Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 28, 1993 TAG: 9303260547
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DIANA KUNDE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
DATELINE: DALLAS LENGTH: Long
And for years, about half the people who got the letter telephoned the agency.
There was a simple reason for their frustration, said Regional Commissioner Noel Wall. The letter wasn't clear. Yet it wasn't until the Dallas region implemented total-quality management that the problem was highlighted and the solution found - by the frustrated front-line employees who were answering phone calls from their equally frustrated customers.
There's a small, but growing movement to reinvent how government does its job. Practitioners use words such as "entrepreneur" and "customer." They follow the lead of companies such as Xerox Corp. and Motorola Inc. in adopting new ways of managing.
Now they have the attention of the federal CEO. In his previous job as governor of Arkansas, President Clinton implemented a quality program.
Clinton is talking about listening better to U.S. citizens and taxpayers, and he's calling them customers. He's saying that the best ideas for saving money and doing a better job will probably come from the federal government's 3 million employees.
Those concepts are at the heart of a total-quality management program.
As in private industry, the key question is whether Clinton can go beyond rhetoric to real change.
"No one is more frustrated by bureaucracy than the workers who deal with it every day and know better than anyone how to fix it. Employees at the front lines know how to make government work if someone will listen," Clinton said in announcing a six-month government-performance review to be headed by Vice President Al Gore.
The audit will be modeled after a similar one done by Texas Controller John Sharp that ended up saving the state $2.4 billion.
It's being viewed as a politically needed first step, such as Clinton's 25 percent White House staff cut, to reassure Republicans, fiscally conservative Democrats and taxpayers that government can tighten its belt.
The lasting change will be in what follows, say experts such as W.C. Enmon, a Xerox Corp. executive working in Texas Gov. Ann Richards' office. On loan from Xerox, he is implementing a total-quality management program in state government.
"Quality is longer-term. It becomes foundational to the organization. It becomes part of the fiber," he said.
In a total-quality program, the philosophy is that mistakes are caused by faulty systems, not faulty people. Employees are the best authorities on their own work. Their opinions are actively sought to continually improve the systems. The end result is much better service to customers.
W. Edwards Demming, the father of the total-quality management movement, found his first receptive ear in the Japanese auto industry. The idea has since swept through U.S. manufacturing and into service industries and government.
Experts say change of the sort Clinton espouses is possible, but it will be difficult in the huge, entrenched federal bureaucracy.
As in private industry, it will take more than buzzwords.
"The overwhelming conclusion of our book is that we have good people trapped in bad systems," said Ted Gaebler, co-author of a book on public-sector organization. With 18.6 million employees at all levels (including 3 million in the federal sector), government employs one out of eight Americans. Government employees are no better and no worse than private-sector employees, he said.
The problem is that they are working in systems designed a hundred or more years ago. "The systems have been encrusted so long, that we think it's normal to have nine people sign off on a check," Gaebler said.
It's hard to change the way government does things because politicians usually don't care - it's not "sexy" enough - and employees don't feel empowered, he said. The solution is to free those bureaucracy-trapped workers to develop their ideas.
Besides entrenched ways of doing things, there are other special problems Clinton will face as he tries to make government more customer-friendly and efficient, experts said.
The reward system. Unlike the private sector, a government agency that saves money typically can't plow it into its own programs or share it as an employee bonus.
Time and the political demands of four-year terms. When Enmon of Xerox first talked to Richards, she asked when she could expect results from the state's new quality program. She'd see some results almost immediately, he said. "But for hard, big dollar savings, I told her, we're looking five, 10, possibly 15 years out. The governor smiled and said, `Well, you didn't understand the question.' "
At the Dallas regional Social Security office, Wall believes the changes are mind-boggling in another way. After several years of top-down efficiency drives and improved measurements in time spent to handle claims, he was frustrated that employees didn't seem proud of their accomplishments. Employees seemed stressed, and that affects managers and people who visit the agency as well, he said.
He wanted the agency's "customers" treated with dignity and speed by people who obviously enjoyed their work. Involving employees directly in making decisions - like the one about changing the form letter - was the solution, he said.
\ STRATEGY GOVERNMENT MAY USE
Here are major elements of "total-quality management," a management strategy that has been adopted by Xerox Corp., Ford Motor Co. and other businesses and advocated by President Clinton for improving the federal government:
Customers are the most important people, so seek out their views and understand their needs.
Pinpoint problems by measuring the organization's performance.
Enlist all workers, from top to bottom, to work as a team to find ways to improve the quality of the product or service.
Eliminate privileges, such as executive dining rooms, to establish a sense of shared mission.
Make serving the customer the driving force for the organization, not its rules or past procedures.
\ Source: "Reinventing Government," by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler.
by CNB