Keep off the Grass...Please

Thinking about the best way to get your process followed…and in the way you want

Image by Lockie from Pixabay

Key thoughts on this topic

· We often want staff and customers to take a specific route through a system or process but find that it either isn’t possible or isn’t practical to lock the process down.

· Reporting processes to find staff who are not following the desired process cost money and effort to put in place and maintain, as does any follow up such as applying disciplinary procedures in the worst cases.

· There are other ways to drive process compliance that may generate better results at a lower cost.

Summary

We often want staff and customers to take a specific route through a system or process but find that it either isn’t possible or practical to lock the process down. Sometimes there will be exceptions or other routes which do need to be followed so we need to allow for a wider selection of possible journeys. When we do this, we then find that these other journeys are being used inappropriately, where either they are bad for our business, bad for our customers or both. How do we think about the best way to ensure we’re driving the right outcome?

Cutting the corner

The problem described here is a common one. It applies to many different processes in all industries and can generate real difficulties. Let’s start with a simple business example…

Consider we have a sales process; we could be selling any kind of product in almost industry. We have standard listed prices and sometimes we find it necessary to customise the price for customers and apply a discount to get those larger orders or to provide the necessary service to great repeat clients.

Over time, find that our sales team are applying higher discounts and are doing so more often. This is a real issue for our business as our margins are squeezed at scale.

A likely reaction to this kind of people-driven breakdown in the process is a group-wide memo, a set of new instructions issued to all staff to only issue a discount under certain conditions, new reporting looking at who is offering the biggest discounts and how often and potential disciplinary action against the worst offenders.

All of this is expensive to create and administer and, unfortunately, if we’re to continue to allow the application of a discount and want our sales team to have some level of discretion in applying a discount to close those deals, this is unlikely to be effective. Putting in place hard rules around discounting removes the autonomy and flexibility we’re striving for in our business too and potentially reduces our ability to be agile and capture those deals.

Looking deeper into why our staff are behaving like this and recognising that what they are doing is human nature, can give us a better insight into how to change this behaviour.

Keep off the Grass

Let’s look at another, much more mundane example which I’m going to use as an analogy here.

Consider a walk to work or down to the shops and you arrive at a square, lawned area. If you’re at one corner and you need to get to the opposite corner to continue your journey, going round the lawn may take you 2 minutes and to cut straight across may take a little under a minute and a half.

Under these circumstances, people may be tempted to cut across the corner or, if they’re in a hurry, walk directly across the centre. The more this happens, the more these short-cuts become worn-in and as it is clear that so many others are taking these short-cuts, the more likely it becomes that anyone new arriving at this square will walk all the way around.

Adding a “Keep off the grass” sign will do little to change this behaviour too as will occasionally having someone applying fines for people who cross the grass as there will always be new people who see that the shortcut can be taken.

What we need to recognise is that this is human nature, and we can see that this exact behaviour – taking shortcuts and finding any way of expending less energy in the pursuit of food water (think the advent of farming and fishing with nets for example) would provide a survival edge for early humans and their families so it’s really not all that surprising to find that this successful strategy is so ingrained in us all today. Rolf Dobelli in his book "The Art of Thinking Clearly" cites experiments that show how when people work together on a task, they all put in a little less effort than they would if they were wholly responsible for the outcome showing that if people can put in less effort and get away with it then they will - and this is not a deliberate undertaking, it is subconscious and ingrained.

So, how can we change the behaviour of people who are cutting the corners and making a mess of our lawns?

If we’re prepared to make some adjustments, we can make a great deal of a difference. Consider those corners that are being cut, can we cut them off ourselves? Are they really essential to the lawned area? If not we could put a path over the corners or cut them off entirely, or we could make the lawn a circle.

While I can’t say as I’ve done the experiment personally (please contact me if you know of anyone who has or would like to!), it seems to me that I would be far less likely to cut across a circular lawn than a square one as I’d have to cross a significantly greater amount of lawn to make such a much smaller saving – the ratio changes significantly.

We could even consider actually just putting a path directly across the centre – putting the path where people want to walk?

If that’s not possible, then we could consider making it a greater offence to step onto the grass. A fence would prevent this completely but a low hedge or even just a planted border wide enough to make it awkward to step over would present a psychological barrier that would prevent most people from doing it.

Paths and borders

Taking this "Paths and Borders" method to our IT process then gives us a new way to look at establishing compliance.

Laying a path:

We need to make the standard process that we want to be followed most often, the simplest and easiest way to go for our staff.

To achieve this, it should be the best, fastest and most effective way for them to get the job done for the majority of customers who have standard needs and don’t really need a discount. Stepping off this process to apply a discount should come at a cost to this efficiency so it is done where necessary and only where necessary to gain the deal.

Some things to think about in the execution of this:

· Ensure that forms work seamlessly

· Pull in standard prices, total them up correctly and apply taxes automatically

· Ensure that the process connects seamlessly to the fulfilment centre

· Focus on dealing with any barriers along the way to make this path simple and easy to follow where there are no special requirements.

Planting Borders:

If there still needs to be additional balancing factors, consider adding some planted borders. Put in place some inconveniences which offset the advantages offered by a shortcut so that it is no longer of benefit to simply do this every time regardless of need. Some ways you could introduce barriers:

· An approval process (even if it’s just from another colleague in the same team).

· The need to fill in some details manually now that we can’t rely on the book price.

· A process which requires a further loop back to the customer so accept the quoted price rather than simply putting the order straight through

· A special "apply discount" page in the application which takes an additional 45 seconds to load

While it may feel counter-intuitive to be making a process deliberately harder, remember that the first step is to make the process as simple as possible for the path we want to be followed and that these other routes through the process are those that we’re attempting to discourage except for when it’s truly needed. We should therefore expect that this is where a minority of the traffic will go so the inconveniences here should be encountered far less frequently. Also, remember that these are avoiding the other consequences and should be offset against the costs of having staff fail to follow the correct process or the other costs incurred in trying to force compliance through sanctions. Think of these inconveniences as speedbumps in a residential road that is being used as a cut-through for commuter traffic. While we would rather not need them, if they discourage lots of people speeding down our streets they are well worth putting in place.

Final Thoughts

Remember, that the path and borders strategy here is designed to encourage compliance and will not enforce it absolutely. It is limited to reducing incidences of non-compliance that are not wilful. Where staff are not following a business process because they are gaining out of it, either through incentives or by fraud, these strategies are unlikely to be effective and more direct measures would be required.

First Published 16/07/2021

All views expressed in this article are solely those of the author

© Alex Cowhig 2021