Being on Holiday...

I spend quite a lot of time working with and mentoring senior managers in law firms, chambers, and commercial organisations. There are often two main things that I start by trying to get across - the importance of having some time to think, and the importance of having time to relax and recharge.

At this time of year, it is the second that I concentrate more on. In August, many of us are either on holiday or are about to go on holiday. If you are on holiday, my main point at the moment would be this: why on earth are you reading business blogs when you are on holiday! You have probably followed a link to the blog from an email or from Twitter, of you have some sort of notification that lets you know a new blog entry awaits. Again, however, why on earth are you reading this sort of thing while you are on holiday?

Most of us work rather hard and managers in organisations - particularly law firms and chambers, where few professional managers exist, and where the leadership team are managing the organisation part-time - and so it is vital that we take some time to relax and re-energise so that we can carry on the good work.

So - being on holiday. In order to be on holiday, there are a couple of things that you can do in advance that will help.

The first is to have a conversation about emails - with your secretary, with your assistant, or with your clerk. Are you going to look at emails at all over the holiday? Are you going to look at them once a day? Are you going to trust your secretary/assistant/clerk flag particular emails and only read those? Or are you going to be like Cory Doctorow (link here) who is reported to set up an autoreply when he is on holiday that says:

"I'm on vacation until x/x/2010. When I get back, I'm going to delete all the email that arrived while I was gone, so if this note is important, please send it to me again after that date."

Personally I think that approach is a little brave. My point is that it doesn't matter which of those you opt for, you should have the discussion in advance so that everyone in the office/chambers knows what your particular deal is - that way no-one is surprised that you haven't read their email for example.

The second thing you can do is have another discussion with the same people as above on the subject of contacting you while you are away. "Call me if something important come up" is hopelessly vague - you must agree what 'important' means otherwise you will either get calls to let you know that they have run out of coffee on the second floor and don't know where the petty cash is - or you will return to a smoking ruin of a building and someone saying "Oh we didn't like to bother you...".

Finally - let your most important clients know that you are going away and what the deal is about contacting you. You might say that your phone will only be on for an hour in the early evening so that you can check messages or you might prefer to tell them that you are going somewhere that has no phone reception (whether you are or not). Again the point is to set a rule and let everyone know what it is. You will be surprised about how accommodating clients usually are - after all, they go on holiday too.

Have those three discussion and it will go some way towards making sure that your holiday is as restful as possible.

Have a happy - and restful - holiday.

Lessons for Business

The expenses saga continues with our politicians, and seems to get worse at every step. Are there lessons for businesses in this sorry tale? Yes, I believe there are - but they are quite simple, straight forward lessons which I would hope that everyone knows. Sadly, the MPs' story seems to suggest that, once again, the bleeding obvious does need to be stated.

Lesson 1: Ethical standards rather than complex rules.

If you do not believe that the people who work with and for you have high ethical standards, there is no point in setting up complex rules to try to control them. Standards and principles work,in my opinion, although it may not be obvious why. There is often a delight in writing new rules to cover new situations. The difficulty with specific rules is that, if there are many of them, the lesson for staff can be "if there is no rule against it, then you can do it". By having a simple principle such as "Behave responsibly" or "Act in the best interest of the client" there is enough vagueness to persuade staff to err on the side of caution. 

I worked with one organisation which moved from a set of reasonably well understood financial principles to a 60 page set of financial regulations. Financial efficiency went downhill - partly through the complexity of the rules and partly because of the "work to the rules and only the rules" way of working.

Lesson 2: If you have done wrong - admit it and go immediately

We can all make mistakes. If a member of staff - no matter how senior - has "made a mistake with their expenses" for example, they should admit the error and then resign. This may sound as if the punishment is more serious than the "crime", however the alternative is to say "it's ok to fake some of your expenses so long as you are an important employee and we don't think it's too serious". To me this sounds rather like tempting staff to take a chance. Zero tolerance has the advantage of being easy to understand.

I worked in a hotel company which had a published zero tolerance for drinking on duty. Every member of staff knew about the rule but we didn't think it was that serious. One Saturday evening the General Manager was acting as Duty Manager, and late one night was standing at the bar drinking a small glass of beer. The Area Manager happened to visit, saw the GM drinking and fired him on the spot. We had no problem convincing staff that the rule was serious after that.

Lesson 3: Transparency is easier

The more things are kept private and secret, the more people are convinced that the reason for the secrecy is because they are being disadvantaged.

Staff expenses should be available throughout a firm (and to the shareholders or partners depending on the structure) - this leads to better behaviour from everyone since they will not only need to justify their expenses to their line manager, but to the firm as a whole. Why should anyone be ashamed of legitimate expenses? The same can be applied to most expenditure. Even salaries can be published by way of salary bands - it works in the UK Civil Service, so why not everywhere.

By considering lessons for our own workplaces, perhaps some good can come out of the mess that our MPs have made of theirs.