Fortune Magazine ranks NetApp as the number 1 best company to work for in 2009 and asks the question, “What makes it so great?” The partial answer: Employee enthusiasm for the legendary egalitarian culture helped catapult NetApp to No. 1 after six years on our list. Typical of its down-to-earth management ethos, NetApp early on ditched a travel policy a dozen pages long in favor of this maxim: “We are a frugal company. But don’t show up dog-tired to save a few bucks. Use your common sense.” Rather than business plans, many units write “future histories,” imagining where their business will be a year or two out.
One dozen pages on travel policy alone tossed out and replaced by three sentences that include the radical concept of ‘common sense’! As a business consultant who is passionate about common sense business practices, policies and processes I’m considering some travel of my own to Sunnyvale, California to meet with NetApp and see their common sense in action.
Common sense seems to be in short supply. Most companies are focused more on rules than results. Take the case of a leading global financial services firm that has a local office staffed with 80 underwriters in their home loan division. Currently each of those 80 underwriters has between 150 and 240 mortgages in their queue each morning. To put this in perspective, the most highly skilled and experienced underwriter can ‘decision’ (AKA approve/decline) 8 to 10 loans per day. Day in, day out, week after week, this group comes to work knowing they can barely make a dent in the ever growing backlog.
This is obviously a challenge for the company and its employees – but there’s more. New underwriting guidelines have been flowing into the system all year long. This impacts not only the underwriters but the processors who prepare the mortgage packages and the originators. The company has also initiated mandatory training and a new quality initiative as well as rolling out a new (and de-motivating) incentive plan for the underwriters. New rules were put in place that severely restricted overtime and the ability to take work home as well. At the same time the stress is building, the company froze salaries at the beginning of the year and those who questioned it were told to ‘just be glad you’ve got a job’!
The company wants results but is focused on rules. This is typical fear based reactionary management – instead of relaxing your grip you hold on tighter. You put more rules in place trying to control the situation. When people feel overwhelmed, out of control or threatened they forget the first rule in all emergencies – stop, take a deep breath. The answers are all there but you can’t see them when you’ve got a death grip on ‘the rules’.
Within every crisis lie the seeds of opportunity and most people only become aware of that opportunity when their backs are against the wall. Fear is actually a great motivator – you must creatively adapt to survive. When this company can step back and get some perspective – and I can recommend a great business consultant to facilitate that shift – they’ll find they are surrounded by opportunities. The answers are right in front of them – they just can’t see them for the fear – and another rule is not one of the answers. It’s time to focus on results from an entirely different perspective.
Shift the perspective to engaging and empowering the staff to collaborate in ‘owning’ the creation of best practices and processes to create a results driven business. Companies hire people for their knowledge, skills, creativity and enthusiasm. If they then put them into an environment that’s counterproductive – siphoning off only the knowledge they want and squelching creativity and slowly eroding enthusiasm by tightening the rules noose, everyone loses. You cannot be an innovative company if you are not innovative in your business practices, processes and policies.
Unless your company makes and sells rules and is profitable at it – it’s time to focus on results. When you start focusing on results and incorporate common sense, you are on a winning and profitable path.
Over the years BPM has become solely focused on IT solutions – mechanizing every task – and has forgotten the intrinsic value of human connections. The heart of a business is the communications, connections and interactions between people – management, employees and customers. No IT solution can replace good communication or replicate the nuance of employees and/or customers interacting with each other that results in creative solutions to better meet the needs of the business, employees and customers. When these human connections are open and flowing, good business practices and processes are defined and implemented within an environment that allows for dynamic change by engaged and empowered people.
I wholeheartedly support good IT solutions. They are essential to good business – but they aren’t the heart of the business. The development and creation of great IT solutions for your business is another area where current BPM often forgets the human connection. If your employees (and often customers) are going to be the users of these solutions and these solutions are meant to make your company more productive and profitable, one would think you would include the people who actually do the work as a critical element of the development phases. The biggest cause of failure for new IT solutions is the failure to involve the user in the process.
BPM, at its best, recognizes this is a balancing act – good IT solutions aren’t going to solve the problems created by poor communication and the resulting organizational stagnation – and you can’t develop a great IT solution without empowered and engaged employees. You start with the basics – a common sense approach to good business practices and process. When you have the basics in place you have created the environment for a vital, productive and profitable company. So, let’s start with a little house cleaning (and that doesn’t mean getting rid of people – that’s the last resort) – it means looking at the day to day business and the processes each person works with to get their job done with a fresh perspective. This is not about flowcharting work flow processes – this is about a willingness to listen to your greatest assets, your employees, and a commitment to make fundamental changes to create innovative solutions that increase efficiency, productivity, morale, customer satisfaction and your bottom line.
Today’s economy demands that you look at your businesses with a fresh perspective and a commitment to rout out inefficiencies, arbitrary rules, counterproductive processes and practices. This economy demands a return to a common sense approach to fixing businesses from the top down and the bottom up. Doing otherwise is a critical failure of will and imagination – a desire to maintain the status quo that creates a culture of stifling the will and imagination of those within your business who hold the keys to the fundamental changes that could move your business to the next level of success.
So where do you start? Management tells you that they’re bringing in a business consultant (collective groan). You’ve been there – sucks time out of your working day and nothing substantial ever changes. But what if that consultant not only listened to what you have to say but went about assuring those changes were made. Feel different now? That’s what I do. I’m a Business Process Management consultant who is passionate about a common sense approach that actually fixes businesses with a focus on people and then process. I believe in radical collaboration to create best practices by empowering and engaging those who are on the front lines and back office with a commitment from management to assure those solutions are implemented.
In the coming weeks I’ll continue to share my thoughts on my vision of BPM and I’ll be starting a series of short case studies – what does your business look like from your customer’s perspective? Most people think of process issues as very dry, boring, tedious stuff – flowcharts and spreadsheets and binders filled with charts. But there’s a very human face on both sides of any process – what does your customer see when you have a process problem? I want to open this up for you to share your experiences as a customer too.
