Fearmongering with a Lie

The Lie

At the beginning of every school year, all of the university’s office assistants were required to attend training, whether new or returning to the role.

During my fourth year of training, the head of the housing department made an announcement that didn’t sit quite right with me:

“You are all replaceable. If you can’t do the work, and if you can’t do it well, someone who can will take your place.”

As the most experienced office assistant in the room, I knew that was a blatant lie. We were severely understaffed. I sometimes had to work double shifts if just one of my coworkers called in sick. I frequently worked both post office and front desk responsibilities at the same time.

Why would he lie to all of us?

If I had to take my best guess, he wanted to address our poor performance. Office assistants only had a few responsibilities, but we consistently struggled with multistep tasks year-after-year. One that immediately comes to mind is handling residents’ mail.

Going Postal

Mail was delivered directly to the front desk from our internal post office. Large packages had to be scanned in with our custom software and stored in the back room. The residents would receive an automated email instructing them to pick up their mail at the front desk. When they did so, we would use this software to check out the package, then hand it to them.

That seems straightforward, but mail was constantly lost or miscatalogued. Looking back after my TapRooT® Training, there were some notable systemic issues at hand.

For starters, this software was extremely primitive.

It had absolutely no auditing capabilities. Everyone shared the same login per building, meaning there was no way to trace who logged in or out a package.

This created such an issue that most assistant hall directors (who supervised office assistants) resorted to creating Google spreadsheets to have traceable information.

With these quirks in mind, imagine the checkout process from my perspective…

A student asks for a package, so I step into the back room to look for it. (Hopefully, this doesn’t take too long, because I am simultaneously expected to monitor the fire panel and security cameras.)

I find it, step back behind the desk, and log into the software to check out this package. I then open up the spreadsheet to enter the following information: the resident’s name, my name, the date, time, and package ID.

If the office assistant who received the package made a mistake, like forgetting to log it onto the second spreadsheet, I would have to start all over again, redoing the entire checkin and checkout process. (It would also be impossible for the assistant hall director to find out who made this error.)

Keep in mind that our building housed over 500 residents, and we received dozens of packages every day. There was often a long line to receive mail — if the office assistant was checking them out correctly. Many simply handed residents their mail without giving any thought to the software or the spreadsheet.

Remember, we only got a measly 8 hours of training a year, which didn’t even cover building-specific processes, like a custom spreadsheet. There were also no written procedures at all.

It was basically impossible to learn this without screwing it up. This was particularly alarming because some packages contained imperatives, like medicine.

Changing Behavior (without Fearmongering)

Upper management knew there were human performance problems, but they went about fixing it in the worst possible way.

Motivating better behaviors is an inoffensive but ineffective solution at best. A “we can do better” doesn’t really achieve much when the systems in place are so broken that “doing better” takes about four years of trail-and-error whilst crossing your fingers, hoping that no one else messed up one of the extremely convoluted steps.

Not only did the director of housing attempt to motivate better behaviors with fear, but that fear was based off a completely fictitious narrative. I think most returning employees could easily tell he was bluffing.

If a team, facility, or department is underperforming, chances are that you don’t have bad apples in the bunch. You have systemic issues that will continue to fester until they’re properly investigated. Lying will only worsen the situation.

If you haven’t attended TapRooT® Training, I’d highly recommend our 2-Day TapRooT® Essentials Course. It’s an easy way to kickstart better investigations.

For current TapRooT® Users thinking about continuing their improvement programs, I’d suggest attending the TapRooT® Summit. There are lots of specialized sessions and a network of brilliant professions.