The dangerous power of expectations

The problem with promises, implicit or tacit, is that they create expectations.  So what?

Here’s the problem with that:

As business owners we make promises, whether you want to or not.  When we make a promise we are creating the future for other people.  People come and expect that something will happen within a reasonable delay and with respect and a fair price.

I have stopped using stores for numerous reasons, all related to failed expectations.

One of the local sporting stores wanted to charge me for warentee support for a product that they sell and carried a lifetime guarentee!

I had to chase after the regional distributor and then finally the manufacturer in Germany to get warranty service from my local vendors.  It took me almost two years of intermittent effort to get a lifetime guarantee honoured.

This is exactly the opposite of what we expect of a company that offers a strong warranty on their products.  No one said to me when I purchased my product that the service would be fast and easy.  They just said that they would replace them if they broke due to manufacturers defects.  But our expectations turn around something will happen within a reasonable delay and with respect and a fair price.

So the only way for us to satisfy our clients is to allow them live fulfilled expectations.  So it is up to us to manage the things that we can.

We have to justify:

• the time it takes
• the price
• and the relationships

If you can manage those things then you will be able to have happy clients with fulfilled expectations. They will thus have nothing but good things to say about them because you held up your end of the bargain.

Be proactive and control the promises and turn any tacit agreements into voiced agreements so that people won’t be surprised by their own expectations being unfulfilled!

Good luck and take control.

Equal pay for equal work…point by point! Équité salariale

Pay equity or as they say in French Équité salariale is one of the more interesting things that our government has produced is a way of measuring the value of a category of work for a given business. This system is supposed to be used to eliminate inequality between stereotypically gender biased job types…i.e. secretaries are girls and mechanics are boys. And since boy-work is harder mechanics are paid more…

While sexism is an important issue, the real value of this process is to give management a clear view of how much their employees are making relative to how hard their work is, inside the company!

The boring part here is the mechanics…but here’ a brief explanation.

So the above graph shows the median pay for the enterprise in question which we’re going to call The Most Amazing Stuff Ever Made inc. or MASEM inc.

We distribute points to six sub factors, training required, experience required, intellectual effort, environmental factors, physical risk, physical difficulty, and responcibility. We then weight these sub factors and assign a value to the category of employment.

Looking a the chart we see MASEM has 9 different categories of employment. Five blue, that’ for boys, and four pink, that’s for girls. Then we follow the x-axis and see points between 400-820. That’s a measure of how hard the job is based on a number of sub-factors that we use to assign points to a category.

On the y-axis we measure the money distributed to the different categories after taking into account hourly wages and benefits. Oddly enough there is a rather consistent internal logic in this company as the lowest earner is getting around 16.50/hr for 430 points of value attributed the their work; and the highest earners in the company are making around 33$/hr for their 820 points of work value. But we see there are categories that are over paid for their work and people that are under paid for their work…. Oddly enough it’s the boys that are penalised in this company.

Something for MASEM management to consider the next time they have to consider their pay raises and annual reviews of their employees.