Q: My staff seem to get sloppy in accounts. They end up making elementary errors. How do I prevent this?
One of my favourite cartoons from around thirty years ago shows a comb on its back with its teeth in the air. A flea is running joyfully along bouncing from one tooth to the next. It says, “Life is easy when you know how!” Ahead there are several teeth missing.
Running a workplace brings the cartoon to mind every day. No matter what you do, the second law of thermodynamics trips into action. This, you will remember from a recent blog, if not from your physics’ text books, suggests that everything is going to break down eventually. Whether it is cleaning and tidying your room or asking for the accounts from a clerk, there will be a progression from order to disorder and even chaos. I suppose it mirrors life as we know it, Captain. My own existence seems to be pretty entropic in that there are bits and pieces of me breaking down slowly, including memory. But it’s important that the clerk gets the figures right, so what do you do?
All workers, when faced with humdrum repetition, begin to commit mistakes. Even airline pilots. The skill for the MD of a company is to reduce repetition and increase challenge for all staff. Challenge here is made up of variety. Different kinds of work at different times of the day. Different workers cross checking the clerk’s figures. Physical activity to compensate for hours in front of the monitor. There is nothing worse than predictability for the mind. The synapses become fixed and the person retreats into a fantasy world to escape, losing touch with the reality of his or her daily tasks as s/he, like the flea, begins to take the job for granted.
So, ensure that a worker knows what is his or her core work – the work that is essential to the company’s smooth operation - and then seek to embroider it with unlike activity. Stimulate the left and right brain, the physical and the mental, the emotional and the rational. Everyone should have a mix of business as usual and project work. That’s how staff and company flourish.
Not to do it is a form of abuse...
Q: I am thinking of using a credit card protection company to handle our fraud controls. What could be the consequences?
Prejudice with no Pride
I think the best way of illustrating the problem is the following little case study. I suffered at the hands of racial prejudice today. Not the obvious kind but the pervasive institutional kind. I’ll tell the tale as quickly and succinctly as I can.
My elder son is in Japan. He takes size 12 shoes. You can’t get them in Hiroshima. I ordered them from a company called Walktall. My billing address is in London. They took my money for two pairs of shoes. Later, their credit card detectives said that because the order came from West Africa (Ghana) someone may have stolen my credit card. Customer Care said that this thief could be trying out the card to see if it worked and would then move on to bigger things. Hm two pairs of big shoes for someone in Japan. The mind boggles. I never realised that thieves took such surreal and longwinded routes to achieve their ends.
What is at stake here is something rather significant. Knowing the business world as I do, I am often confronted by businesses hiring companies to work as contractors. They bring in these specialists and hand over responsibility and accountability to them. It never occurs to the business owners that their entire customer relations are hinged upon the behaviour of these contractors. Thus it is, in this case, that the contractor’s credit checks include orders from Ghana, which to most WASPS means ‘err...somewhere in Africa’. There was no attempt to cross-check the contractor’s rescinding of the order by Walktall. In fact, the supervisor I talked to was as assertively blind to the whole question of cultural insensitivity as 19th Century missionaries wandering around the dark heart of the Congo to bring God to people who, they believed, had no souls.
“We are protecting our customers” she kept on averring, oblivious to the fact that this one disgruntled customer then becomes a catalyst for dozens more to walk away from the site at Walktall. She had no skill in placating me but preferred to accuse me, implicitly, of ignorance of credit safeguards and a nuisance.
So my son has got no shoes. Walktall is diminished to Walksmall and I am more aware of the incipient problems people from Africa face when they try to improve their countries’ economies.- via their dealings with the west.