Rules vs Guidelines

I am having a bit of a battle with a train operating company at the moment over a Delay Repay claim.  I was travelling from Liverpool to Dorking which required three changes, two of which were to travel across London from Euston Station to Vauxhall.

The first part of my journey was delayed so I was later than scheduled arriving in Euston.  However, I managed to catch up that time travelling to Vauxhall.  The official time for this part of the journey is 40 minutes, I did it in about 15 minutes.  I therefore caught my scheduled train from Vauxhall and expected to be home on time.

Until that train got cancelled mid journey leaving me to travel a circuitous route back to Dorking, arriving 45 minutes later than planned.  As a result, I claimed a repayment for my delay.  However, it has been rejected because I made too short a connection in London so my journey is not valid so cannot be compensated!

The ridiculous thing is that had that last train not been cancelled, I would never have claimed for a delay although I could have done as my journey into London was delayed and therefore qualified me for a repayment!  They are the rules!

This is why I dislike rules and prefer guidelines.

There are some rules that are important, obviously!  Wearing seatbelts and not stabbing people are a few that are useful!!

However, in most of our work, guidelines are more useful than rules.  The problem with rules is that they cannot account for every scenario.  Circumstances will occur that have not been considered and if we only have rules to go by, then we cannot accommodate different situations.

With guidelines, we give the people judging the situation the latitude to decide.  They can review the circumstances and make a decision accordingly.  Of course, we need to trust them to make sensible decisions.  We need to train them to be able to make good judgements. 

I suspect that this is where the problems arise.  Management do not trust their workers to make the best decisions so impose rules that need to be followed.  Of course, this results in upsetting customers and more work for everyone but management probably do not see that so do not care as much.

For the same reasons, I dislike detailed sales processes.  No process can ever capture all of the possible scenarios for first meeting a customer and managing them through the process to a sale.  However, management like to dictate what should be done so that they can control it and measure it.  Again, I believe that it produces poor results.

Train people to do the job, reward them appropriately for doing it and trust them to do it.  The training is a very important part of this.  You cannot expect people to make good decisions if they do not have the knowledge to be able to make them.  Experience will help significantly but for new hires etc, training is a crucial requirement for being able to do the job well.

So, please, please, please! Train your staff, give them some guidelines and let them do the best job that they can.  Imposing rules will frustrate and demotivate staff and result in less revenue.