Quit blaming the help

Abjectly horrible customer service is one of the CNMI’s less endearing traits, and it’s a leading gripe among tourists and tour agents. Locals learn to adjust their buying habits to steer around the worst places, but tourists don’t have the chance to concoct such strategies. I’ve seen a lot of $80 meals in hotels that had worse service than a fast food place has; hey, fine with me, I won’t go back, but probably not so fine if it was your first impression of Saipan for a three-day vacation.

We’ve all got some fun tales to tell. There’s the stationary store that wouldn’t carry notebook paper because it would always sell out, and therefore was “hard to keep in stock.”

And there was the bookstore clerk who flatly refused to order Thoreau’s Walden, since it was so old it “would be out of print.”

And most recently there was the waitress who refused to make us a fresh pot of coffee because there was still some six-hour old brew in the pot and it would be a “waste of money” to brew a new one. You’d think a financial genius like that would be on Wall Street, but I guess she took a wrong turn and wound up on Middle Road; we didn’t ask her, though, all four of us went elsewhere for our lunch and java.

Yet there is a precocious genius, or at least a rationality, behind all the foregoing anecdotes (none of which are second hand, they all happened to yours truly). All of these workers were minimizing their expenditure of effort, right? Well…why not? Clerks get paid the same whether they’re good or bad. Tipping isn’t really a generous deed in Saipan and consequently holds little incentive for many waitresses. Any worker in the world knows you’re not going to get rich on minimum wage, so the rational gig is to expend just enough effort not to get fired. Any effort above and beyond that threshold is wasted.

So they might not know the phrase, but these workers are engaging in a process of “constrained optimization.” Economists need computers and advanced mathematical techniques to solve these problems. By contrast, many hourly workers are solving the basic form of these problems at an intuitive level, as they seek the level of Optimal Effort. Is that cool or what? Maybe Wall Street and Middle Road aren’t that far apart, after all…well, unless you’re looking for a cup of drinkable coffee.

Meanwhile, let’s acknowledge that there are a lot of hard working folks in Saipan, and, yes, some are store clerks and, yes again, some are waitresses. It’s not that I’m ignoring them, it’s that I have a short attention span and can only contemplate one fact at a time.

And the basic fact no matter where you are is that humans, like water, will flow through the path of least resistance. For many people in many situations, it’s a perfectly rational way to behave. Successful management systems don’t buck this trend, they recognize it, and design a process that requires very specific employee actions for every reasonably conceivable case. This puts the employee in a position of being either clearly obedient, or clearly disobedient, for any given situation. Optimal Effort is no longer the issue, at least insofar as management enforces its dictates by firing the disobedient. Actually, I don’t really know what “insofar” means, but I always wanted to use that word. It seems so formal.

Anyway, why should an hourly clerk be put in a position to make on the spot decisions that management should have thought through, and created a procedure for, way before the fact? Why, indeed. When I hear about incompetent workers, I’m usually hearing about it from incompetent managers.

It is not Saipan’s labor, but Saipan’s management, that is coming up short in many cases. The wheels of commerce and of competition may grind slowly, but they do grind, and poorly managed businesses will continue to go out of business, and some clueless owners will blame their workers, or the economy, or the government, instead of putting the blame where it really belongs: On themselves.