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Empower your people
By Lauren | August 27, 2010
Continuing my Friday series on keeping your business out of court, let’s focus on a recent experience I had with my own family. To celebrate my oldest daughter’s 10th birthday, we went to Disney World … in August. It was a great trip overall but the heat was nearly unbearable, and I’d decided that, instead of renting a car, we’d take advantage of Disney’s transportation network. Not a great decision. Waiting twenty minutes for a bus in hundred-degree heat and humidity with exhausted kids isn’t smart, and I almost bit the bullet and rented a car. If I’d done that, though, we would have missed Tom, and that would have been a shame.
Tom drives a bus between Epcot Center and the Disney hotels, and he’s absolutely amazing. He first caught my attention with the courtly approach he took to bringing a little girl in a wheelchair on board. She had to be hotter than any of us, but he had her smiling in seconds. Then, Tom charmed the socks off an entire busload of tired, overheated people, cracking jokes and telling stories all the way to our hotels. If you asked him what he does for a living, Tom would tell you that he makes magic every day, and he’d be right.
How does Tom’s outstanding attitude relate to keeping your business out of court? Read on. Disney is famous for empowering its employees to go the extra mile to keep visitors happy. Incidentally, they also stand as the company’s first line of legal defense, because they diffuse tension, solve problems, and leave Disney’s patrons with a smile. If Tom had been forced to put that little girl on his bus according to rigid restrictions and hadn’t been able to exercise his signature charm, her parents would have been much more inclined to call their lawyer if, Heaven forbid, the child was injured during the bus trip.
Happy, empowered employees prevent litigation by keeping customers content. If your company is overly controlling, you can inadvertently restrict your employees from solving problems before they escalate into expensive litigation. Hire people you trust, give them good training, then give them space to do their jobs. They’ll be more productive, and they’ll protect your company along the way.
Topics: Business Ethics, Lauren Recommends, Risk Management, corporate responsibility, customer relations, ethics |
August 28th, 2010 at 2:13 am
Right on, Lauren.
There is nothing more infuriating for a customer than when employees they have to deal with are barred from exercising plain common-sense because of overly rigid rules and procedures.
Granted, for reasons such as safety or legal requirements, there may be some specific situations whereby inflexible rules may be necessary.
But this is not the case for most situations. In most situations, companies are best off allowing their employees to exercise basic common-sense.
And really, if companies can’t trust their staff with issues of basic common-sense, there is something going wrong with their hiring practices.