“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess” – Ronald Coase.
Let’s start this blog entry by challenging your imagination a bit. Imagine a big project. It doesn’t matter which project or in which industry. It could be a big construction project, an R&D project, a large marketing campaign or the introduction of a new IT system. The only important thing is that it is a really big and complex project with many people working in it. As every big project it will have sub-project leaders. Each of them is responsible for a certain aspect of the project. In an R&D project these might, among others, be for example sub-project leaders for electronics development, software development and integration testing. As in every project the project leader needs to prepare a regular project status report. For this status report it’s enough to put a green, yellow or red light at each milestone and at the status of the different sub-projects and the project as a whole.
To prepare this report the project leader has to gather the relevant information. Now just lean back, close your eyes and imagine how the project leader will gather this information.
I am sure the majority of you came up with the most obvious solution. The project leader schedules a meeting with the sub-project leaders and just asks them how things are. That’s usually how we work together: we communicate.
Now let’s look a little further into the future. The big project you just imagined is significantly behind schedule and slightly over budget. This has already happened to quite a few projects within your company. Because of that the management decides to introduce a new IT system. This system gathers as much data as possible from everybody on every level and automatically generates status reports. These reports are always actual and visible to the management. Everybody is told this is to reduce the administrative workload and create more transparency. Furthermore having close management attention allows for additional support on short notice if necessary. People are told that eventually, this will make the life of each project member on all levels much easier.
What do you think people will think? Will they believe this story? Will they embrace the idea of a new system and willingly start to enter data in it?
Experience tells me – and probably most of you as well – that this will not be the case. Most people will be very reluctant to introduce this new data gathering system. They will probably even argue strongly against it. And this brings us to the question of today’s article: Why do people usually not like to enter data somewhere?
There are a few obvious reasons:
- people haven’t done this in the past and they don’t like changes at all
- people are afraid this creates additional workload
- people are afraid their performance is tracked
- people don’t like to give away (key) information so easily
Point one and two are more or less common sense and are addressed in most projects nowadays. The fact that many people don’t like changes or even oppose them is addressed with change management methods. The concern of possible additional workload is addressed by focusing on usability and creating a customized, well-fitting user experience. That people are afraid their performance is tracked is sometimes assumed to be the most important point by the management. However this is usually not an issue, as the data should be sufficiently high level to prevent it from being attributed to single employees. That leaves point 4: people don’t like to give away key information. From my point of view by far the most interesting point. Why do people not like to give away information that easily? Let’s answer this a little indirectly by looking at what factors are important for overall employee satisfaction. This is not really easy, as in general there are a number of factors that influence employee satisfaction. However many studies show that some of the most important ones are:
- receiving respect and credit for their work
- a feeling of responsibility and room for decision-making
These factors are actually much more important than salary for example. But this is nothing new and many companies try to use concepts like job enlargement to increase employee satisfaction.
Now let’s go back to our original question from the beginning: why do people not want to enter data in a system? Because they don’t want to give away information. And why don’t they want to give away information? Because this feels like giving away a huge part of their responsibility. Let’s look at a simple example to explain this: a manager has a question about an important topic and he needs an answer before making an even more important decision. To answer his question and to aid his decision-making he asks somebody for his opinion. This simple act of asking for an opinion actually demonstrates a huge level of trust and respect. The person he asks will certainly get the feeling that his work and his expertise is actually valuable. All this would be missing if people gave away important information easily. Everybody could just look things up without the need to ask. Of course this scenario is not the intention when a new system is introduced. However these are exactly the fears many people have at least on a subconscious level.
It goes without question that each company needs to track data. But unfortunately in many companies the reporting requirements get excessive. More and more KPIs are defined and need to be reported. But honestly: do you really need to see the average customer contacts per month? It may seem like having live data creates transparency and makes your processes much more efficient. People spend less time preparing management summaries and reports. But on the other hand this takes away some of the essential things everybody from us needs: respect and a feeling of responsibility.
You need to be careful here and find a tradeoff. Of course you need data for your business decisions but you always need to give your colleagues or employees the feeling that it is still their personal judgement you trust most. One way to do this is to introduce entry fields that ask for personal opinions instead of hard facts. You should make sure that in all your important dashboards these personal opinions are mandatory and displayed prominently. Make a point of never making a decision without personally talking to other people involved and explicitly ask for their judgement. You’ll still encounter resistance and people will never like to enter information in a system. But by constantly emphasizing how important their personal opinion is, you can ease one big reason for people’s resistance to new systems.
What are your experiences? How is reporting organized in your company? Do you use many automated IT systems? How does this influence the atmosphere?
Take Care!
Business Psychology 