I know what you are thinking . . . “my organization makes workers accountable with measures, performance reviews and inspection.”  Well, we aren’t talking the same lingo.

Rarely do you find measures in service organizations that matter to customers.  Usually the measures are all about reducing costs and meeting budget.  Let me tell you a secret . . . customers could care less about these measures.  And one counter-intuitive truth we have discovered is that measures that customers don’t care about lead to increased costs or a best a scorecard.  W. Edwards Deming referenced these lagging measures as useless to improving costs and service – “it is like driving a car looking out the rear view mirror.”  Customer measures lay out the road ahead.

Performance reviews make workers slaves to the system.  The game is to be compliant, not innovative.  It promotes a culture of brown-nosing and popularity contests, leaving most workers disenchanted.  They do make people accountable – to their boss.  The hierarchy is there to prevent accountability to customers, workers must bow to the next one up on the totem pole.

This thinking breeds inspection for compliance to measures that don’t matter to customers.  Most in inspection and compliance roles add little or no value from a customer perspective and too often creates animosity amongst workers.  Also, I find that workers are stuck in work designs that are sub-optimal and compliance means that we are perpetuating poor thinking and design.

So, what makes workers accountable?

Work that is challenging and designed to improve service is the short answer.  The long answer is that a worker that can see the impact to customer has a better chance of being accountable than a functionally separated one that your piece of work if blind to the one before or after.  This means that better designed work promotes accountability and it doesn’t require compliance.  Most workers willingly are accountable when they embrace a work design that makes them relevant and has ties to customer needs.

The bottom line is that accountability is attributable to the design and management of work.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.