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You
Don't Have To Be a Geisha To Keep Your Job and the Insulting Dress
Code
by Dr. Lynne
Curry
Question:
My boss just asked me to arrange for female "escorts"
for a group of male clients visiting our company from Japan. Although
our company is based in the United States, we do the bulk of our
business with Japanese and Korean companies and my boss and our
sales manager recently visited these two countries. While in Japan,
our primary Japanese client hosted them to an evening out with female
courtesans as escorts.
My
boss is a proud man and wants to reciprocate "in style".
Since he can't stand being told "I don't know" or "we
can't do this," I need to find a way to find some female escorts.
I also get the feeling that if I can't come up with someone to hire,
he'll expect me to come through with a few female friends. Help
me get out of this.
Answer:
Tell your boss you have put some thought into how to reciprocate
"in style." Explain his Japanese hosts treated him to
an evening filled with a quality Japanese cultural experience. Say
that although we have no local equivalent to courtesans, you can
help him to reciprocate exactly as his Japanese hosts did, by offering
an evening filled with the most wonderful cultural experiences locally
available. Tell him you think they will appreciate that more than
if you provide them a weak carbon copy of courtesans and he then
risks what might happen if an untrained "courtesan" makes
a culturally unforgivable mistake.
Question:
When a top company manager recently saw a cuss word on an employee's
tee shirt, he came unglued. The next thing we employees knew, we
had a Draconian dress code in effect even on casual Fridays. When
we protested to our supervisor, she said, "You guys let casual
Friday become casual everyday. No wonder they created a dress code."
This dress code makes no sense for those of us who never interact
with the public and a bunch of us don't have the money to spend
on fancy clothes and on the cleaning bill to get these clothes clean
when we work all day around files or machinery. Help us talk reason
to our bosses. We want our tee shirt freedom back.
Answer:
If you want a revised dress code, you need to propose a reasonable
alternative to the newly created code. Otherwise, you give your
managers a problem yet offer no solution.
So, what do you suggest? The best dress codes make sense and provide
reasonable guidelines. For example, you might want to rule out any
tee shirts bearing vulgar statements and specify that if any supervisor
questions whether a statement fits the vulgar category, the employee
wearing the questionable tee shirt automatically needs to change
the shirt.
So,
if several of you want a new code, get together and draft a viable
solution - and one that doesn't allow for offensive clothing. You
might even suggest the company provide every employee a nicely made
tee shirt bearing the company logo.
Question
Our company operates five stores in three communities. We're just
barely making a profit given escalating product, personnel and advertising
costs. What's worse are our employee and customer problems. We have
a lot of turnover, and several of the employees we have seem to
create so many problems with customers that it costs us not only
their payroll but also all of our profits to employ them. Some of
these employees tick off half of all the customers they deal with
and the others seem willing to "give away the store" to
make a customer happy.
We'd fire these people but we aren't sure we could hire anyone any
better. To fix this, we've developed a system so that any employee
dealing with a problem customer needs to immediately route the customer
to his or her supervisor and that supervisor needs to get a management
okay before taking any action. Can you comment?
Answer:
Companies that ask customers to route through three levels to get
satisfaction lose customers. Your eventual solution - hire better
employees and then train them so they can make customers happy.
Your immediate solution - provide your supervisors the training
they need to effectively handle customer and employee problems.
This training needs to include how to make judgment calls that satisfy
customers without "giving away the store."
As
managers, you need to look at how and where you spend your time
and whether your efforts give you the results you need and want.
Which makes more sense - for you as managers to spend your day dealing
with customers for you as managers to train your staff to resolve
customer issues, freeing up your time so you can concentrate on
getting costs under control, hiring quality employees and improving
your marketing?
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