My apologies to my devoted fans (you know who you are LOL) for being late with this week’s blog. I hope you will forgive me when I explain how this came about (and not want to strangle me!)
We are providing a training course for a large global client. They are running the course in a central European country, with the majority of the delegates coming from that country, but including some from other European countries. Nothing unusual there, but …
In order to provide them with this training, however, we have first to go through their procurement process and become an approved supplier. Again pretty routine and not a problem. Now we need to get a purchase order (PO), because no invoice can be paid without one. Fair enough, even though this requires providing a quote before the PO can be raised. This is where things started to get difficult.
One quote is not sufficient. We must provide a separate quote for each country that has a delegate on the course. Taken somewhat aback by this I queried why they couldn’t just allocate the amounts to the different countries internally (which is what I had always experienced.) I also asked whether this meant that we now had to become an approved supplier in each country? I expressed concern that this would take time which we did not have as we needed the PO before we could place the order for the training materials and have them shipped.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that they had an internal code against which they could recharge the amount, using this still required a separate PO for each country! So, in order to obtain these we had to involve each delegate, get their direct superior to approve their attendance and to raise the purchase requisition. Co-ordinating all this has taken time and, at the end of the day, I still had to prepare a number of separate quotes, get that number of PO’s and then create the corresponding invoices, (all of which apparently have to be paid separately too!) All of this has taken time and, as the vendor, I am the person who has had to rush in order to meet the deadlines so we can ensure the training can go ahead on schedule.
This may all be a simple fact of modern business life, but it typifies the daily frustrations that people have to deal with. While I find the whole experience petty, irritating and a trifle inconvenient, what really troubles me is that it necessitated the delegates and their managers being pulled off other productive work to sort this out. It is only one small example but it is symptomatic of the sort of disruptions and stress that anyone can experience during a working day, complying with procedures and controls. Imagine the multiplier effect on morale and motivation that these can have. Is it any wonder employee engagement is the problem it is?
Of course this is not to say you should dispense with controls entirely. But, if you want engaged employees then you have to minimise red tape and design and implement systems and processes that make their lives easier and not more difficult. This must be a design standard. You do have it as one, don’t you?
Bay is the founder and director of Zealise, a company created to help larger small to large business organisations to properly value their people and thereby inspire them to optimise their self-worth and so engage them that they transform organisational performance and bottom-line results. Bay is also the author of several books, including “Lean Organisations Need FAT People” and “The 7 Deadly Toxins of Employee Engagement.”