Do you Trust your Employees to Enter a $3.01 Coupon?

What we have here is a lack of trust.

A few days ago, my wife and I made our weekly trek to the grocery store. This time, though, we armed ourselves with a $5.00 coupon that was included in a merchant discount book we had purchased during a school fundraising event. Little did we know that the $5.00 coupon exposed a trust issue at the grocery store.

After stacking our cart with groceries — many more than we had originally planned to purchase, by the way — we navigated our way to a register. Once the cashier finished scanning our groceries, we handed her the $5.00 coupon, which she recognized.

And then we waited.

And then we waited a little bit more.

Apparently, the grocery store has a policy that requires a cashier to obtain manager approval to process any coupon over $3.00. In other words, a cashier can process a $3.00 coupon, but not a $3.01 coupon, without manager approval. Our coupon, which exceeded the $3.00 threshold by two whole dollars, required the cashier to summon a manager to the register so that the manager could physically enter the code to process the coupon.

When the manager left, I quietly asked the cashier, with tongue-in-cheek, why she wasn’t trusted to process a $5.00 coupon. The cashier, shaking her head in frustration, explained the policy to me, adding that she had been a loyal employee of the store for over 20 years.

This unfortunate occurrence — and it is unfortunate — immediately reminded me of Stephen H.R. Covey’s bestselling book, The Speed of Trust, which anyone with supervisory duties should read.

According to Covey, a low-trust environment produces two undesired consequences:

• increased costs; and

• reduced speed.

The grocery store’s policy certainly reduced the speed of its operations: my wife and I, together with the customers behind us, had to wait for a manager to process the coupon. Notably, the manager herself had to temporarily leave her register to tend ours, which increased the waiting time of even more customers.

In the end, the policy’s arbitrary distinction between a $3.00 coupon and a $3.01 coupon doesn’t make much “sense.”

This week, take a moment to assess the level of trust in your business. And be honest! 🙂

• Are your employees trusted to process customer transactions without the necessity — and hassle — of manager approval?

• Does your business have any arbitrary policies that obstruct exceptional customer service and frustrate employees?

• If you are a supervisor, how can you extend more trust to your staff?

Although extending trust to employees may result in surrendering a sense of control, you’ll soon discover that the benefits of a high-trust environment — reduced costs, increased speed, and higher employee morale, just to name a few — far outweigh the disadvantages, including the risk of poor customer service, of a low-trust culture.

We “trust” that you’ll have a “customerific” week!

Mark