How can you go about improving the performance of your workers in Azerbaijan? Business consultant Aaron McKean shares his experience of using employee feedback to overcome problems in the area of customer services.
At a company I’m advising here in Azerbaijan I had gone to the office and the top manager asked me to come and chat with him for a few minutes. He started by asking me a leading question: “Which department of our office seems to be the weakest?” Now, there aren’t a whole lot of choices here, but if you know my manager at all, you know that he’s looking for a specific answer. I could have tried to derail this whole exercise by giving an answer he wasn’t looking for. Instead, I wanted to see where it was going. I replied, “Customer Service”.
Should a manager focus on staff weaknesses or work with them to find solutions?
After that was firmly established, we started talking about what we could do to start making some improvements. This is almost exactly what you want to hear as an advisor: someone who’s asking for your perspective, ready to learn something. My observational skills and previous experience in management and customer service, as well as my being an outsider, can come together to help give feedback and generate ideas on how we can improve specific parts of the business. We talked for a few minutes about how to go about talking with the Customer Service Department employees. We decided to have an after-work meeting with them, lead by yours truly. The manager wanted me to focus on how the Customer Service employees aren’t doing their jobs well. I, instead, wanted to expand on that a bit. I laid out a basic meeting with three goals: to discuss the department’s strengths, to identify the department’s weaknesses, and to brainstorm some ideas we could implement to remedy the problems.
The meeting started out great. My role, as I saw it, was to facilitate their discussion. I had come up with my own list of their strengths and weaknesses, in case I was asked the question. They hit on almost all of their strengths. And, with a little coaxing, they identified well their weaknesses. Though at first they decided they had no weaknesses, I then changed the question to “Imagine you are a client; now what would a client say are the weaknesses?” That worked well. We then moved on to some ideas to make improvements. This is just where I think the disconnect between management and employees comes in. The employees came up with three feasible, effective ideas: putting up signs in the office to identify the service areas; placing an employee at the door as a greeter to help direct clients to the right place; and rearranging where employees sit to make the processes more efficient. Great, right?
The manager was at the table during the meeting and said very little, certainly nothing helpful. After a few minutes of discussion, the group moved on to other topics. I tried to bring them back to what we could do to implement their ideas. They told me that they had already figured that they couldn’t actually implement the ideas and started discussing other things. What?! I asked about the specific ideas, and they pulled up and shot down each one. The branch manager continued to say little to nothing at all. The meeting ended with the employees deciding to donothing. That was a stunning result for me.
That this was a stunning result is true. Yet, at the same time, it’s not exactly a surprising result. On the table we had left viable solutions, a product of constructive discussion. In our idea of a Western-style office environment, attempting to implement these solutions would be inevitable. In our Azerbaijani context, the choice to do nothing still stings, but there are factors that make this scenario not only plausible, but probable.
The manager did nothing to support his staff…
What happened? This is where management failed miserably. At any point, the manager could have stepped in and said, “Yes, we can try that.” The employees didn’t really even ask him if he would help out. If I had been the manager in that situation, I feel like it would be my job to step up and say, “Okay, you’ve given some ideas, so now I’ll do my job and see if they are feasible.” A manager’s job should be to put his or her employees in the best position possible to succeed, right? Not so, here. After hearing ideas about how to make the customer service employees’ jobs easier, the manager did nothing to support them.
Why did the staff undermined their own good ideas?
There are three basic ideas that sum up why the meeting went as it did: First, being placed in a position to make changes, the employees didn’t see an opportunity for advancement or improved salary, or any of a number of incentives we would expect to be in play at a meeting like this. Second, our employees may be too risk-averse, afraid to try something new and have it fail, only to be blamed for that failure. Third, the employees feel sufficiently disempowered, so much so that attempting to implement new ideas is useless as they won’t receive support. In understanding these three debilitating attitudes toward innovation, it’s helpful to take a step back and view the office culture and management style that permeates Azerbaijani organizations.
The problems of working in a top-down hierarchy
Working in an Azerbaijani office, it becomes immediately clear that the structure is a top-down hierarchy, a rigid power pyramid. All decisions and ideas come from the top and people below are their only to carry out the wishes of the manager. It’s difficult for ideas to flow the other way, up the pyramid. Suggesting changes or improvements could be seen as questioning the authority at the top; likewise, accepting ideas from below could be seen as weakness.
In an environment like this, ideas from employees are not going to be rewarded. Why would a manager reward an employee for embarrassing him or her by pointing out a weakness? And why would the manager defer to that employee, anyways? Our employees still came up with ideas, but there was no resolve to see those ideas through. They have been sufficiently subdued into a demure position, believing the effort they would expend to realize an innovation wouldn’t win them any rewards. Action here has been disincentivized.
A “blame” culture?
Azerbaijan’s ‘blame’ culture also feeds directly into the management structure. If an idea doesn’t produce tangible results, marked improvements, that idea will be seen as a failure. Nobody wants to be blamed for a failure. And we don’t really know what the consequences of that failure will be. Even for the ideas we came up with in that meeting, I still don’t see how there’s much risk in putting up signs. Yet, putting forth effort to see an idea through means youthink it will work. You don’t want to be wrong and find out that signs don’t improve anything just to get the blame for it.
Last, and this is where the manager had a very real opportunity to make a change during that meeting, is that the employees, even if they had decided to go forward with changing the layout of customer services, wouldn’t receive any support from the manager. If you know that your manager isn’t going to support you or help you achieve a new innovation, then why are you going to try? In an office setting where the top manager is going to feel threatened by a new idea, he or she isn’t going to support it. During our meeting, the manager could easily have stepped in to say, “Yes, we can try that idea.” It would have provided a major boost to the morale of the employees and also resulted in some movement in the Customer Service Department.
These three deleterious possibilities, created by the classic “power pyramid”, provide an excellent illustration of how our interactions with employees can serve to either empower or subdue. Finding ways to work with employees in ways that provide incentives for change and calls to action are going to result in those employees stretching themselves. Instead of a disconnected, one-way relationship with management, employees who have support and feel comfortable taking measured risks will create a rapport in the office that leads to a dynamic environment. An office with no rewards for innovation becomes stagnant.
I’m not so naive as to think we don’t have management issues in Western countries. We all probably have great examples of how management has failed us in our jobs. Yet, the pervasive attitudes in Azerbaijan described above are nearly crippling. It means that the manager must be a master at directing all of the operations, since he won’t rely on others or delegate any responsibilities. It inhibits initiative by employees. That the sort of thing that will severely weaken your ability to adapt and improve. Obviously, I can’t fix this problem by myself or in the space of a two-year contract. But it also puts me in this odd position of feeling like I have to be an advocate for the employees to the manager. Not exactly a position I relish as an advisor.
