When at a door, train, bus, or anything else, people going out exit before anyone else goes in.
This is a simple process rule. In the example, it makes good sense. You can’t get in a train if people have not left the train yet. If it’s full, you’re not getting on. If people have exited the train, there is now room for more people. It’s really not a hard rule.
In HR and in business generally, we define rules, policies, process flows, and then often we don’t follow them. The reason for this is that we have exceptions to handle, and sometimes things just have to be handled faster than a defined process allows. When this happens, we often take short cuts to get to the end state faster.
The problem with exceptions and shortcuts, is somewhere else in the process, we most likely created inefficiencies and possibly created more manual work somewhere else. What you actually did was speed up one process but slow down 5 others. While this might be an ok ROI in some circumstances, it’s not in many. Unthoughtfully circumventing process for short term and single objective gains at the expense of anything else is a tough proposition that we all go through all too often. All the while, we are scolding managers that fall out of line when they take shortcuts in their HR processes when they have P&L objectives to meet. Let’s challenge ourselves to be more thoughtful about when we decide to exit a process and understand the real ramifications and benefits when we do.
