In a blog post I recently read, the writer said that in America, when someone says “our policy is…”, the policy is stated and adhered to but in his country, “not so much”. He went on to say that the cultural signals are different between the two countries.

The writer goes on to suggest that in his homeland, they seem to operate on the premise that if most people are told, “We can’t do that…it’s against our policy”, they will not question the assertion and will just walk away. But, if you argue forcefully and with conviction, they will comply. In America, you don’t have to argue - they do what they say.

I’m happy he’s satisfied with the way things are here. I would argue, though, based on my many and varied experiences, that policy as written and policy as executed are two distinct branches on the same tree here, there, and everywhere else. And the wrong branch is dying.

I’ll give you an example: I once did business with a certain purveyor of wireless products and services before I became an employee. Once I became an employee, I naturally enjoyed a sizeable discount on everything wireless.  The service wasn’t that great but for the price, I felt I could bear some pain. A few years down the road, the company ”rightsized” and I became an ex-employee.

The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.
Socrates

At the end of my wireless contract, I looked at what the now ex-employer wanted to charge me for its goods and services (retail prices had gone up quite a bit).  I asked at a local office if my being a steady-paying customer for over eight years counted for something. What would they do to keep a good customer?

They said they were powerless to do anything - it was driven “by corporate”. I asked them to check with A/R and even offered to get my credit report to show I was a customer worth hanging onto. They wouldn’t deal, though.

I decided to take it to the corporate office. Sure enough, they were as indifferent to my “plight” as the local office. They said, ”If we do it for you, we have to do it for everybody.”

Their stated policy is to “give customers exceptional service” but what their actions say is “…as long as it doesn’t cost us up front.”  Their implicit policy is to treat customer service (or customer satisfaction) as a necessary evil.

The time-honored maxim — that it’s cheaper to keep customers than it is to replace them — seems to have lost its meaning. Perhaps, too, the concept of “cost control” has become the top priority…to the exclusion of everything else.

What do you think? More importantly, what do you tell your customers, and what do you do?

We’re conducting a poll on LinkedIn, asking users what their company’s acceptable use policy is with respect to “Twitter”. Does your company:

• Encourage you to use Twitter?
• Tolerate it?
• Discourage its use?
• Forbid you to use it?

If respondents aren’t familiar with the phenomenon and/or they don’t care, they can click on “What’s ’Twitter’?” The results in this highly unscientific poll, to date, are:

• 50% - Encourage its use
• 19% - Tolerate it
• 26% - Forbid it

Three percent responded “What’s Twitter?”  Looks like two-thirds of this sample is already there or is close to getting there.   On the other hand, if we assign a value to each response, like so:

• Encourage = +2
• Tolerate = +1
• Twitter? = 0
• Discourage = -1
• Forbid = -2

The result is between zero and one, which gives us the impression that while this group of companies is aware of Twitter, they’re not ready to make a commitment, either.  They’re a little “lukewarm”.

As I said, this isn’t a scientific poll. LinkedIn doesn’t allow us to gather demographics, so we don’t know if the sample is all B2B, if the respondents are top management or rank-and-file, etc. Still, a dirty window is better than no window at all, isn’t it?

So, what about your company? Are you using Twitter? Do you have a company policy on the use of Twitter? Is Twitter better suited to B2C than B2B?  Take our poll and let us know where you stand.

Thank you.

As I mentioned in another recent post, I’ve begun using the “Polls” feature of LinkedIn to gather data, however unscientifically done, that might tell me what’s going on in the minds of the Websphere’s inhabitants. It seems people love to take polls, especially when their commitment is minimal. They not only get to express an opinion (sort of), but they also get to compare themselves with other “pollees” (looked up that last word — Merriam-Webster’s OK with it).

Many of us participate in opinion polls routinely. Polls give us validation, as well as a sense of belonging. We vote online for everything from “Who’s the most popular talk-show host?” to “What was the worst outfit at the Golden Globes?” to whether news sites should charge for their online content.

Companies shape their actions and their policies, in part, on what people say. If we’re good, we understand what our customers are saying and act accordingly; if we’re not, we come up with “new Coke”.

At Bizmanualz, we want to know your opinions. We want to know how you feel about certain issues such as policies and procedures, process improvement, lean thinking, quality, and tools and techniques associated with those concepts. My first LinkedIn question is “What’s Your Company’s ‘Acceptable Use Policy’ with respect to Twitter?

Another question I just posted is “What’s the PRIMARY Goal of Your Social Media Program?” Even if you don’t have a social media program, take the poll (we have a “don’t have one” response). Then, please come back to Bizmanualz and comment further on the question, the poll results, or about something in the realm of policies and procedures, quality, etc., that concerns you. Create your own poll on LinkedIn and share the link with us, or ask us a question and we’ll see about creating a poll for the community.

Thank you so much for your participation.  As always, best of luck.

Last November, Lifehacker released results of a poll it conducted. They simply asked visitors, “Do you use Twitter?” The results were:

• Yes, regularly - am a big fan (26%)
• Occasionally (20%)
• Yes, but only for search (5%)
• Never - don’t care for (47%)

Another 3% said “other”.  Lifehacker didn’t ask about Twitter policies, though. Seeing (anecdotally) that social media policies appear to be on the increase,* I constructed my own unscientific poll on LinkedIn. I asked my “connections” (a small sample) if their companies’ policy is to:

• Encourage its use? (50%)
• Tolerate it? (18%)
• Discourage it? (0%)
• Forbid it? (27%), or
• What’s Twitter? (4%)

What’s missing, obviously, are demographics — age, gender, respondent’s job, size of the company, whether they’re B2B or B2C, etc. — and methodology. In other words, the poll would never stand up to scrutiny. Nevertheless, there’s some value there. I know what my next step is — that’s asking you, the reader, if you think an acceptable use policy for Twitter — and other social media — is needed at your workplace.

A lot of companies jumped all at once on the “Twitter train” without stopping to consider, “Is there a point to all this? Or are we just reacting?” They jumped in without putting together a plan. They were thinking (I’m guessing) that they had to get “out there” and build Twitter following because their competitors surely were, or they must be very, very close. They didn’t want to be thought of as followers, or technological laggards.

They didn’t know what results to expect, yet they were quickly disenchanted when they didn’t achieve these unspecified results. (It’s all over the Internet what they wanted — a business model, aka, money, cash flow, ROI.)

So, what should they have done (or, what to do now that it appears they’ve overcommitted)?

First, understand Twitter. Do some research on the topic. Find out all the costs (opportunity cost, maintenance cost, etc.). Assess the risks. In fact, do a whole SWOT analysis. “Social media ROI” comes in many forms. Companies often make the mistake of thinking ROI can take one form ONLY — short-term monetary gain.

Find out which entities have been most (un)successful at Twitter, and learn from them. Your goal is to determine if there’s a way to make Twitter work for your company, or if you should avoid it.

Second, assuming you’re going ahead with Twitter, lay out your objectives. Arbitrary though they might be, set a goal. A realistic goal…a stretch goal. You need something…a baseline, a hurdle…against which to gauge your success. Eventually, you gain experience and you adjust your goals.

Third, formulate your acceptable use policy (AUP) for Twitter around those goals. Policy can help — or hurt the success of your venture. There are plenty of Twitter policies online — borrow them, if you need to.  Be careful not to duplicate them — their situations are not the same as yours.

Make sure your policy is clear. Establish roles and responsibilities — who should be using Twitter, and under what circumstances. Let your users know what is and isn’t permissible. Let them know what the penalties are for one-time, multiple, minor, and major policy violations.

Fourth, revisit the policy periodically, or when special circumstances warrant. A policy written in stone isn’t a good policy.

And if you sense you jumped into the Twitter pool headfirst without checking the water’s depth? Well, you know better now, I hope. (If you decide to drop Twitter, you won’t be the first. Or the last.)

So, is it time for your organization to establish a social media policy?

* Some of the anecdotal evidence:

• ESPN Responds to Criticism, Publishes Social Media Policy (http://mashable.com/2009/08/04/espn-social-media/)
• Post Editor Ends Tweets, New Guidelines Issued (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ombudsman-blog/2009/09/post_editor_ends_tweets_as_new.html)
• NFL Issues New Twitter Policy (http://views.washingtonpost.com/theleague/nflnewsfeed/2009/08/league-issues-new-twitter-policy.html)

On January 7, 2010, Timothy Hendron, 51, a longtime employee of ABB’s north St. Louis, Missouri, plant, reportedly took the lives of three coworkers, wounded five others, and took his own life.  This is just one of the latest incidents of worker-on-worker violence that have been on the increase in the last several decades.

In retrospect, of course, it is always clear that “the signs were there”. The individual was under a lot of stress…he was disaffected, alienated, a guy who kept to himself…bills were mounting…he had an unusual interest in weapons…and on, and on. Not everyone fits “the profile”, but most are close enough that we invariably ask “Why didn’t they (we) see it coming?”, or “Why didn’t somebody do something about it before it got to that point?”

Unfortunately, there is no “one size fits all” answer — the answers are as varied and as complex as humanity itself. Recognizing, though, that workplace violence is the ultimate antisocial act against social animals, there are things we can do to and for one another to minimize the risk, among them:

• Showing respect for one another;
• Getting to know coworkers;
• Being better communicators (which means being much better listeners);
• Taking an interest in coworkers outside the workplace;
• At least occasionally, putting coworkers’ interests ahead of our own;
• Watching out for one another;
• Not thinking “someone else can take care of it” or “it’s not my job”;
• Becoming more aware of and responsive to coworkers’ needs, stated and unstated;
• Knowing coworkers well enough that you know what their “normal” is; and
• Having the courage and compassion to help when their “normal” isn’t there.

Does your company have a workplace anti-violence policy? Better yet, do you have a personal policy regarding the prevention of violence in the workplace?

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
(Lao Tzu)

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

For good or bad, it’s the policies we make that drive our actions.  Our policies reflect our goals and priorities.  They drive our behavior, our processes, and our procedures.

Our business procedures are dependent on policy and without good company policy, our procedures do not provide value.  Bad policy cannot be corrected by procedures, no matter how well the procedures are written.  Here’s an example of bad policy…

The Glass-Steagall Act (aka, the Banking Act of 1933 - USA) was enacted in response to the massive failure of commercial banks in the early thirties.  Commercial and investment banking, among others, were separated in an attempt to minimize risk.

This risk-averse policy appeared to work for the economy in general, though it didn’t work for large investors and institutions that wanted to “compete with overseas institutions that (were)n’t hamstrung by archaic laws”.  Totally ignoring the issue of increased risk, banking and investment moguls pushed for a law like Gramm-Leach-Bliley…and they got it.

They (Citibank, Bear Stearns, etc.) managed to undo Depression-era restrictions on consolidating and diversifying, and they grew dozens of times over.  That is, until their hubris caught up with them and the “Great Recession” exploded onto the economic scene.  Derivatives processes — they failed in part because they were overly complex; they also failed because of the economic policies that allowed them to exist.

So what’s old is new again.  Members of the U.S. House and Senate are pushing for reenactment of Glass-Steagall, believing — perhaps rightly — that we all paid the price for this ill-advised change in banking and investment policy and we have to correct it.  And, who of sound mind can blame them?

Another possible example of bad policy: There was a story just this week of H&M and Wal-Mart stores, located on the isle of Manhattan, not merely tossing out unsold clothing but destroying it, making sure it could never be used or sold.  In this economy — and in the middle of winter, no less — a reasonable person has to wonder why that clothing wasn’t given intact to any of dozens of charitable organizations.

Granted, the parent corporation in each case probably doesn’t have a policy of “if we can’t sell it, we’re destroying it”.  I also hope no store manager would be so stupid as to have a procedure, formal or otherwise, for destroying unsold merchandise.

However, one has to wonder, “Did one employee ‘go rogue’ on the company? Or were employees told to ’destroy this stuff and get rid of it’?”  Just because it’s not written doesn’t mean it’s not policy.  Or, maybe they’ve had a policy of not putting unsold clothing out where someone could sell it (and for nothing but profit) and somebody just took that policy and ran with it.

I know what some of you must be thinking: “Well, I don’t run my business like that.  Besides, we’re much smaller than they are, and we have everything under control.”

Consider this, though. You’re in business to make money, and naturally you want to grow your business.  What policies do you have that enable you to do that?

Now, consider that in this hyper-competitive business environment — made all the more cutthroat by the global recession — a company might find itself bending its policies.  Oh, maybe just a little, at first.  Then, maybe a little more.

How far would you be willing to bend?  Which of your policies might have bent already under the strain of the recession?  (Your policy on wages? Your quality policy?  Others?)  Are these policies likely to bend back when the economy improves?

You’ve heard my opinion.  Now let’s hear yours.

******

By the way, here are some excellent articles on this topic:

• “The AIG Fiasco Keeps Getting Worse“, Fortune online, 7 Jan 2010
• “U.S. Senators Propose Reinstating Glass-Steagall Act“, Bloomberg online, 16 Dec 2009
• “The Curse of Policy-Based Evidence“, Science & Development Network, 13 Aug 2009

First, what is a policy?  Well, in an article we recently ran, we established that a policy and procedure are two distinct entities. According to the dictionary, policy is a “definite course or method of action selected from alternatives and in light of given conditions to guide and determine present and future decisions”.

Organizations typically have high- and low-level policies.  High-level policies govern the entire company in most or all circumstances. They are somewhat generalized and often articulate soft goals.  They speak of company desires, needs, and aspirations.  High-level policy doesn’t readily lend itself to procedures; instead, it takes the form of a standard, or a guideline.

Low-level policy deals with a more specific set of circumstances. Low-level policy is the kind that usually leads to procedures. An example of a low-level policy that everyone’s familiar with has to do with attendance; employees are expected to come to the office to carry out their duties during “normal working hours”.

Because the world around us is continually changing, our policies - especially the high-level policies - have to be reviewed and reshaped occasionally.  We do this by implementing “the policy cycle”.  The policy cycle consists of:

• Setting the policy agenda;
• Writing policy;
• Implementing policy;
• Enforcing it;
• Reviewing the policy; and
• Updating policy.

Setting the Policy Agenda

Your organization has limited resources - time, money, people, etc.  Whatever your company’s intent, whatever its objectives and strategy, you can only do so much.  Your policy agenda is a concession to the scarcity of resources.  What resources you have, you manage well and you prioritize.

The smaller the organization, the easier it is to set a policy agenda, generally.  It’s with large organizations that we see more intense competition to politicize an agenda - to get preferred items on the agenda because they serve localized interests, which are easier to understand and deal with, rather than those of the entire company.

Writing Policy

A policy has to be easy to understand and implement. Policy statements have to be written clearly, concisely, and directly.  Policies should not be open to interpretation, though this isn’t always possible, especially with high-level policies.  In that case, the company must identify policy experts who will be readily available to interpret policy and resolve differences.

Policy writing has to be an iterative process.  Policy drafts should be reviewed by a representative sample of the group or groups who will be responsible for implementing the policy on a daily basis.

Implementing Policy

People have to know that a policy exists if they’re to be held accountable for it.  Not only do they need to be aware of it - they should also know why the policy exists.  People generally view policies as restrictions and unless it’s clear where and why the policy originated - that there’s a valid reason for it and that the organization benefits - compliance will be a problem.

Policies have to be communicated effectively and there needs to be a suitable introductory period to ensure compliance. People should have plenty of advance notice - give them time to learn the policy, discuss it with others, understand it, and submit their comments.  When people feel like they’ve had a say in policy, they’re more likely to comply.

Enforcing Policy

Given that policies are often developed in response to problems, how do you make sure the problem doesn’t recur?  Well, you try not to do what a lot of governmental bodies often do - you don’t make policy that’s unenforceable.  The U.S. Congress has been doing this for years with respect to food safety, writing more laws for the FDA to enforce while hampering its ability to conduct inspections by slashing its budget.

Policy has to be clear on what constitutes compliance and what happens in the event of noncompliance.  There has to be a clear responsibility for ensuring compliance and imposing penalties.

Reviewing and Updating Policy

Policies are often changed only because a noticeable event or trend occurred which forced the organization to respond.  A notable example of that is the proliferation of smartphones; so many individuals have purchased smartphones and incorporated them into their daily routines so quickly that the company can’t keep up.

The majority of company policies, once written and implemented, are rarely looked at again.  Yet, all policies have to be reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that they reflect the business realities of the moment.  A good example of that is some automakers’ infatuation with the SUV, based on a policy of maximizing profit rather than giving customers what they need.  Even if $140 barrels of oil and the decline in SUV sales weren’t a strong enough signal to them, the automakers should have been reevaluating their policy periodically with an eye to updating it.  Their hundred-year-plus histories should have told them - you either change or you have change forced on you.

What about your organization?  When was the last time you reviewed any of your policies? Do you follow a policy cycle?