Honesty store an excellent people strategy
Credit to Author: REY ELBO| Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2019 16:16:47 +0000
HONESTY came to mind as it became a hot topic in recent days due to the midterm election fever. But let’s sidestep politics for a while and discover how honesty can be tapped as a management strategy with the first known coffee shop established in 1995 in Batanes which prides itself as “a store that is too small for dishonest people.”
It took more than 23 years for very few organizations to try the honesty strategy like the G-Liner Bus Company plying Cainta to Quiapo and vice-versa and other routes. The trouble is that, when you check its Facebook page, you’ll be directed to a lot of negative comments against the rude behavior of its drivers and conductors.
If the allegations are true, G-Liner may as well ditch its honesty fare system and instead focus on customer satisfaction. But that’s another story.
Another example of an honesty strategy that came in the news recently was the attempt by the Manila Police Department to put up an honesty store selling food, noodles and beverages. It was closed for a while after an audit revealed it lost P20,000 to an insider who was discovered to have pocketed the money as shown by a closed-circuit television camera.
The store reopened after several weeks of closure.
The honesty strategy may raise some eyebrows. But if there’s one model we’d like to copy, it can be TDK Philippines Corporation, a Japanese manufacturing plant in Laguna. It has an honesty bake shop that caters daily to thousands of its employees.
The system is simple to start and maintain.
It has a transparent box under lock and key where employees pay P20 for a bag of bread. The system is practical and profitable for the following reasons:
One, it is one form of low-cost employee motivational strategy. Management is not spending money for it. It merely provides a small space for a concessionaire inside the factory where workers take their morning and afternoon breaks.
Two, it is convenient and cost-efficient for the minimum wage earner. The bakery concessionaire saves a lot of money for it does not have to assign a storekeeper for all kiosks in different parts of the factory. Whatever savings it gets is flowed back to make the price reasonable for the workers.
Three, the system helps contribute in the improvement of the company’s labor productivity as the 15-minute coffee break is strictly followed by all workers. There’s no reason for them to delay their return to work after each break as everything is under their control. No more interaction with a storekeeper.
Last, anticipated losses are borne by the external service provider. But who cares to steal a P20 worth of bread, anyway? The workers think it’s not worth to risk losing their job with that little amount. Management trusts the system. For them, it’s not worth it to install CCTV cameras in those areas.
Conclusion? An honesty-based store works best in private organizations. It may not be effective in situations where you have to deal with the general public like in the case of the bus company and a police station.
Amar Bhide and Howard Stevenson, writing for Harvard Business Review, say: Organizations “can be proud of a system in which people are
honest because they want to be, not because they have to be. Materially, too, trust based on morality provides great advantages.”
Honesty is an important ingredient in business, but not in traditional politics. Even if the voters have been betrayed, it’s still a mystery for us to understand why the same people who have been indicted, imprisoned, bailed out and paroled continue to be elected and lord it over us.
According to Bhide and Stevenson, “(m)ore damaging to the moralists’ position is the wealth of evidence against trust. Compared with the few ambiguous tales of treachery punished, we can find numerous stories in which deceit was unquestionably rewarded.” If you want factual examples of dishonesty being rewarded, then read the full article of Bhide and Stevenson and take that risks.
I’m not promoting dishonesty here. Even if one thousand people are stupidly dishonest, they’re still called stupidly dishonest. No question about it. Therefore, the next time you think of putting-up an honesty store in your company, use a visual, graphic scarecrow like the one used by psychology professor Melissa Bateson who secretly ran an experiment in her own department’s break room.
The experiment was done in the early 2000 when CCTV cameras were not yet in vogue, if not very expensive to procure and maintain. Faculty members and employees at the Newcastle University paid for coffee, tea, and milk by dropping money into an honesty box. Each week, Bateson posted a small poster of new price list without changing the price, except for a photograph that accompanies it.
Each week, there was a picture of flowers. The next week, a pair of human eyes. The cycle goes on. No one suspected the secret experiment as the honesty store was already in place several years before the test. The result of the experiment shows the customers on average paid three times more when the pair of eyes is in the price list, rather than a photograph of flowers.
Let’s go back to politics: What would be the result of a similar experiment if instead of flowers, we’ll alternate the photographa of Benigno Aquino III and Rodrigo Duterte in the price list of an honesty store?
Rey Elbo is a business consultant in human resources and total quality management as a fused interest. Send feedback to elbonomics@gmail.com or via https://reyelbo.consulting
The post Honesty store an excellent people strategy appeared first on The Manila Times Online.