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The Management Conundrum

16 March, 2020 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Trust or control? Imagine a scenario where your employees keep on changing things.  All in the name of improvement and innovation.  Everybody is spending time making your organisation run that little bit better.  It sounds great, a management nirvana,  until you realise that they are tinkering with processes, messing with procedures and running roughshod over […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: command and control, compliance, Dilbert, human nature, management style, trust

Standards Make Good Servants but Poor Masters

4 November, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

standard work

Standard work I found an interesting post about standardisation in public services.   The post argues that standardisation doesn’t work in the service industry.  Each customer or citizen is different and because each citizen is different they want different things.  So if you standardise everything and then force your staff to follow the standard process […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement, Tools & Techniques Tagged With: andon, best practice, command and control, compliance, conformity, standardisation, work instructions

Cigarettes and Alcohol

10 May, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Prohibition Noun: The act of forbidding something, especially by law In 1919 the US government attempted to reduce levels of alcohol consumption.  They passed legislation that prohibited its production, transportation and sale.  The ban was almost complete, bar a few exceptions for religious and medical use.  During the 1920’s the U.S government spent about $220m […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: compliance, culture, human nature, management style, motivation, political intervention, reinforcing behaviour

Serious Business

27 April, 2013 by James Lawther 8 Comments

Serious Business

I travel to London on the train more regularly than is pleasant At the end of each journey a steward passes through the carriages with a big plastic bag, collecting the rubbish.  They never look too enamored with their job. This morning the steward entered the carriage and announced with a flourish: Any rubbish Laptops iPads Mobile […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: compliance, conformity, East Midlands Trains

Payback Time

20 April, 2013 by James Lawther 6 Comments

revenge

Maz Iqbal told me a great story this week…. Imagine you were an employee of a large business.  You worked in a factory, or a shop, or a warehouse or maybe you were an agent in a call centre. A big call centre where they measured your every move: how long your calls were how long […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: average handle time, call centre, compliance, employee performance measures, monitoring, motivation, targets

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