A former colleague once told me: “It’s October already, and I still have four sickdays left. Let’s see when I will take one or two of them.” I was a bit confused, since to my knowledge there were no sick day vouchers. It turned out that our consulting company calculated with 5 sick days per person and year to reduce the productivity rate in the KPI system, in order not to “punish” an employee for becoming sick. In theory a noble thought, however interesting how the company culture twisted it into a rather dubious result.
Was my colleague a clever, shifty person? Deducting the employee’s personality from this behaviour is wrong.
Based on Luhmann’s systems theory the following rings true: Through a very sophisticated and extensive KPI system, the company´s organisation created a culture that enabled such behaviour.
Maybe the system was lacking a bonus for employees that called in fewer times sick than others?
Indeed it would have been possible to further bloat the system, in the vain attempt to cover every eventuality.
But what if not more regulation is the solution? I believe it is dismanteling control.
Trust is one of our most important company values in tostep. “We bestow trust and honor trust gifted to us” is one of our principles of practice.
The principle reflects clearly the human picture it is based on. To say it with Douglas McGregor, we believe that our employees are solely of “Theory Y” type, intrinsically motivated, loyal, sincere- not the other ones, that need to be constantly controlled and monitored.
Now the most interesting part that McGregor found out is that it is irrelevant whether I fully believe in this human picture to make it come true- it suffices that I take this principle as basis when building my organisational system. Because this is how I set the rules by which my organisation works. Employees in the system present themselves mostly trustworthy.
How precisely do we bring this value to life?
We use trust in dismanteling management processes in areas where complex decisions need to be made. We abstain from having a detailled reimbursement system or a complex KPI system, because we trust in the sanity and reason of our employees and grant them the necessary freedom to do so.
Our employment contracts are extremely lean and so are our General Rules of Employment, since also here: We bestow trust and honor trust gifted to us.
Where in your workday are you confronted with practices that let you doubt that the often proclaimed value “trust” is lived?
Literature Recommendations:
McGregor, Douglas: Human Side of Enterprise, 1960
Covey, Stephen M.R.: Speed of Trust, 2006