Why aren’t my staff following the procedures like they used to?
Why aren’t my staff following the procedures like they used to? Believe or not, it’s unlikely to be because your staff have suddenly become lazy, stupid, or malicious. Rather, there is a good chance that your business is experiencing organisational drift.
Organisational drift is a phenomenon where gradually over time the way work is done in the business on a day-to-day basis (‘WAD’), drifts away from how the business is supposed to run accordingly to what’s written down (‘WAI’). This happens slowly and gradually over time and often either goes unnoticed or is accepted by management in the business.
The primary reason that this drift occurs is because of the dynamic nature of the environment people are working in. More simply, things change over time. Suppliers change, businesses move location, they go through restructures, new products are launched, the list goes on. When procedures are introduced in a business, they reflect how the business functions at that time, and often not even then. Unless procedures are rigorously kept up to date, over time they will reflect less and less the reality of work as done on a day-to-day basis. The procedure might call for equipment that the business no longer uses, have been designed to be used at the businesses’ previous location, reference a job position that no longer exists, or the procedure may no longer meet current regulatory requirements. These factors may make following the procedure impractical, or even impossible.
Another very common situation is where the time allocated to the work task is insufficient to allow the procedure to be conducted as written. For example, the business might expect a staff member to install an air conditioner unit in 3 hours, and therefore schedule the staff member to do 3 installations per day. However, it may be that for a staff member to install an air conditioning unit by following the all the steps of the required procedure completely would take 5 hours. This puts the staff member in position of having to choose between following the rules, or meeting the required production targets. If they follow the procedure, they will very quickly have customers complaining their air conditioner technician hasn’t shown up on time and subsequent questions from management.
Generally, employees come to work wanting to do a good job and help the business, so more often than not they will elect to skip parts of the procedure or modify it as necessary in order to get the work done within the allotted time. The more experienced staff will likely have developed an idea over time of what parts of the procedure are critical (for safety or other reasons), and which are not. Over time these practices become normalised and routine, and the WAD drifts away from the WAI. Experienced staff for example will ‘train’ new staff how to install air conditioning units according to the schedule, rather than according to the procedure.
This situation can persist for a long time, in fact, these kind of practices can be how the business is able to fulfil its purpose and get from one day to the next. Sometimes parts of a procedure may well be unnecessary. Part of the difficulty comes when something goes wrong. Perhaps one of the steps in the procedure has become routine to be skipped is a defence against a safety risk. Most of the time this is no issue, but eventually the risk event occurs and a staff member is injured.
In this situation it would be easy to say, well it’s the staff member’s fault, they didn’t follow the procedure. However, this would be to ignore the reality that the procedure had been made impractical by the work scheduling, and that deviating from the procedure had become common practice. Blaming and punishing the staff member in these circumstances would likely result in a lot of resentment and mistrust from them and other staff members as there would be a sense of management looking the other way when the work is getting done, but throwing the staff under the bus if something goes wrong.
So, what can we do instead to reduce the chance of organisational drift, or to fix it if we find it occurring.
One of the most important things we can do is to involve the staff who will be performing the task in the design and review of procedures. Front line staff are likely to have the best information and expertise on what the task involves, its challenges, risks, and the external variables it relies on. By involving front line staff you’re much more likely to develop procedures that reflect the reality of doing the work.
Second, having a well-functioning staff reporting system can help you identify when organisational drift is happening. This reporting system needs to be easy and convenient for staff to use, staff need to receive responses to their reports, and the business needs to be willing and able to actually make appropriate changes in response to staff feedback. There is a lot that can be said about how to design and implement effective reporting systems, but if done well they can be a powerful tool for building a more flexible and innovative business.
Third is to have systems for regularly reviewing procedures to ensure they remain current and practical. This may be based on a timeframe, part of the audit cycle, be triggered when change occurs in the business, or some combination of these. Regular reviews can help to find those little areas of obsolescence that creep into procedures over time, such as regulatory changes or organisational restructures.
Finally, it is important to remember that if organisational drift is discovered, the response must be tailored to be appropriate to the situation. Sometimes the WAD needs to be brought back to the WAI, such as for regulatory compliance reasons. In these types of cases its critical to understand why the drift occurred in the first place and address those underlying issues, otherwise the drift will start to occur again as soon as attention moves on to something else. To go back to the air conditioning unit example, if it’s decided the full procedure must be followed due to safety risks, then the scheduling issue must be addressed in some way if the drift is not to reoccur. This might be by allowing more time for installation, increasing the size of the work, changing the equipment used to allow for faster installation etc.
However, sometimes when drift has occurred it is the procedure that needs changing. Perhaps the staff have actually found a better way of performing the task, and the WAI should be redrafted to reflect the WAD. Perhaps the steps the staff are skipping when installing the air conditioning units are actually unnecessary and can be dispensed with. Perhaps those steps related to a previous model with safety risks the current model doesn’t have, or there is a better way to mitigate that risk which is less time consuming which the staff have discovered.
All of this requires the ability and willingness to listen, learn and understand the realities of day-to-day work in the business. However, doing so allows for a more just, fair, productive and innovative workplace.
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DISCLAIMER: This blog provides general information only, and is not intended as advice specific to your circumstances. Please contact us if you have any particular questions.
