Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [95]
Nobody dreams of working in a call center. But USAA has always depended on it. It has to, because its customers—many of them active servicemen and -women—are scattered all over the world. So McDermott couldn’t dispense with this thankless job, but he could make it more satisfying and—who knows?—maybe even enjoyable. “I had to make the jobs more meaningful,” he said. That meant ditching the bureaucracy and giving his people the authority to do what their job title implied—serve their customers. In place of a multilayered, slow, and bureaucratic claims-approval process, he authorized the people answering the phones to settle claims up to a certain amount on the spot.
“I would approve anything that made the job easier,” he said. That meant automating the most tedious, repetitive tasks. It also meant training—as much as sixteen weeks before a representative would get online. Training his people to do more than read a script to a customer with a problem would help them do their jobs and take advantage of their newfound freedom.
But McDermott had a deeper motive for empowering his people with tools and skills. “If you enrich the jobs,” he said, “you enrich the people.” McDermott talked a lot about people’s “God-given talents.” His view was that everyone was good at something—was good for something. And if their job allowed them to pursue that talent and that interest, it would be fulfilling. It would make them happy. Answering phones doesn’t need to be dreary if your job is not just answering the call, but helping the person on the other end of the line—sometimes with life-size issues. For some USAA employees, helping people in this way might be just what they were after. Others would find satisfaction in something else, and so McDermott’s campaign to remake USAA into the best customer-service organization in the country had another element—freeing his employees to move around within the company. If their interests and talents ran toward information technology, he’d train them in that. If they had a mind for the law but no legal education, he’d train them in that and send them off to claims processing. Like Bill Gore at W. L. Gore & Associates and Jean-François Zobrist at FAVI, he actively encouraged people to break out of what they were doing if they felt stuck or inclined to try something else. Instead of pinning people down, he gave them the tools to grow and, with that growth, the freedom to choose what they wanted to do inside the company—or in some cases, anywhere else.
In many traditional companies, this kind of mobility is discouraged. After all, it takes time and money to train someone to do a job, and the last thing an employer wants is to waste those resources when an employee wants to move on, unless, of course, her unit is trimmed down—which is unfortunately how “mobility” is often practiced in companies. Well, it turns out there is something worse than that—keeping people in jobs they don’t want to do. We mentioned in chapter 4 that Jeff Westphal of Vertex likes to tell new hires, “Welcome to Vertex; you’re free to leave.” Westphal’s point is that he doesn’t want anyone to feel trapped into working there if she’s no longer happy. Zappos’s Tony Hsieh, recall, takes it a step further and offers new hires a quitting bonus of $2,000 if they quit during their paid training.
The freedom to leave is the ultimate form of mobility—especially when it’s subsidized. But if you’ve got nowhere