The High Price of Overly Prescriptive HR Policies' Case Study

Digital
Article
Personnel Policies
The High Price of

Overly Prescriptive
HR Policies
by Sue Bingham
This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Nidhi S Bisht's Human Resource Systems and Processes / PGDM-HRM at Management Development Institute - Gurgaon from Aug 2021 to
Sep 2021.
HBR / Digital Article / The High Price of Overly Prescriptive HR Policies
The High Price of Overly

Prescriptive HR Policies
by Sue Bingham
Published on HBR.org / September 15, 2017 / Reprint H03W88
Recently, one of my colleagues left our firm to make significantly more

money at another company. We wanted to keep her, but the commission-
based salary offered by the other company was more than we could match.
She hadn’t realized how long her new commute would be during rush
hour, however, and after three days of long, round-trip commutes during
rush-hour traffic, she asked to shift her schedule an hour earlier to spend
less time in unproductive gridlock.
Her manager denied her request, saying, “If we did it for you, we’d have to
do it for others.”
Copyright © 2017 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved. 1
Sep 2021.
It was good news for us; she was back with our team the following
Monday.
Too many companies’ HR policies are overly restrictive. Such policies are
often convoluted and overly paternal, and attempt to control the behavior
of regular people through rules designed to rein in the “bad apples.”
Having consulted with hundreds of company leaders on how to create

high-performance workplaces over the past 30 years, I’ve seen this
firsthand. Although a small percentage of employees may try to take
advantage of more flexible or generous policies, designing your HR
policies with such people in mind isn’t the answer. It won’t help boost the
performance of the majority of employees – employees who have the
organization’s best interests at heart. It will only make them feel
distrusted.
Most employees who work for you are intelligent adults. If your employee
handbook or HR policy manual is large and prescriptive, consider the
following:
Don’t play “gotcha” — make positive assumptions about employees

Attorneys may recommend codifying company rules in a series of “thou
shalt nots” and then making employees sign a statement confirming that
they’ve read the handbook. If employees violate rules and then claim
ignorance, companies can then say, “Gotcha! You signed that you’d read
our policy, so you did know.” This approach relays negative assumptions
from day one.
Creating an environment of mutual trust is much easier than trying to run

an authoritarian regime free of rule breakers. And there are some
situations where making something a “rule” can really backfire.
In an effort to become known as a positive place, for example, Ochsner

Health System made it a punishable offense for any employee to fail to
Sep 2021.
smile within 10 feet of a customer. Instead of setting the expectation that

politeness was part of the company’s image, it tried to make happiness a
rule.
Giving leaders a comprehensive book of infractions and punishments isn’t

helpful — it turns them into “bad cops” in situations where nuance would
work better. In high-performance environments, guidelines empower
leaders to use their personal judgment to make decisions.
If you believe employees need strict rules and enforcement to be

productive, hiring and retaining high-performance people will be a
challenge for you. You hired these people for their tenacity and talents. Get
out of the way, and let them be great. Deal with any people who choose
not to meet expectations on a case-by-case basis.
Carefully evaluate the messages your policies communicate. Is each policy

necessary for the vast majority of adults working for you? Can you reframe
punitive rules as positive goals to aim for? For example, instead of a policy
that provides definitions of “tardy” or “absent,” and punishments for each,
state that you expect employees to show up on time. If your organization
requires a dress code, take a cue from one of our clients and simply define
the policy as “Dress appropriately.”
Communicate one standard of conduct that states, “Everyone is expected

to act in the best interest of the organization and his/her fellow
employees” as a replacement for a long list of conduct rules. Another
company, for instance, replaced its employee handbook with a 17-page
“leader’s guide” that set the expectation that leaders would use judgment
and company values when making decisions that impacted employees.
One place to draw a clear line is around telling the truth. Establish a zero-
tolerance policy for dishonesty. The costs of untrustworthiness are just too
high, and the only way a common-sense approach to HR policy will work
is if integrity is a core organizational value.
Sep 2021.
Follow common sense, not policy

Strict policies are often excuses to not think. When common sense and
bureaucracy clash, you see headlines like the one about a longtime Lowe’s
employee who was fired for calling 911 on a shoplifter. Her action was
against store policy, and the “book” called for immediate termination.
Somewhere along the way, rules trumped logic and created an
environment of uncertainty and fear.
Involve your team in creating expectations, not rules, or you’ll only get
compliance from those unwilling to go beyond basic requirements. The
cost of compliance is ongoing. Commitment is an upfront one-time cost,
and then it’s self-sustaining.
Having a team meeting for the purpose of clarifying the team’s charter —
what value the function adds to the company — is a good start. First, you
should facilitate (versus present) this by asking for responses to “What is
our role in the company? What do we do that provides a unique value?”
Later, those responses can be distilled into a charter. After that discussion,
ask, “How do we want to be perceived? How do we want the organization
to view us?” Then, ask, “How do we want to view ourselves as a team?”
Together, the group determines gaps and develops standards or
expectations of each other that drive committed behaviors as members of a
high-performing team.
Prioritize leadership over technical skill

Early in my career, working as an employee relations manager for a
Fortune 500 company, I quickly realized that most of its endless rules
stemmed from three factors: Frontline supervisors managing the majority
of the workforce were promoted for loyalty and technical skills, not
leadership ability. Once promoted, there was limited investment in their
leadership training. To mitigate the risk of these untrained supervisors
using judgment in decision-making, HR published and policed rules
instead of improving the selection and development of more experienced
leaders.
Sep 2021.
Policies are a company’s message to its employees regarding how it values

people. If your company must have policies, senior leaders should allow
and expect managers to use their own discretion and judgment in
administering these policies. Again, expectations and guidelines work
better for thinking adults than black-and-white rules and steps.
Most companies hold lots of meetings related to production, scheduling,

and sales, but few dedicated to how they’re managing their workforce.
One company we work with is an exception; they place equal value on how
results are achieved and what the bottom-line results are. This company
holds weekly meetings in which managers and front-line leaders discuss
people issues. They don’t wait for others to challenge current policies; they
look at the policies they’ve published and ask, “Is this a policy designed to
catch one of the few bad apples (who know how to game the system,
anyway)? Is the tone respectful, positive, and adult?”
Do your HR policies outline specific punishments for detailed infractions?

Do they focus on what employees can’t do, rather than what they should
do? If so, they’re holding employees back more than they’re protecting you
from a bad apple or two.
When you spend time thinking up rules to stop every conceivable bad
behavior, it’s easy to forget to rely on the people around you. Take your
faith out of policies, and place it in the people you hired to grow your
company into a thriving business.
Sue Bingham, founder and principal of HPWP Group, has been at the
forefront of the positive business movement for 35 years. She’s driven
to create high-performing workplaces by partnering with courageous
leaders who value the contributions of team members. Bingham also
wrote a bestselling Amazon book, Creating the High Performance Work
Place: It’s Not Complicated to Develop a Culture of Commitment, and
contributed to From Hierarchy to High Performance, an international
bestseller.
Sep 2021.

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