The Economist: How to stop red tape rage sinking morale

Interrogate the internet about the most ridiculous rules people have experienced at work, and the stories roll in.

The lab assistant instructed to label the expiry dates on all chemical samples, who was reprimanded for not writing when a bottle of sand would go off (to comply, they put in a date 65m years hence).

The accounting firm where only partners were allowed to have plants over a certain height.

The company where employees were required to submit requests to maintenance if they wanted the height of their office chairs to be adjusted.

The baroque limitations on how often people are allowed to go to the lavatory.

These are extreme examples of corporate red tape.

But most companies will have at least one pettifogging rule that hinders more than it helps.

Does it really make sense to enforce a rigid definition of time off if someone has suffered a bereavement?

Does getting an expenses claim paid have to feel like something Kafka would reject as implausible?

By the same token, every company will have settled into a way of doing things that might once have served a useful purpose but no longer does.

Such stones in the corporate shoe are that most welcome of things for managers: the quick win.

Quick wins are often associated with incoming bosses.

A new broom is more likely to see things that seem to make little sense, and on closer inspection, actually make none.

Staff are happier to say what bothers them: any implied criticism is aimed at the old regime.

It helps a new chief executive if they can make changes that quickly demonstrate to staff and customers their ability to make things better.

Small victories also give them permission to take their time over bigger decisions.

Hubert Joly, whose turnaround of Best Buy, an electronics retailer, has become case-study catnip, found nothing but quick wins when he became the CEO in 2012.

He credits an initial stint working at a Best Buy store in St Cloud, Minnesota with giving him many of his ideas. Staff were upset that the previous management had cut employee discounts on products.

The store gave too much space to fading product categories like DVDs and CDs, and not enough to fast-growing ones like mobile phones.

Flat-screen televisions were frequently damaged, partly because of the way they were stacked.

All of these were easy enough to change.

In “The New CEO”, a book on how to make a successful start to life in the top job, Ty Wiggins of Russell Reynolds, an executive-search firm, tells a couple of other quick-win stories.

One boss found that people at headquarters were distributed chaotically throughout two buildings just across the street from each other.

Within a month he had decided where everyone should be sitting, and saved a lot of time and moaning in the process.

Stephanie Tully, the boss of Jetstar, a low-cost Australian airline, made it her business to meet as many employees as she could in her first weeks.

Time and again, she heard complaints from crew about how much they hated the uniform.

An early decision to design a new range sent a very visible signal that they were being listened to.

After a while, though, it gets harder for bosses to spot this low-hanging fruit.

They may have moved on to bigger things; they may well have introduced the rule that most infuriates everyone.

But they should be in no doubt that quick wins will still exist.

Even in efficient companies, rules and bureaucracy accumulate.

The trick is to have a way to keep finding them.

In “The Friction Project”, a recent book by Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao, two Stanford University academics, the authors write about a programme at Hawaii Pacific Health called “Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff”.

Clinical staff were asked to nominate idiotic record-keeping processes that they wanted to ditch.

Eliminating a single data-entry requirement, to click on a patient’s name each time nurses and nursing assistants did an hourly round, freed up thousands of hours a year.

In a similar vein AT&T has a scheme called Project Raindrops, which encourages employees to submit ideas for policies that should be ditched, from excessive approval processes to a virtual private network that logged people out more often than anyone could bear.

There is no reason why bosses cannot do “listening tours” throughout their tenure.

Getting managers to do front-line work is another way for them to see where process has got out of hand.

Running a business is hard. Why turn down the chance of a quick win?