Broken Culture

Why 1p led to a radical company

I was filling my car with petrol the other day — and as well as having the usual heart-attack about costs, I was musing about a talk I was due to give on culture. All at once, I had an incredibly vivid memory of my first ever job…

Pump number 2, Sir? That will be £20.01.

The man placed a note on the counter and glanced quickly up at me. I checked the pump display. It was £20.

My reading says £20.01. Sometimes it happens.

The man gave a bark of laughter. Oh, I bet it does. A penny on every nozzle, every time someone fills up. It’s bloody theft.

I shrugged. My feet hurt. It was hot. The queue behind the man was building up.

It said £20. His voice was rising. I’m not paying it. It’s a bloody con.

Behind me, in his little office, the manager poked his head up like a meerkat, and then retreated.

It says £20.01, I repeated.

He glared at me. I glared back. Then he put his hand in his pocket, picked out a penny and flung it at my head. Fucking little jobsworth, he spat and left.

Symptom of a sick system

It was my first job — over the summer in between school and university — on the tills in a petrol station on the M5. It was minimum wage, unspeakably boring and utterly miserable.

The customers hated the place. They didn’t want to be there, but obviously, driving along the motorway, they needed petrol and were forced to pay our extra-high prices. The place was huge and impersonal, but really busy, meaning long queues and frustrated people.

One thing they really hated was that sometimes, after filling up and replacing the nozzle, the metre would click up a single penny. The customers and the staff didn’t know why. It just happened. If they were paying by card they normally didn’t care too much, but if they’d deliberately put in a certain amount then that extra penny — which they might not have, really, really, annoyed them.

If my angry customer had refused to pay (instead of throwing the penny at my head), I had two choices:

1) I could take his license plate number and call the police. By driving away without paying the full amount owing, he was — technically — a ‘drive off’.

2) I could let it go and accept that my till would be out by a penny.

I didn’t want to take option 1. The police tended to get a bit stroppy on being asked to chase down the motorway for 1p. But I also didn’t want to take option2 — because that 1p, would eventually come out of my pay packet.

When someone drove off without paying for petrol, the employee was expected to take down the license plate and call the police. In a forecourt of 32 filling stations, this was close to impossible. If you failed, if a cheque was unsigned, if the till was out in any way, full cost was deducted from your wages.

What was the result?

The company rule was intended to stop employees allowing friends or criminals to fill up for free and then report it as a ‘drive-off’. But since drive-offs happened no matter how careful or honest the employee, it was bitterly resented and caused unintended consequences.

The employees all stole to cover drive offs. When a customer paid with cash, the employee would void the transaction, smile nicely, and pocket the money. They would help one another out as well — handing over stolen money to cover the shortfall in a particular till. My drive-offs were often generously covered for me by others.

It’s not that surprising that this spread. Staff also began to steal a little for themselves each day… Most took home an extra £10 in their pockets — more than two hours pay. Theft of stock was also common. Even the toilet paper was kept under lock and key because staff stole it. I didn’t steal money — not due to superior morals — but because I was too scared of getting caught. But I ate crisps or chocolate during the long, boring night shift and helped the shelf-stocker falsify the returns of wasted or spoiled goods.

Toxic Relations

The manager knew everyone was on the take. And he hated us accordingly. He used to creep about and jump out unexpectedly trying to catch us at it. He shouted accusations, his spit flecking our ugly uniforms.

Manager and staff were locked into an adversarial relationship: our cunning pitted against his authority. He was no doubt under enormous pressure to crack down on theft, and his shouting and bullying probably stemmed from a forcefully applied carrot and stick.

Employees were also directly locked in battle with customers — if they stole, we were punished; if they wanted something extra, we were berated for giving in; if they complained, we were told off. We delighted in frustrating — not only the shouters — but all customers. We said no to their requests for water to mop their car-screens or to tell us the hand-towel was finished; when they came in to explain they’d missed their exit, we blankly informed them they faced a 15-mile drive to the next.

How could it have been different?

Let’s take a small problem, something that made customers unhappy — the extra penny.

Staff knew how much this frustrated and angered customers. Every till would have at least one complaint per shift. Over a year, that equates to 4,380 angry customers — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because for every customer who expresses his anger, there are a dozen more who are annoyed but keep quiet.

What could we have done?

1) We could have explained why it happened. When a nozzle is replaced, the pressure inside the hose changes allowing the level to drop back and for the machine to register the extra teaspoon of petrol that had been delivered but not measured.

We didn’t know this. I had to google it while writing this. But someone in the company knew it — they had to, because the weights and measures regulations are adhered to and the tolerances of each pump must be accurately measured.

2) We could have given the penny back or said not to worry about it.

Indeed, you’ll find many service stations nowadays have a little saucer filled with a few pennies and a cheery sign telling customers to help themselves if the pump went over.

3) We could have made it up in some other way — handing over a string of the loyalty stickers, for example.

We couldn’t, because you could only hand out a set number (which was checked). Actually a classic scam was to steal the stickers and get a friend to apply for the various free gifts. The company continually tried to crack down on this and never succeeded.

The real reasons behind our lack of customer service were:

· Autonomy: there was none. We had no authority to make any change in pre-determined interactions

· Feedback: there was no channel to communicate problems, ideas or ask questions to gain information

· Culture: no motivation to improve customer service only an angry sense of being ‘owed’

The company had no ability to learn or develop. Power was concentrated at the top; knowledge was concentrated at the bottom. There was no flow between the two — except a top-down series of directives. The resulting culture was fundamentally broken — and it cost everyone. The company had a serious theft issue; customers had awful service, and employees were miserable.

The price you pay?

Is such a system is inevitable? Perhaps the low pay and high staff turnover of retail can only result in a poor culture.

Industry-wide figures for staff theft in retail estimates that the average is 1.32% of sales. Compare this to John Lewis, where the employee ownership model gives a different culture. Here, only 0.6% of sales is believed to be lost to staff pilfering. The chain has all the usual issues of retail but with the added temptation of far higher value goods to pocket than are available in a motorway service station.

It interests me that in the 20 years since I worked on the tills, technology has changed radically. Automatic license plate recognition helps counter drive-offs, loyalty cards have replaced stickers and cards and no doubt CCTV and systems makes it harder for employees to steal… Yet none of these deal with the underlying issues of a lack of autonomy and communication. They make no attempt to tackle the culture.

So unsurprisingly, customer service in petrol stations and in retail generally remains bedevilled by complaints. All the control mechanisms in the world cannot force people to be genuinely helpful and pleasant if they don’t want to be.

Some might argue that lack of competition means a motorway service station can afford to be slightly complacent about customer service. But I don’t believe that was the company’s intention — after all, they expended a great deal of money and effort on marketing, advertising, sponsorship and loyalty schemes.

In the end, I concluded that the abysmal culture was unintentional — caused by poor decisions, not deliberate choice.

Not only in retail

This sorry state of affairs may have been extreme, but it is not unique.

Over my career, I have seen staff act in ways that they know are neither in the customer’s nor the employer’s interests. The abuse of expenses and company assets can reach levels indistinguishable from theft. I have known ideas from junior staff automatically dismissed and customer satisfaction ignored because it seems more important to please the board or grasp a bonus.

Under such circumstances initiative, creativity and brilliance wither. The best people move on or perform at below par. Problems are passed up the chain; solutions are stifled or still-born; delays and the fear of making a wrong decision slows the organisation and introduces massive inefficiency. I have heard people lamenting that ‘if only they had a different boss things would improve’. A passive reliance upon authority to solve problems or change culture becomes part of the issue.

The true culprit

The months I spent in the motorway service station felt endless and I was delighted to leave. I hated being at the bottom of the hierarchy, but I assumed that I would enjoy being at the top. Middle-class, off to university and puffed up with a sense of my own entitlement, I knew the kind of job I would end up in would be as one of the executives in HQ, not on the shop floor.

It didn’t occur to me to ask whether this attitude came with an unacceptable cost. Indeed, in my first real job after university, I was delighted when I was put up in a much smarter hotel than my colleagues and could travel in a different class. When one of my staff complained about the policy, I simply felt smug that I was a ‘manager’.

I still felt pleased when I became a ‘senior manager’, but by then I had started to question at what point in the hierarchy the strange sense of frustration would disappear. How soon could I stop writing internal presentations to approvals boards and actually start approving things myself? When would this strange politicking disappear; the backroom persuasion and charming of ever more senior managers; the being the first to know what the CEO thought; the manoeuvrings to sit next to the Global VP at dinner?

I’m sorry to say that it took nearly two decades before I realised just how corrosive it could be — and not only for those at the bottom, but for all employees. I realised that those seemingly at the top — Directors, Board members, even CEOs — were frequently as constrained, demotivated and frustrated as everyone else. The waste of talent and creativity left everyone — including customers and shareholders — worse off.

I had finally realised that I needed to question the system itself, and not my position within it.

Outside the system

Along with two colleagues, I tried to find a way to change the entire system. Together we founded a very different kind of company. Gamevy is employee owned, with no managers and no imposed hierarchy. People choose what to work on; dissent is encouraged; there are very few limits to spending company resources; all information is shared transparently; leadership shifts from person to person depending on the project, an individual’s expertise, character and commitment…

We set Gamevy up, but the three of us aren’t in charge. Everyone is. To the naïve, that sounds like a recipe for anarchy. But it isn’t.

When the equivalent of customer angry over a penny uptick arrives — all of us take responsibility and try to create solutions. The developers might try to refine the nozzle’s accuracy. The designers might think about how to explain the problem. And I like to think that during a quick debate over the options one of us would suggest the incredibly simple and cheap low-fi solution… a saucer of pennies on the counter, offered to anyone who’s annoyed.

So there it is — ambushed by memory in garage forecourt, I thought about the power of culture for good and bad, and the structures, systems and behaviours that create it.

Most of all, perhaps, as I drove away, I thought about how miserable I have been at work — and how happy I am working for Gamevy.

Helen Walton (@helenislovely) is a founder at Gamevy and one of the organisers of @SparkConf, a movement dedicated to making work happier and thinking about new management techniques. Find out more http://www.sparkthechange.co.uk/ Any recommends or follows are always welcome too!