The Problem with Blanket Policies

When companies grow, they have to optimize, and there's nothing more optimal than having everything follow uniform plans. Only very little in life is "one size fits all." Blanket policies are horrible.

Uniformity Is A Baseline - But One MUST Plan for Customization

Let's say you have a travel policy in place and the policy restricts flights to a certain price, hotels to a certain price, etc. That's fine in theory. But now push that policy up against someone who travels nearly every week and what's going to happen? You might get rejected for a $95 upgrade to "even more legroom" or told "we can't pay $400 a night in Boston," when that's what Priceline says is the going rate for 10 miles in every direction.

If you travel nearly every week, you're going to bump against the policy all the time and it's going to become a terrible slog. If you travel once a quarter or twice a year, you might have to push for help resolving an issue, but far less often. And the policies definitely exist for a reason.

Reading this as a finance team, you'll think: "Hey, that $95 adds up." That's true. But for SOME people, a very select few, let it. For MOST people, keep the policy in place, because it's not as impactful.

The Goal With Such processes Automated Authorization

Once you're a huge entity, you can't keep hiring people to "mechanical turk" their way through all the exceptions. You need automation. It has to exist or people will get swamped managing requests. This requires lots of tuning. That's all lovely.

HOWEVER - it's easy to figure out the exceptions. If you've got three or four or even twenty people who fit a "volume user" profile, then adjust your system to allow for that. It'll still be automated. The numbers will just be higher where it makes sense.

If You Make It Hard For Me to Do My Job

I should disclaimer this by saying I'm not complaining for myself in this case. So far, I haven't traveled much since the new systems went into play. I charged a few Lyft rides on my new corporate card, but other than that, I haven't had to navigate. (I will in a few weeks, so maybe I'll complain more, then.)

Years ago, a finance department guy came to complain to me about the minutes of use on my company phone. I was managing a team of deployment engineers and we had several long multi-hour conversations on our devices during maintenance window events. He complained that I went over the hour allotment. (This was when cell phones had minute plans.)

I took my phone off my belt (nerd!) and handed it to him. I said, "Great. Here's your phone," and walked away. He panicked. Waitwaitwait. All that. I said, "Oh, tell my boss, please." And I went to the men's room.

I'm not better than anyone else. None of the people who are bumping against the policy think they're better than anyone. Their job requires a different set of parameters than other jobs. It's not rocket surgery.

If you make someone's job harder to do, what do you think comes next? Will they want to work harder or less? Will they ever want to work above and beyond the baseline, if they can't get what they need to do the job.

(That guy put my phone back on my desk and never bothered me again for the rest of my years at that company.)

Systems Require Tuning - It's Why "Balance" is So Stupid

When people talk about work/life balance, I point out that "balance" is 50/50. If you had a steak/salt balance, that's 50% salt. Not tasty.

Work takes more time than life for most jobs (especially when you take the executive path - but in all roles). Sometimes, you push life out of the way to do a bit more work. Other times, life rushes up and you might need a little time away from work.

The only "balance" is in a company realizing that the people who feel handled when they have a life situation are the people who will work hardest when work calls for more than the standard allotment.

Tuning isn't balance. Tuning is making the thing work for you. I have heart problems and have to take medication for that. Because of it, I can't take certain other medications because it would spike my heart up and over in very bad ways. The "tuning" is that I have to keep my heart rate low, so sometimes, I can't use other medicines to fix other issues. It's fair because it's NOT balanced. It works because it's not.

Blankets Are For Beds

There's no problem having a baseline policy for most all people to follow, as long as you build the exception handling for the people who don't fall into the curve. To NOT expect to do this is madness. You'll turn people off, and think about that: the people who incur the most expenses on behalf of the company are often the ones working their hardest on behalf of that company.

What do you think happens when you don't equip them to win?

I'm grateful that I work at an organization that understands this and works on our tuning all the time. I'm so glad we have supportive people who build not only the policies but the exception handling to ensure their teams can operate at the levels they're being called to perform at over the course of their career.

Don't quote policies. Help people tune. It's so much more helpful.

Chris...