountable, as opposed to having a small unit that worries about fixing bugs.   The collective accountability goes a long way toward improving quality.  Once everyone knows that they will have to address these calls at some point, it also makes people take extra care to get it right the first time.  

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When Management By Walking Around Fails

Anita Tucker and Sara Singer of Harvard Business School have conducted a fascinating new study about how leaders interact with workers on the front lines.  They examined efforts to improve quality, efficiency, and customer satisfaction in hospitals.   The scholars conducted a field study of 56 work areas from 19 randomly selected hospitals and compared the results to 138 work areas in 48 randomly selected control hospitals. They examined an approach called Leadership WalkRounds™ which they describe as "a program of [senior managers] visiting the organization's front-lines to observe and talk with employees while they do their work."  They found that employee perceptions of performance improvement dropped after implementation of the WalkRounds™-based program. The scholars argue that,

"The study provides a cautionary tale that visits by senior managers to the front-lines of the organization will not necessarily increase staff perceptions of performance improvement.  Failure to meet expectations, once raised, can negatively impact organizational climate. Unless such programs are implemented with authentic motivation to identify and resolve issues, they may yield a negative return on the money invested."

Should we be surprised by the findings?   I'm not so sure.  While I've written about executives who effectively engage the front line workers in their organizations, I've also seen many cases where such efforts are counterproductive.  What goes wrong when executives visit with front-line workers?  Here are a few pitfalls that I have seen:

1.   Sometimes, employees perceive the visit as an "inspection" rather than a genuine effort to solicit input and ideas from workers.

2.  Workers perceive that managers have already made up their mind on certain issues, and therefore, that the executives are not genuinely listening and considering their views.   In other words, workers conclude that they aren't being given a legitimate opportunity to influence decisions.  

3.  Senior managers spend too much time talking and not enough time listening.  They focus on communicating messages to the front lines, rather than soliciting feedback.  

4.  Workers change their behavior because of the presence of senior managers. Therefore, managers do not get a sense of what's really going on in the organization. 

5.  Executives fail to follow up in a timely manner on employee ideas or questions.  

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How Analytics Can Help You Improve Quality and Reduce Costs

I found a terrific example of the use of "Big Data" in Fast Company magazine this month.   The article by Farhad Manjoo describes a situation at Washington Hospital Center.   ER doctors became concerned that many patients returned to the hospital just a short time after being discharged.  A computer scientist at Microsoft Research began to investigate.  He wanted to identify some triggers that would predict whether a patient would be readmitted.  Specifically, he was looking to help doctors identify some predictors that might not otherwise receive much attention by ER physicians and nurses.  He analyzed more than 300,000 ER visits.    Among other things, he discovered that the length of a patient's stay in ER tended to be a good predictor of readmission.  If a patient stayed in the ER for more than 14 hours, they were likely to return to the hospital within a few weeks.  Similarly, if the patient's chart mentioned the word "fluid" at some point, that seemed to predict readmission quite well too.  

This story illustrates how companies can use analytics to help them understand how to improve the quality of customer service, as well as to reduce costs.  Take an automobile dealer.   They conduct repair and maintenance on thousands of cars per year.  A fair number of those cars return shortly after a repair or maintenance appointment, because something is not working correctly or hasn't been done to the customer's satisfaction.   An automobile dealer could analyze the data from thousands of those cases, and it could try to identify the predictors of return visits.  If they could identify a few solid predictors, then they could try to intervene to reduce those return visits.  Those interventions could improve quality and customer satisfaction, while reduce costs (since every return visit is costly).   Many service businesses could apply a similar logic and use analytics to achieve positive results.   Can your company benefit from such an approach?  

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