Rick Arquilla, president and chief operating officer of the plumbing and drain service Roto-Rooter Services Co., stood in front of a call center in Chicago and told America he was going to test the dispatch system he helped design.
He traded in his suit, tie and title for jeans, a blue flannel shirt and a camouflage hat and entered the center using the persona Hank Denman. After all, this was the TV show “Undercover Boss.”
His first assignment was learning the system. The camera zoomed in on Arquilla. Pen and paper in hand, he scrambled to take notes as the operator taught him dispatch’s color-coding system.
“So orange is before green?” he says.
“Yes,” says Candace, the operator. “Am I confusing you?”
“Yeah,” Arquilla says. “See, I’m color blind.”
Dead silence.
Arquilla found it somewhat humorous that a color-blind man would develop a model based on colors. Then again, he never intended on using it.
How often are decisions made at the top of your organization without really understanding what it means for the people who do the work? Perhaps you’ve gathered your direct reports in a room to piece together a plan without employee input.
“It caused me to pause and say, ‘Wait a minute,’” says Arquilla, who oversees 3,500 employees. “There are a lot of decisions that we make here, at the home office, and implement from conceptual stage to actually rolling it out nationwide. Maybe no one who has to do the work ever got a chance to try it to see if it works or not or give us feedback and say, ‘Most of it’s right, but some of it doesn’t make any sense.’”
If you want a truly effective organization, you have to constantly engage the people in your company who are closest to the customer and who are actually doing the work.
“It’s slowing down for a second and asking do we have enough checks and balances along the way to make sure that we don’t have unintended consequences from being too quick to want to implement a general policy, a new procedure, a new way of running our business. And we haven’t spent enough time getting people on the front lines to give us open, honest feedback.”
