2007 should be the year of good manners in Irish Businesses
By Peter Cluskey, Irish Examiner
Friday 16th March, 2007
WHEN grumpy old men and women complain that businesses in prosperous 21st century Ireland are not as well-mannered as they used to be - from receptionists who cut to the piped music without telling you where you’re being transferred, to shop assistants who’ve apparently forgotten the words “hello”, “goodbye”, “please” and “thank you”, to managers who have no interest in how their clients are being treated - are they being just that, grumpy?
Or have they a point? Perhaps when these heroic grumps wail, like Victor Meldrew, “I don’t believe it!”, they are after all reflecting the horror of the silent majority at a general coarsening of our interaction with many of these businesses - to whom, let’s not forget, we all too frequently pay good money.
Now there’s evidence. A new survey by Dublin consultants, Business Performance Perspectives, conducted at the end of 2006, shows that not alone were the majority of their respondents dissatisfied with the level of manners in business - but more than a quarter of them said they would go so far as to take their business elsewhere if they were at the receiving end of bad manners.
Not surprisingly, ninety-nine percent of respondents said they believed manners were an important element of doing business. Then, when asked the simple question, “In your opinion are business people in Ireland as mannerly today as they were 10 years ago”, a surprising 60 percent - coming up on two-thirds- said no.
Asked the follow-up question, “What action would you take if you were on the receiving end of bad manners?”, 28 percent said they would move their business elsewhere, 32 percent said they would report the incident to a manager, while 34 percent said they would give immediate feedback to the individual concerned.
And equally interestingly, fewer of us than ever are willing to stay quiet and accept bad manners. Only six percent said they would do nothing.
“Personally I believe we’ve completely lost the plot when it comes to manners”, maintains Pamela Fay, Managing Director of Business Performance Perspectives and formerly Business Performance Manager with Diageo Ireland.
“Even the simple things like saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ are disappearing. Often when you go into a shop, the shop assistant won’t say anything. In many cases they won’t even look at you.
“But I believe more and more companies are becoming aware of this. The majority of people who took part in our survey are business people. MDs are having these experiences themselves in shops and restaurants and when they deal with other businesses and they’re starting to ask themselves - how are my staff treating my customers when I’m not there? So they’re beginning to see the value of managing each interaction between their company and their clients.
“Economic prosperity is fantastic. It’s given us all much more freedom then we’ve ever had. But many companies are starting to take a step back and say to themselves - in the longterm, we need to have a good reputation, we need to have good people working for us and we need to be more active about taking care of our relationship with our customers. That’s where business etiquette comes in.”
So that’s one-half of Business Performance Perspectives’s business. “When we start working with a company, we typically take staff in groups of 12 people a day and talk, for instance, about personal and company branding. What does the company stand for, and how do we reflect that? It gets individuals thinking about their place in the company and how they see their careers progressing.
“The bottom line from everyone’s point of view - whether they’re employees, managers or owners - is that being bad mannered shows a lack of respect for customers, colleagues and business associates. And not only that, but in the longterm it invariably leads to lost revenue and negative brand perceptions as well.”
The other half of Business Performance Perspectives is performance management. “In a sense they’re two sides of the same coin”, says Fay. “Whereas the manners side is about how you do your job and how you interact, the performance side is about focusing on the end you want to achieve.
“We might, for example, take a company strategy, break it down into two pages and extrapolate from it a series of monthly targets to be met right across the organisation. It’s all about targets and results. It makes you think about what the key drivers are in your business. And it makes people accountable.
“So everyone has one or two targets. People feel they’re working towards the same objective. There are one-on-one reviews once a month. And ideally good performance is bonus-related to the tune of maybe 10 or 15 percent of salary.
“It’s particularly effective in an employees’ market because those who are fitting in well, who are performing well or even outperforming their targets really get a lot out of it - both in terms of satisfaction and in terms of reward.
“A survey by the Harvard Business Review some time back showed that executive teams spend far too little of their monthly meetings dealing with strategy - and far too much fire-fighting and discussing day-to-day issues.
“They may look at the strategy plan quarterly or half-yearly, but by then if there’s a problem it’s too late. All hell breaks lose at the end of the year when the bottom line is not up to expectations - but it could have been avoided.”
(Peter Cluskey is at petercluskey@yahoo.fr)
© 2007 Irish Examiner