The Media churn out another lazy rehash of the old familiar story, Mr Good trying to save money whilst Mr Bad wants to stop him firing all his workers, in this case all the London Underground Ticket Sales staff. If like me, you are an infrequent traveller to London, you always use the Underground as it is the only way to get about. As an aside, in fairness the Buses are getting better organised, (fantastic 'London Journey Planner' App) but still the dilemma of which Bus, where to get off and electronic display saying next due in 5 minutes whilst you wait for 25 minutes and still no Bus in sight. Back to my theme. A welter of overlapping tiers of travel options and an automatic ticket machine with an interface devised by the Devil himself, evil incarnate. I regard myself as reasonably technically competent, an average commuter, but my lack of routine familiarity with all the London travel options means I am defeated each and every time I attempt to use the automatic ticketing system. I need the human, even if scowling, face of the Ticket Sale Office to translate my simple travel plans into a sensible Ticket to Travel. Unless London has decided to commit suicide and turn its back on all those tourists that flood the Underground every day, what is it thinking.
Our Society is being driven top down by Accountant Rules. Sure, absolutely, the Money In has to exceed the Money Out, no argument. But Accountants do not have any formula to tell when Customers have had an unsatisfactory experience that they choose not to repeat. In the real commercial world out there, struggling to get by in the ongoing recession, they are highly tuned to the customer experience. They go out of their way to ensure the customer's residual recollection is favourable to them. Not that mistakes do not happen, of course they do, but it is someone's job to proactively respond with more than a smiley face and 'Have a Nice Day' to ensure any problem is fixed and they are left satisfied. Not so our quasi-private companies running our essential services. They are only in it for profit, customer, or consumer, satisfaction is of no account. Sure a stone-walling complaints procedure that at most logs the complaint then dead files it away. Their remit is not to provide a good quality service that meets the needs of the users, just to return a profit. Not just London Underground but a plethora of quasi-private service provider have all been hitting the news for failing to address their 'customers' needs. Take the water utility boards, responsible to safe discharge of sewerage, brushing aside one of several householders that have repeated (five times), raw sewerage flooding into their homes; or Environment Agency with responsibility to manage our natural resources, failing in their duty of care by allowing the Somerset Levels to be inundated for weeks on end; or our treasured NHS failing to provided basic care robbing their elderly patients of dignity; or Local Authorities not allocating sufficient Care Hours to enable carers provide a decent quality of assistance and so on, rail failings, postal failings and on and on. Staffed by dedicate people who joined to serve the public but in the end are undermined by administrations that can only see the profit line and have no motive to meet the needs.
As I argue elsewhere, (All Change)(Time to Stand Up) quasi-'competitive' private companies have no place in running essential services. The 'competition model' is an entirely false fabrication, no real viable alternate options exist, the customer is stuck and stuffed. Nothing wrong, in fact overwhelming reasons why, essential services should be State organised. Just a new leaner model of how to go about organising and arranging them and making them accountable. There is hope that we can get back to providing all the customers, that is us, with services that aim to at least meet the needs of its customers. Now that would be a refreshing change.
Showing posts with label accountants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label accountants. Show all posts
Thursday, 6 February 2014
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
Finding a New Way
On reflection, there are perhaps three major areas of interest in these posts, the community, the political voice and how we value people. I circle around trying to hone in on the core issues but it all changes depending on where you start from and which direction you look in. Bear with me. My current pre-occupation is with how we value people. Looking back at Tax, Salaries & Reward, Raising Revenue, That Extra Mile, even Unemployed, I have touched on several interrelated aspects. Now it is time to dig a little deeper.
There are no absolutes controlling this world. The financial systems we have served their purposes for their time, those systems that worked well, for us, carry us forward. But they are not immutable. They may not even be the best or may have undesirable consequences. That they work is not sufficient reason to stand off and not look at them and ask, is there a better way? We are at the cusp of a new era, IT is changing every parameter of the society we used to know. The future is unmapped, beyond our ken but we do have tools in our hand that we can choose to use to help shift it one way or another. My other posts mentioned at the start gives some indications. Time for another.
The cost of labour. As an accounting unit it is simple to define and therefore simple to totalise, build that into the equation and then calculate your profit or loss. Reduce labour costs, increase profit. Ergo, simple. Except of course life is not simple and the implications and consequences of reducing labour costs are far from simple and have radical society wide impact. Yet if you cannot produce a profit, you cannot continue to produce. Without 'production' there is no call for labour. But life is not simple. We do have to find another way of looking at labour other than just as a cost.
I have touched on it before. Human interactions are best carried out between humans, machine or automated processes just cannot cope with the complexity that a human persons life introduces into the proceedings. Deskilling is a current economic vogue. Break complicated task down into simpler routines, write out the controlling parameters and then teach junior grade staff to perform these simpler routines. Job done and money saved. If only. As an illustration a NHS Staff Nurse when they sit by the bedside of a patient are monitoring the patient for health signs, for verbal indications of well-being and sensory evaluating that all things are in place. Their training but most of all their experience enable them carry out this complex appraisal quickly before passing onto the next patient. Not so the ward assistant charged with serving food, or changing bedclothes, issuing medicines or washing the patient. Simple narrowly focussed tasks that tick the task boxes but misses that experienced overview. How is the Staff Nurse trapped in the office appraising reports of task completed by junior staff ever going to get the time to overview the patient behind these individuals tasks done? The junior staff do not have the training nor experience to understand when something is wrong that can be changed. The boxes are ticked but we are left in a bad place. How does that feel when you complete an automated call process? Wouldn't a voice call to an operator have been faster, more efficient and most of all felt a better experience. Even granting a low calibre operator!
We have to change the way people are valued in the work place. The cost of labour is not the be and end all. Some companies are beginning to respond to this issue, reverting back to human intervention. A "I see what you say" defuses the potential for conflict but unless to drives on to a resolution is only a feel good panacea. The underlying satisfaction surveys have too get a lot smarter. Is not how good we rate the experience but the ease and efficiency by which the problem is resolved that should count. Let us reward problem identification and resolution.
A machine can outperform a tennis player in predetermined shots but can never be a match for the instant anticipation, response and calculated unplayable reply in reaction to a random challenging serve or return. The human mind is fine tuned to compute all those thousands of measurements calculations and positional changes required, unmatched by any foreseeable machine. Let us reward the learnt and adaptable exercise of fine motor controls in novel situations.
We are surrounded and swamped with examples of creative thinking. Machines can be brilliant at producing and searching for viable permutations from selected factors and we are beginning to discover techniques where by 'machine' can learn to optimise a response to a predetermined problem. We humans have been doing it for thousands of years, seeing a problem and coming up with a solution that has no precedent and is not dependant on the starting out position. Lets us reward the outcome of creative thinking.
Today a man was celebrated because his last expression of anger was more than twentyfive years ago, all put down to the benefits of meditation. Whatever route taken some people are able to offer a calming restorative good humoured response to others dealing with life's problems. Lets us reward those that help us back to good humour.
Lets us reward all those intrinsically human attributes that enrich our lives together, based not on the hours of time spent but on the outcomes. Outcomes that contribute to all our better well-beings. Rewards for a job well-done and not for the time spent doing it well or otherwise. Job well-done measured by the human satisfaction with the outcome and not some abstract rule or measure or specification of acceptability. We must relearn how to use humans to their achieve their optimum and then reward them proportionately for those achievements. Let machines do the donkey work they are best suited to. In the end only a human can finally decide whether that fact, trawled from zillions of possibles, is actually relevant to the question in hand.
There are no absolutes controlling this world. The financial systems we have served their purposes for their time, those systems that worked well, for us, carry us forward. But they are not immutable. They may not even be the best or may have undesirable consequences. That they work is not sufficient reason to stand off and not look at them and ask, is there a better way? We are at the cusp of a new era, IT is changing every parameter of the society we used to know. The future is unmapped, beyond our ken but we do have tools in our hand that we can choose to use to help shift it one way or another. My other posts mentioned at the start gives some indications. Time for another.
The cost of labour. As an accounting unit it is simple to define and therefore simple to totalise, build that into the equation and then calculate your profit or loss. Reduce labour costs, increase profit. Ergo, simple. Except of course life is not simple and the implications and consequences of reducing labour costs are far from simple and have radical society wide impact. Yet if you cannot produce a profit, you cannot continue to produce. Without 'production' there is no call for labour. But life is not simple. We do have to find another way of looking at labour other than just as a cost.
I have touched on it before. Human interactions are best carried out between humans, machine or automated processes just cannot cope with the complexity that a human persons life introduces into the proceedings. Deskilling is a current economic vogue. Break complicated task down into simpler routines, write out the controlling parameters and then teach junior grade staff to perform these simpler routines. Job done and money saved. If only. As an illustration a NHS Staff Nurse when they sit by the bedside of a patient are monitoring the patient for health signs, for verbal indications of well-being and sensory evaluating that all things are in place. Their training but most of all their experience enable them carry out this complex appraisal quickly before passing onto the next patient. Not so the ward assistant charged with serving food, or changing bedclothes, issuing medicines or washing the patient. Simple narrowly focussed tasks that tick the task boxes but misses that experienced overview. How is the Staff Nurse trapped in the office appraising reports of task completed by junior staff ever going to get the time to overview the patient behind these individuals tasks done? The junior staff do not have the training nor experience to understand when something is wrong that can be changed. The boxes are ticked but we are left in a bad place. How does that feel when you complete an automated call process? Wouldn't a voice call to an operator have been faster, more efficient and most of all felt a better experience. Even granting a low calibre operator!
We have to change the way people are valued in the work place. The cost of labour is not the be and end all. Some companies are beginning to respond to this issue, reverting back to human intervention. A "I see what you say" defuses the potential for conflict but unless to drives on to a resolution is only a feel good panacea. The underlying satisfaction surveys have too get a lot smarter. Is not how good we rate the experience but the ease and efficiency by which the problem is resolved that should count. Let us reward problem identification and resolution.
A machine can outperform a tennis player in predetermined shots but can never be a match for the instant anticipation, response and calculated unplayable reply in reaction to a random challenging serve or return. The human mind is fine tuned to compute all those thousands of measurements calculations and positional changes required, unmatched by any foreseeable machine. Let us reward the learnt and adaptable exercise of fine motor controls in novel situations.
We are surrounded and swamped with examples of creative thinking. Machines can be brilliant at producing and searching for viable permutations from selected factors and we are beginning to discover techniques where by 'machine' can learn to optimise a response to a predetermined problem. We humans have been doing it for thousands of years, seeing a problem and coming up with a solution that has no precedent and is not dependant on the starting out position. Lets us reward the outcome of creative thinking.
Today a man was celebrated because his last expression of anger was more than twentyfive years ago, all put down to the benefits of meditation. Whatever route taken some people are able to offer a calming restorative good humoured response to others dealing with life's problems. Lets us reward those that help us back to good humour.
Lets us reward all those intrinsically human attributes that enrich our lives together, based not on the hours of time spent but on the outcomes. Outcomes that contribute to all our better well-beings. Rewards for a job well-done and not for the time spent doing it well or otherwise. Job well-done measured by the human satisfaction with the outcome and not some abstract rule or measure or specification of acceptability. We must relearn how to use humans to their achieve their optimum and then reward them proportionately for those achievements. Let machines do the donkey work they are best suited to. In the end only a human can finally decide whether that fact, trawled from zillions of possibles, is actually relevant to the question in hand.
Tuesday, 20 September 2011
Slow Death
The Accountants are slowly strangling and stifflling the life out of UKplc. Now let us get this straight from the outset. You have to make a profit to survive in business, no question. In hard times you have to work your business hard, cut out waste, improve efficiency, make sure you are as productive and effective as you can be. Run a lean mean machine, no problems. There is however a switch over point. When you run your business with the aim to make a better profit, achieve a percentage increase in market share, to improve your shareholding status or whatever of the many and varied slices the Accountants use to 'judge' the financial success of a business by. You have crossed the line.
The first and only criteria to be in business is to provide what you do to the best of your ability and to the customers satisfaction. Once you lose that motivation you have sold out any solid morale justification and thereby squandered your rights to be in business. No matter how much hype and smooth sounding customer focussed mission statements you come up with you have lost that vital contract. Your personal contract to provide the best. This is where UKplc is now finding itself. Whether we are talking the corner shop, a long-standing family firm, a national or international producer or supplier. The Accountants have their claw around them all. We have grown to expect short-term solutions to be the sole inspiration, another percentage point here or there in profits or growth. Entirely losing sight of the long-term goal of keeping your existing customers happy and wanting them to come back, again and again and telling all their friends to join in. This is real growth, this is real vitality and this is the only measure of survival.
If your priority of attention is to squeeze another percentage point of profit out of your business, the end figures may look very impressive, with lots of noughts, but along the way you have had to sacrifice. The sacrifice might be one or some of many things, quality, supplier relationships, staffing morale, reject standards, returns handling, future investment, plant upgrades, transaction delays, support, or a whole host of other such issues. A host with one thing in common they directly impinge on what you supply and your customers satisfaction in receiving what you offer. A host that might add a small percentage in your costs and that can look large in the balance sheet. They can make major contributions to achieving quality, but quality is not a balance sheet account. So any of these minor irritants that you have given ground on have set off a time-fuse. Your criteria for quality has become compromised. A fuse that will, over time, gradually eat away at customer satisfaction and confidence. By then your business will be in terminal decline and your helpful Accountant, that helped you make more profits, will have slipped away to a better and more promising punter.
Once you give ground on being the sole arbiter on what you are offering and it becomes subject to others value-engineering assessments then you are in the mire. Savings are always easy to offer but retaining the standards you set for yourself are a daily nightmare battle only you can make.
This is where this blog wants us to all stop and think. As we too are the Chief Executives of our own business. How we put ourselves out and about is our business and we need to be clear in our minds the standards we set ourselves to achieve. Not to be seduced by tempting offers to buy more, buy cheaper, buy easier but to keep on taking ourselves to task for not quite attaining that quality standard we know is right for us.
So look around, be alert, questioning and challenging on whose products you bring into your life. Keep your life account in balance but strive within that limitation to make the quality happen on a daily basis that you know is right for you.
The first and only criteria to be in business is to provide what you do to the best of your ability and to the customers satisfaction. Once you lose that motivation you have sold out any solid morale justification and thereby squandered your rights to be in business. No matter how much hype and smooth sounding customer focussed mission statements you come up with you have lost that vital contract. Your personal contract to provide the best. This is where UKplc is now finding itself. Whether we are talking the corner shop, a long-standing family firm, a national or international producer or supplier. The Accountants have their claw around them all. We have grown to expect short-term solutions to be the sole inspiration, another percentage point here or there in profits or growth. Entirely losing sight of the long-term goal of keeping your existing customers happy and wanting them to come back, again and again and telling all their friends to join in. This is real growth, this is real vitality and this is the only measure of survival.
If your priority of attention is to squeeze another percentage point of profit out of your business, the end figures may look very impressive, with lots of noughts, but along the way you have had to sacrifice. The sacrifice might be one or some of many things, quality, supplier relationships, staffing morale, reject standards, returns handling, future investment, plant upgrades, transaction delays, support, or a whole host of other such issues. A host with one thing in common they directly impinge on what you supply and your customers satisfaction in receiving what you offer. A host that might add a small percentage in your costs and that can look large in the balance sheet. They can make major contributions to achieving quality, but quality is not a balance sheet account. So any of these minor irritants that you have given ground on have set off a time-fuse. Your criteria for quality has become compromised. A fuse that will, over time, gradually eat away at customer satisfaction and confidence. By then your business will be in terminal decline and your helpful Accountant, that helped you make more profits, will have slipped away to a better and more promising punter.
Once you give ground on being the sole arbiter on what you are offering and it becomes subject to others value-engineering assessments then you are in the mire. Savings are always easy to offer but retaining the standards you set for yourself are a daily nightmare battle only you can make.
This is where this blog wants us to all stop and think. As we too are the Chief Executives of our own business. How we put ourselves out and about is our business and we need to be clear in our minds the standards we set ourselves to achieve. Not to be seduced by tempting offers to buy more, buy cheaper, buy easier but to keep on taking ourselves to task for not quite attaining that quality standard we know is right for us.
So look around, be alert, questioning and challenging on whose products you bring into your life. Keep your life account in balance but strive within that limitation to make the quality happen on a daily basis that you know is right for you.
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