With the homecare we see that a larger appeal is made on the employee’s professionalism because he now has to steer his own processes and gets more responsibility. In the education pilot, the challenge of the tutor’s professionalism has increased because he has to work from the questions of the students and not from his own lesson preparation:
how can I react in the best way to the questions of the student, what do I have on offer, at what am I good? Certainly when the student will also be able to choose the tutor (or the minor from another institution), it will have to clearly visible where the tutor can offer an additional value.
Essential is a clear concept of the method of working, accepted by everyone:
what space do we offer to each other, what can and can’t we expect from each other and how do we justify ourselves?
In the pilot in the HBO we see that this concept still has to grow, whereas in the homecare all participants very deliberately worked on it.
We also see in both cases that demand driven processes do not automatically succeed but have to be learnt. The participants: customers, students, professionals and management, have to opt for it and have to be able to implement it.
The IT infrastructure is here merely a condition. The people make the difference.
Culture
‘organizations do not change, people change’
Intermezzo III: Agenda Dictatorship and Sign Management
Frans van der Reep
You enter the supermarket during your evening-off and again you cannot find the sugar.
How do you feel then? You are fed up but so is the staff of the supermarket. The super-market assistants do not only have to tell the customer but also each other where the sugar is this week and you have to spend more time on your shopping. The supermarket sees the costs rise (more staff) and the sales fall (customers stay away). What to do.
A large sign at the entrance? For a single article, such a sign is no problem. If it is about more articles, then you drive the customers away from the shop. The sign-solution has another consequence for the shop. It becomes necessary to appoint a sign manager.
Someone who is not there to sell stuff to customers and, cynical but true, has an interest in many signs. Because the sugar is moved to another location time after time, the shop staff will often have to consult with the sign manager as well about where the sugar is put this week. In short: full agendas, communication problems and especially many misunderstandings.
The good thing is, that the customers and the staff of supermarkets and many other companies try to achieve the best result, with a lot of devotion and expertise (that sometimes goes very far). The challenge for improvement is that often we keep ourselves busy tremendously and that obviously companies grant us that room.
The tragedy is, to stick to the picture of the supermarket, that some colleagues are so eager to sell that sugar to the customer, that they start a little sugarshop inside the supermarket. Great initiative but this does make running a supermarket even harder.
In the end we hold each other in that vicious circle with (too) high costs, (too) much overhead and (too) little customer-satisfaction.
The vicious circle outlined above is not solved by only changing the organization structure or by once again describing or improving the processes. That will have the effect of: “We don’t do anything wrong... but oh, that structure”. Or some other excuse:
“the Approach”. Or the ultimate alibi, “the Culture”.
And as regards “the culture”: in our opinion there is only one way to change that and that is to change your own behaviour. How did we put it again: If you want to change the world, start with yourself. It is free, you can start it today and you don’t need anyone else. Of course there will always be possibilities to better organize any company.
All that organizing produces overflowing agendas. Please let’s not think that by organizing, the job will be done.
Why do we all have such overflowing agendas? Why do we let that happen. Why do we trudge from meeting to meeting and do not get any further than “sign management”.
Are full agendas a sign that we are needed in the company? Conversely, do empty agendas disquiet us? An entrepreneur who wants to anticipate rapidly and adroitly to new opportunities, rules himself out beforehand by being fully booked for the next three weeks. Independent of the organization structure or approach, we should lift ourselves beyond that very human insecurity and rely on our own strength: self-reliance as a key to cooperation and making speed.
If each of us has the guts to take that step, the full agendas will disappear and we will release a load of energy to face the future of ourselves and our business with trust.
Then we will also create the conditions for real cooperation, which is something else than sitting together in a meeting-room time after time. Then we will really dare to make ourselves independent from each other, really dare to team and to take the step from words to actions.
If we take that step, our companies will become more flexible and adroit because we ourselves have become flexible and adroit, our performance towards customers will be better, our processes cheaper and our jobs (even) more fun!
8 Chain-reversal in your organization, From Schedule-push to Reality-pull
86Frans van der Reep