Policies and Procedures – Page 113 – IS Survivor Publishing

The Person-to-Person enterprise (first appeared in InfoWorld)

By: Bob Lewis|In: Leadership|Last Updated: December 4, 2000

In the person-to-person enterprise, smart leaders avoid specific policies whenever possible, stating instead the principles they wish to embed in the corporate culture.

“Person-to-person” is the phrase introduced in my upcoming book, Lewis’s Laws (IDG Books, due on shelves next March), to describe how businesses will operate in the emerging post-process era. It means business success depends on how well individual employees connect with individual customers. A person-to-person business puts employees in the middle and views processes and procedures, information technology, knowledge-sharing systems, along with the telephone and office furniture, as nothing more than resources each employee may use to be more effective.

As for IT standards … the policy-ridden centerpiece of many IT organizations’ relationship with end-users … in the person-to-person enterprise these are defined and managed to make employees’ computing environment better, not more restrictive.

The following story, related by a regular reader, did not come from a person-to-person enterprise:

“My wife manages a help-desk call center. The IT department in her company is responsible for, among other things, maintaining the telephones. During a recent week, the telephones went down six times, for a total of about 7-1/2 hours. This was a very serious problem. My wife had one of her people create a simple Microsoft Access table listing the date, time and duration of each outage and sent it in an email to the IT manager. She asked the IT manager to fill in columns listing the cause of the outage and the corrective action taken in each case.

“When the IT manager received the email, she called her staff together. However, rather than talk about the problems with the telephones, the discussion centered solely on how to stop users from using an application (Microsoft Access) that wasn’t supported by that IT group. The telephone problems were completely ignored.”

Please pay close attention. In the person-to-person enterprise, the proper response to a reported problem is a root-cause analysis, not a shot aimed at the messenger. A crash-prone phone system does not promote employee effectiveness. When the problem persists, end-users have every right to ask what’s being done to fix it.

All is not lost, though, because the same IT department prides itself on monitoring the quality of its (internal) customer service. As evidence, my correspondence offers the following, related by a director within the IT department:

“The IT department sent out an electronic survey to the users within the company asking how the department is doing. When all of the responses were received, the IS department threw out all of the bad responses. Then, to partially offset the obvious bias caused by doing that, they also threw out the “really” good responses. (I’m not sure what criteria they used to define “really” good.)

“Evidently this is the practice that they have been using with this survey for a number of years.

“When the company CEO asked the CIO about the results of the survey, the answer was: ‘We are above average. The results are really the same that they have been for the past few years.'”

In a person-to-person enterprise, the goal of end-user surveys is neither self-congratulation nor self-flagellation. Surveys are a tool for finding opportunities to help employees become more effective.

In the person-to-person enterprise, employee effectiveness is the name of the game.

Employee privacy – buck the trend (first appeared in InfoWorld)

By: Bob Lewis|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated: November 13, 2000

It’s time to vote. It’s a tough choice this year. No, I’m not going to endorse either George “Fratboy” Bush or Al “Cyborg” Gore. This being an IT publication, that wouldn’t be appropriate. Personally, I’m using my Aunt Lila’s logic. Years ago she explained why she was voting for Walter Mondale against Ronald Reagan. “I can’t stand the thought of voting for somebody stupider than me.”

At least we weren’t treated to a dueling dirt campaign. Much to my astonishment, the Gore campaign didn’t try to uncover the specifics of Bush’s youthful indiscretions, nor did the Bush campaign ever accuse Gore of getting high on WD-40 while lubricating his bearings.

Miracle of miracles, everyone seems to have respected both candidates’ privacy.

If only we could extend that respect to the rest of us.

For consumers, the privacy battleground is greasy corporate behavior vs. the BIG/GAS theory (“Business Is Great/Government and Academics are Stupid”). The heavily promoted and highly popular BIG/GAS theory says government regulation is always a bad thing and industry can regulate itself (despite more than a century of evidence to the contrary). Greasy corporate behavior includes stalking technology that surreptitiously follows you around the World Wide Web, privacy “policies” like Amazon.com’s, which, as Ed Foster recently reported, collects data now to be used according to whatever privacy policy Amazon.com happens to publish in the future … and use of the BIG/GAS theory itself to promote self-regulation as a solution, despite ample evidence of business shortsightedness, stupidity … and greasiness.

For employees, the privacy battleground is more nebulous, which may be the reason employees seem to be giving up. Awhile back the Society of Financial Service polled managers and employees on the subject. According to the survey, two-thirds of all companies monitor their employees in some fashion or other, and most employees don’t seem to mind: Only two out of five employees considered even video surveillance a breach of employer ethics.

Once the automated monitoring of e-mails and web usage becomes acceptable employer behavior, we accept the principle of automated surveillance for detecting violation of all company policies and procedures.

Consider the future. Computers will have built-in cameras; we’ll have software that surreptitiously watches employees at their desks. Telephones will include software that surreptitiously records all conversations in an office. And why not? It’s the company’s computer and telephone, not the employee’s.

The source of employer indifference regarding employee privacy rights is fuzzy, but as my upcoming book, Lewis’s Laws, points out, modern business theories dehumanize the workforce, so they’re a likely culprit. The process perspective, for example, treats employees as roles in processes, seeking to move intelligence from employees to the process. Similarly, the knowledge perspective treats companies as collections of knowledge and seeks to move intelligence from employees to knowledge management systems. With employees viewed as process role-holders and replaceable bags o’skills and knowledge, is it any wonder companies see no problem monitoring their behavior, “hoteling” them in shared workspaces, and otherwise failing to acknowledge their natural need for privacy?

Why employees aren’t outraged is a mystery. Regardless, don’t mistake employee docility for evidence that surveillance is a good idea.

The untheoretical reality is that companies succeed and fail more on the quality and motivation of their workforce than on any other factor. The employee anti-privacy policies now prevalent in the American workplace communicate a lack of trust that’s surely as de-motivating as any message an employer can send.