Most people can be trusted. I firmly believe this. They can be trusted to work well, act honestly, make good decisions (not always ones you agree with but ones honestly made), look out for each other and generally “do the right thing”. There can be such a focus on the minority that cannot be trusted – the stories can be so emotive – that we gear our systems and rules to cope with that minority and we can fall into the trap of believe that the majority cannot be trusted.
This often crops up in our line of work when we are looking at performance management. But the example that struck me today was Wiggle. For those of you who do not run or cycle, Wiggle is one of the main online providers of cycling and running products. Their service is excellent and their prices competitive. But today they surpassed themselves and simply because they created a process that was built on trust.
My son was bought a cycling top as a gift that doesn’t quite fit. It was bought from Wiggle. There was an immediate heart-sinking moment of working out how we would get the top back to the buyer who could return it and get the new sized top and send it over to us. Until we looked at the Wiggle policy which is … If you have received an item as a gift, just fill out a form, post it back with the item and either get a credit or receive a differently sized version. No receipt. No linking of the original purchase. These are branded goods – I could have got them from anywhere. It is easy to see how to abuse this system. But, with a bit of trust, the service is incredible and I wouldn’t hesitate to use Wiggle for gift purchases in the future.
I’m not naive – there may be some hard headed calculation of likely abuse, there may be some controls in place, but fundamentally this is built on trust and the majority of people can be trusted.
When working on a new process this year – whether for performance management or anything else – let’s work on the basis that people can be trusted and design the forms for the majority.
Brendan
www.bowlandsolutions.com
