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Principle replaces policy

The difference one word can make

Years ago, we saw the need to improve our business by increasing our focus on the ways our staff performed tasks. This included everything from answering the phone; talking to customers; working the register; and how various tasks such as unloading a truck were performed. All of these were detailed in what we called letters and were part of a notebook that we discussed at each of our bi-weekly staff meetings.

Each of these letters defined what we called our policies and procedures. Our policies were the guidelines for each of us as staff members and the procedures were the guidelines for performing the various tasks within our store.

While we had only a very few letters at the start, over a couple of years it grew to where there were 31 letters in our notebook. No, this was not some kind of manifesto we created. The notebook was created as a result of multiple discussions during our staff meetings by staff and management as to how we all thought our store should operate.

The procedures were created as our staff saw ways that we could improve how we did things. When things went wrong, creating or changing a procedure was our way of working together to develop a solution. As an example, we special ordered something for a customer and somehow when the item arrived, the item made its way to the sales floor where it was sold to someone else. The office received an invoice, and a packing slip matching the invoice could not be found. Yet, the merchandise that was listed on the invoice was on the sales floor and in our warehouse area. These are just two examples of how internally as a staff we were creating problems that should not occur.

The policies came into being for the same situation that most stores have. There were staff members who are awesome and there were staff members that were barely adequate. As an owner, we wished that every employee was awesome. The staff members that were already awesome felt they were carrying more than their share of the workload. The awesome staff also observed poor customer service by other staff members and wondered if some of the customers would ever return after the way they had been waited on.

Policies and procedures became great tools for our business. However, we came to a day when we thought about the phrase, “customer service policy”. We all have likely heard that phrase when shopping at a business and heard an employee say, “Our customer service policy is….”; unfortunately, we have rarely seen that there is any customer service within the policy. Instead, the customer service policy is more of an instruction as to how the customer is to act or respond.

And yet, we were using the word, “policy” ourselves. We made a change. Principle became the word replacing policy in our notebook. Principles because these were our standards of what we wanted to hold ourselves to with respect to our customers. Principles addressed issues such as how we answered the phone; our personal cell phones; how we dressed for work; and how we would respect our customers by not saying, “Is that all?”, or “Can I help you?”.

Perhaps small items for others, but to us we thought about how much money we spent on advertising and marketing. The customer is not as likely to remember all our billboard, radio, and social media marketing efforts as they are to remember how the staff of one business was a lot different than most others.

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This article is copyrighted by Tom Shay and Profits Plus Solutions, who can be reached at: PO Box 128, Dardanelle, AR. 72834. Phone 727-823-7205. It may be printed for an individual to read, but not duplicated or distributed without expressed written consent of the copyright owner.