While all organizations’ reason for being is customer satisfaction, this mission cannot be accomplished either only by the owner-managers or only by technology or only by capital injection, or by a combination of the three. If this were true, all organizations would comprise only investors, financiers, and customers.
That the investors cannot be connected with the customers without a whole gamut of stakeholders who provide input for conversion into output demonstrates that organizational definition remains incomplete without the inclusion of these other stakeholders.
Most significant of all is the stakeholder whose prime responsibility it is to convert inputs into outputs. Unless there is this workforce at various levels, there is nothing that the investors can deliver to the customers. And what is delivered to the customer is as good or as bad as the quality of inputs and the quality of work that goes into the conversion of inputs into outputs.
While the customer is at centre stage, customers will be served satisfactorily only if the input providers and input converters perform well. For an organization to be customer-centric, therefore, it has to be people-centric in general and employee-centric in particular. That is, the relationship of KESC with all its stakeholders will need to be a principled one if it aims to provide quality service that would yield customer satisfaction.
KESC’s key stakeholders include the suppliers, creditors, government, competitors, community/environment, and, of course, the employees.
The outlook of KESC’s new management towards the employees is currently coming across as a paternalistic one as the management seems to be concerned about their “welfare” and intend to “take care of the workers’ families.” No one expects KESC to be a welfare organization for none other than its own workforce and their families. Nor should KESC’s workers be so helpless that they cannot “take care of” their own kith and kin.
Organizations that aim to deliver customer satisfaction should first be delivering satisfaction to the intervening stakeholder of employees, failing which both the employees and the customers will remain dissatisfied. If a one-to-one exchange relationship is envisaged with the customers, that is, service for a fee, a similar exchange relationship should be struck with the employees. That is adequate compensation for service.
And just like returns to suppliers, creditors, and government are given for their provisions and facilitation services and is not viewed as “welfare” or “taking care,” similarly, returns to the pre-eminent stakeholder of employees should be provided in the same spirit of mutual exchange.
Unless the view of pay, wages, and compensation as charity is shed, organizations will not mature to the required levels. For those who receive “charity” in return for crucial inputs they provide to the organization have a low self-image that is difficult to translate into the desired high-quality service image.
It is the self-image of workers at the lowest level that needs to be enhanced if organizational image is to be built. A sad belief system in our culture is that it is only the highest educated or those in high positions who can go up the needs hierarchy and can then eventually self-actualize. And this belief system is reinforced primarily because we keep the lowest levels trapped in the satisfaction of their lower order needs by not compensating them adequately in proportion to their contribution to the organization.
If the basic principles of personnel management are followed, new managements must commence by streamlining the personnel management practices. First and foremost, there must be talk of a rational compensation structure acceptable to all that must pre-empt deviant inclinations.
So, those most concerned about wrong billings and other deviant practices at the KESC that antagonize the consumers must support a cease-and-desist operation through an acceptable compensation structure. Unless this is done, quality service will be difficult to expect from KESC, whose operations cannot possibly be manned by a few at the top. The rank and file, no matter how condescendingly they may be viewed by the affluent and educated, have the intelligence to undo whatever the new incumbents may want to do.
The managerial challenge at the KESC is, therefore, to harness this “intelligence” and channelize it towards productive and efficient operations. This intelligence can, however, be capitalized upon only if the workers are viewed and treated as adults with IQs second to none. It is obligatory upon managements to satisfy the lower order needs of pay and compensation without which the workforce will remain dissatisfied, with their dissatisfaction spilling over into the quality of service that KESC will provide.
For the service providers caught up in basic needs, the basic needs will remain “first” and customer will fail to get an adequate share of the workforce’s interest, attention, and imagination.
As KESC will make headway on the basic needs’ front of the workforce, it will have moved several notches up on the customer satisfaction front. The next major challenge for KESC will be to integrate and involve the workforce that compensation alone cannot do.
Compensation is a satisfier whose absence leads to dissatisfaction, but whose presence may not energize the human soul enough for more action. At this stage, we need to shed the myth that workers are not inclined towards higher-level actions as all they are caught up in are physiological needs.
Global corporations engulfing the world have workforces that not only possess a high level of self-esteem but also self-actualize. And these highest levels of needs we see satisfied in our very own skilled workers, craftsmen, mechanics, plumbers, carpenters, tailors, and cooks alike. It is the zeal and pride of these technicians that under-girds our superstructure. And it is this sense of mission and pride that we need to replicate on our factory floors in general and in the KESC in particular.
A workforce having a sense of material and intellectual deprivation will be too resentful to perform. It is this sting that needs to be taken out of the KESC workers, who are too aware to be treated as children on the floor. Also, they have information about the organization and its operations.
In knowledge economy, to have information is to have power. In traditional management, it was believed that only the top management is “in the know.” This is no longer the case. In this information age, all are “in the know” to the extent required for the fulfilment of their obligations. Performing organizations, therefore, attempt to make individual goals congruent with the goals of the organization.
Building on the basic needs goal, it is the intellect of the worker that needs to be challenged next so that his commitment to the organization may then be galvanized. This is, however, possible only if the KESC attempts to become “boundary-less” in more ways than one.
The rapport KESC is trying to establish with some of its big consumers in business and industry shows that the boundary between KESC and this consumer segment is becoming porous. Information exchange is likely to help KESC improve its performance if it also brings its boundaries down with other segments of consumers, the community, and society. Having done this, the boundaries within will need to be pulled down too. And information will need to be shared between the management and the workers as also between the various layers of management and departments, horizontally and vertically.
In this day and age, for those who think that KESC can become customer driven through a control-based management are dead wrong. As KESC’s new management deals with the workers, they will find that they are dealing with informed and vocal adults. Deprived they may be in material terms, but not in terms of ideas and speech that abound.
To be effective, the management will need to strike an information-based relationship with the workforce, which is several steps ahead of a mere “open to ideas and suggestions.”
While the latter works through a drop box in which suggestions may be dropped, an information-based relationship is a continuous interaction and involvement in decision-making. Although the above shows that no one layer or two have a monopoly over ideas, top management still has a role. The top management not only creates an enabling environment but a work climate that fosters learning, change, and institutionalization of ideas emanating from various levels. They not only orchestrate the process but endeavour to build social capital and cohesiveness through which the organization works in sync.
So, while the KESC’s new management is contemplating more training and refresher courses thereby building human capital, this human capital should gel into a cohesive whole to realize KESC’s mission of customer satisfaction and delight soon enough.