Author Archive

Back in May, Andy Haden made some egregious comments. Earlier this week, he made more egregious comments. This time he went, and voluntarily at that. This was 2 months too late. Where was the leadership to swiftly act on this? Serious values digressions are rarely one-offs and are usually indicative of a pattern of responding (we only heard two public comments – goodness knows what was said elsewhere). If you don’t deal with values digressions swiftly, they’ll end up being just propaganda on the office walls – and we all know places where this occurs. Values are not just about winning the game, they are about how you win the game. How are you winning yours?

Feeling the cold now (was 1˚degree yesterday down from an average 35˚ on my travels), after returning from the Philippines to participate in the World Stickfighting Championships. I received two silver medals, one for single stick, the other for double stick. In both single and double, I fought Philippino fighters who are quick and agile. In both finals, I fought my Grandmaster and came runner up to him.

Normally, at the start of a fight, one is hyped up a bit, yet at the start of the double stick final I was feeling very relaxed as I was looking forward to it and I knew I was going to have a party for 3 minutes.

Just before the start whistle, I looked at my Grandmaster and then looked over at our Supreme Grandmaster sitting 3m away watching us and our fight to be, and I thought, “How cool is this, life is pretty good.”

Being in an inner-city apartment, my outside windows get pretty dirty pretty quickly. However, these are cleaned as part of the building maintenance. My inside windows? Well, let’s just say they have needed cleaning for a couple of months. On a weekly basis I have seen different window cleaners cleaning the shop fronts in the street below. On approaching them all (five in total), I have told them my needs (clean inside windows), not asked about price as it was not a critical variable, given them my business card, and told them I would work around their schedule. Each window cleaner stated they would call me. Not one did. No, not one. Here I am as a customer approaching them (no marketing on their part), not concerned about price, and very flexible on timing.  Am I the ideal customer or what? How simple was that for them? Apparently not that simple! What simple opportunities are you missing?

My friend Pete wrote the “Letter of the Week” for the Christchurch Press, and won an Akaroa salmon for his troubles. Here is his letter.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe has this to say about New Zealand: “A failed socio-economic post-Victorian experiment.”

It has this to say about Victorian: “A seriously anal-retentive society with a great many adherents to a cannibalistic Mediterranean religion once popular with a group of savages calling themselves Romans.”

Pundits across the galaxy have this to say about anal retentive: “Overly feminised and politically correct behaviour common among the natives of NZ and practised by a hypocritical bunch of bureaucrats.”

Gag Halfront, the social commentator and author of the book Why Jellybeans Attract Lint in Your Pocket, describes New Zealand as “the origin of the All Blacks, a type of jellybean.”

Nine million dollars, being spent in a recession of biblical proportions on a referendum with a question no one seems able to interpret, on a law that makes no difference to our appalling predilection for child abuse?

Now that is really silly.

P A Newsome, Avonhead

When trying to change my printer settings I received a message stating that I needed a username and password for the printer application. Now I knew I was in trouble given that I had never created a username or password for the printer. After spending 40 min of totally unproductive time reading the Brother printer manual and trying everything I could think of, I emailed the online Brother support. To be honest I had extremely low expectations (a) of a prompt reply (five days ago I had phoned Serengeti Eyewear International and am still waiting a reply) and/or (b) of actually solving my problem. Less then six hours after my email I received a reply. Through a series of short email correspondences over the next 30 minutes, my problem (totally unintuitive as I had to key in computer code) was solved. Well done Brother for the prompt reply and actually adding value to my day. Are you responding promptly to your customers, and what value are you adding?

Was in Wellington Friday so popped along to the Formula One: The Great Design Race display at Te Papa. If you have a spare hour (or half hour like me if you get bored easy) then this is well worth a look. Even a lay person like me can appreciate the engineering genius, and there are some interesting facts that you will find out too.

This story appeared in Safeguard Update of 16 November.

Positive, immediate, certain

When people tell Dr Kyle McWilliams that their organisation has reached health and safety compliance, he invariably replies: “Well, that’s not very good is it?”

The reaction? “Their jaw drops,” he told delegates at the Conferenz inaugural Total Safety Culture conference in Auckland last month.

There are two types of job performance, he said, ‘just enough’ and ‘want to’. People who do just enough to keep their job are focused on compliance, the minimum level of performance. ‘Want to’ performance includes discretionary effort and is at a much higher level. “This is the one you want for safety.”

McWilliams, director of Christchurch-based consultancy Corporate Learning, said top performance will never be achieved if it is activated by the need for compliance. Instead, he advocated focusing on the consequences of behaviour, and on providing consequences that are positive, immediate, and certain.

Positive consequences are obviously beneficial, and consequences which are immediate and certain are much more powerful motivators than those which arrive in the future or are uncertain.

He asked delegates why they answered the phone. “Because it’s ringing,” came the response. No, he said, that is just the activator of the behaviour. The positive, immediate and certain outcome was that you get to speak to someone.

“Look towards the consequences rather than the activator. Activators have about 20% effect on behaviour. They kick-start it. Consequences have the other 80% effect.”

Health and safety policies, posters, emails, even training – these are all merely activators of behaviour. “If you want to improve behaviour, shift your focus to consequences.”

However, he cautioned that just because a consequence appeared to a worker to be positive, immediate and certain (PIC), didn’t mean it was a safe behaviour. Getting down from a large truck, for example, could be done unsafely by jumping, or safely by climbing down with three points of contact at all times. The trouble is, jumping takes less time and therefore appears to the driver to have PIC consequences.

“Safety is a constant struggle against human nature, because we are programmed to conserve energy. Lots of unsafe behaviours are PIC.”

McWilliams said we are good at identifying what we don’t want people to do. The key, he said, is to define the safe behaviours you want, then work out PIC consequences for them.

He advised looking at recent incidents and listing the behaviours associated with them, and then listing the alternative safe behaviours. “I practically guarantee you will find the unsafe behaviour was PIC because of the activator.”

If you want to change unsafe behaviours, he concluded, “you absolutely must focus on the behaviours you want, and you must provide positive, immediate and certain outcomes for this behaviour.”

Hospital staff unimpressed with pressie

Waitemata Health gives staff departmental phone list for Christmas for key ring; one nurse says it was worse than getting nothing 14 December 2009

Staff at the country’s worst performing hospital for waiting times have been given the bureaucratic equivalent of a lump of coal for Christmas.

In their pigeonholes they have found a “small token” of Waitemata Health’s appreciation in the form of a handy departmental phone list, with all the hospital’s vital extension numbers listed in a plastic cover with a tag. Some staff report the tag falls apart when an attempt is made to put it onto a key ring.

The apologetic note attached to the gift says sorry it cannot be anything bigger. One nurse says it was worse than getting nothing.

10 Lessons

1. Know your staff.

2. Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something (especially if it is bad).

3. Always ask, “What will be the effects of this?”

4. How to anchor a bad memory rather than a good memory.

5. Does this demonstrate appreciation?

6. The intention for giving this gift is misaligned with how it was received.

7. One size present does not fit all.

8.  Its not about the money – spending more on a present could have got just as bad a reaction.

9. Something that breaks the first time is usually not received terribly well.

10 Know your staff  – again, just in case you missed it as number one.

I bought a Fisher and Paykel Dishdrawer in January which I couldn’t use until two weeks after purchase. One week for delivery, and another week to replace it as it was broken before it was even out of  the box. Two weeks later it has broken down (well at least I got to use it this time). Now the interesting part isn’t that it has broken twice within a few weeks, as bad as that is. What is interesting (and highly annoying) is that it can’t be fixed for three days because the technician won’t be over this side of town until then. I have clients (yes, that is plural) that will be at someone’s house in under an hour if there is a problem. Here however, I have to work around the technician’s schedule (and of course I don’t even know the time so will be waiting around home) because it isn’t convenient to drive here until three days time. Why is this? Is there only a horse and cart available? I doubt it. I think it is because the focus is on the input of what suits the organisation (have the technicians in one area) rather than on the output of serving the customer. So, hand washing dishes for me – mind you, am getting good at it ever since I bought this dishdrawer.

And … hasn’t Fisher and Paykel had some problems over the last year? Hmmm, I have a suggestion or two for areas of improvement.