Owen Smith, our man at BHS is on a healthy diet! (Ed.)
I have received a salutary lesson in the value of recruitment being the fundamental driver to business success. Opposite Marylebone Station there is a small café/sandwich bar where yesterday I bought my lunch for the first (but not the last) time. The service and attitude of the staff was exemplary, and I felt welcomed and valued. But I bet their training budget is zero and they have no bells-and-whistles Customer Service Programme. It made me think about the money spent by larger businesses on these sorts of programmes and how this is like pushing water uphill if you don’t have the right attitude and culture to start with. Indeed, these programmes could be largely redundant if the right people and culture are in place to start with! I came up with the acronym RATS – Recruit Attitude, Train Skill – as it made me smile to think that the RATS in this café are actually fundamental to its success!
So if you’re ever hungry in Marylebone they do much more than eggsbaconchipsandbeans – the sandwiches are great too!
Agree with you entirely Owen.
I’ve been saying the same thing for years and I love your acronym!
I wrote about this on my Simplicity Blog many times – most recently back in May. It gets right up my nose that we still don’t ‘get it’ in most organisations.
Here is what I said in May http://simplicityitk.blogspot.com/2010/05/do-you-really-trust-your-employees.html
One of the problems in big business is that they often create processes and procedures that reward people for doing the wrong thing and penalise them for doing the right thing.
So despite having the right attitude to start with and the skills required to do the job there is often ‘performance prevention’ in the organisation which means people leave their skills and positive attitude at the door when they come to work.
Lack of authority to in the hands of customer-facing staff is perhaps one of the most pervasive issues today.
I have been enormously lucky in that for much of my working life I worked in an organisation and for people that didn’t want to know what I was doing or where I was doing it. I have to say that was a departmental policy not necessarily one the whole company embraced. But it bred a team of ‘special people’, or at least that was the outside view. I recall one very senior manager who moved into our department being completely astonished to find we were ordinary mortals once he got to know us.
Going back a few years I recruited a guy who had virtually no qualifications. But he was ‘up for it’ and indeed proved to be a very smart operator. I recruited another guy who had a couple of degrees but did pretty much ask permission to go to the toilet. It took quite a while to persuade him that I really didn’t want to know what he was doing or where he was going.
The point was that we often needed people to go the extra mile and you need give and take, not just take from employees. I am in total agreement with RATS.
“Lack of authority to in the hands of customer-facing staff is perhaps one of the most pervasive issues today.”
Great comment Andy. Though all managers may want it there is no such state as ‘half trust’ – we either trust our people or we don’t. I sign up to this wonderful quote:
“The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.” Henry Stimson – US Secretary of War World War Two
‘Half trust’ is like saying someone is half pregnant
I changed my mobile recently. The guy in the Vodafone shop was really helpful. But he wasn’t allowed to make any deals. That could only be done by the call centre. I think he was as frustrated as I was.
Mind you, there is a risk associated with trusting people. I recall one car dealership where they suddenly found that all the new cars delivered to them were blue. They had a compound full of them. They had made the mistake of assuming that a young employee could handle the ordering system. It might have been OK if she hadn’t just ordered cars in her favourite colour! Perhaps a bit more training would have avoided the problem.
On the other hand it could have been an opportuntity to have a “Blue Car Sales Wekeend” – In every mistake there is an opportunity