Educating on “Why” instead of “What” or “How” to improve creativity and reduce bureaucracy
When an employee gets on-board, and you’re planning an orientation, what would you generally prepare to brief the new employee?
I’ve been through many training programs all these years … technical training, process training, standard operating procedures, rules and guidelines, handbook, standard scripts! These are often the “tools” provided to new employees to get them up to speed. In today’s world where turnover is often high, this is sadly true in most organizations in trying to get employees ready for the “real work” as soon as possible.
Take a call center employee for example, the usual training will include:
- Some product knowledge.
- How to handle calls.
- Standard greetings.
- Transfering of calls.
- How to handle specific scenarios.
- Finally, a script is often prepared for call center employees to follow.
This is the same for customer service or processing employees:
- Step 1 greet your customer … say “Welcome to XXX, how may I help you?”
- Then there’s often a tree structure for employee to follow through.
- There’s also a FAQ guide for handling difficult customers.
Every organization has a “to-do” and “no-no” list. The sad part is this, it focuses on What to do, what not to do. Next it’s How to do it, and how not to do it. What’s lacking here is the “Why”. Many managers don’t realize the importance of “Why”. And the importance of “Why” has been destroyed since childhood for many people who lives in the busy society.
If you’re a parent, trying recalling have you ever said “Just do as I say, don’t ask why!”. Why or when do we say that? We often use that as a method to stop the kid from asking too much and just speed up the process. What happens here is that we’ve stopped the children from being innovative. The mentality of “my parents know best” or rather “I follow since my parents thinks they know best” continues. This is more apparent in Asian societies than it is in the West.
Now in the interest of speed, we’re subconciously doing the same to our employees. “Please get A, B, C and D done” - How many of them really knows the significance of their work? No wonder there are so many unhappy employees around in every organization. A customer service employee who’s told what to do and how to do it without telling why will simply follow instructions, and often build up red-tapes when there’s any request beyond the norm. That’s because they can’t practice creativity without understanding the underlying reasons to the policies in place.
A different way of developing an employee is to spend more time on “Why”. Letting employees know “Why do we need to greet the customer in such a manner?” or “why do we need to follow this process?” or “why do I need to be in office on time?”. That gives the employee a larger flexibility in finding the right solution for the customers and making sure the underlying reasons remains intact. Focusing on “Why” will also make our employees less of a robot and allows them to deliver services from the heart. Understanding the significance of their work improves motivation to get it done well too!
Once the “Why” has been well communicated, be rest assured that your employee is motivated to find ways to deal with issues even when it’s not within the “standard operating procedures”.
The final challenge one may ask is “What if I can’t find a Why to the policy?”. Then let me suggest here that the policy is either obsolete or wasn’t there to serve a real purpose. Try revising the policy instead. Make it one where “Why” could be explained!
In order to continuously improve ourselves, we will just need to keep asking ourselves why are we doing what we are doing today! Are we developing real effectiveness? or mere efficiency?
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That’s the thing about the Asian culture. We were often rejected from asking “why” questions since young where the question is important as when you ask why, you get to understand. From there, you will remember and you can innovate. But effort has to be made both side i believe. If why is not told, I believe asking why would be the right thing to do. Due to that, “Why” is my favourite question:)