As a third of Houston-area residents enter an 11th day without power, they face a slowing pace of recovery and what seems to many an inexplicable process that restores electricity to some homes while others nearby remain dark.
As summer-like temperatures returned, some customers’ lights and air conditioners came on while neighbors as close as next door were without power and without much information about why the power is still out and when it will come back.
Fueling the heat Monday were reports that unidentified elected officials have promised their constituents a better place in line, said a spokesman for CenterPoint Energy, the area’s largest power transmission company. – Tempers rising as outages drag on, Houston Chronicle, September 22, 2008
Houston’s experience in Hurricane Ike offers us a management lesson: when faced with product failure, how to handle the customer?
Like most of life’s more serious questions, this one does not have a magic solution that involves turning on people faster than the work can be done. But there may be an intermediate work-around that avoids the worst of the crisis. I’d summarize this answer in three steps: 1. Inform. 2. Research and offer substitute. 3. Expedite work process.
People want to know when they can plan to use this product again, because invariably other needs depend on it. Give them some form of reliable information, including the unexpected. “We came to fix your neighborhood, but there were thirteen trees breaking your power lines, and two downed towers, so we need a bigger team and we don’t have those people right now,” is more acceptable than silence. Let people know street-by-street what the status of their request is. You can divert administrative staff to this request since they aren’t able to do their normal job functions, and should sacrifice even traditional important customer communication tools like phone hotlines to do it.
When you asked a Houston power customer why he wants power back after Ike, he may give you all sorts of answers, but if you keep hammering, he’ll distill it to two essential functions: air conditioning and refrigeration. He needs to keep food ready for his family, since he won’t be out hunting and picking vegetables every day like our forebears did, and he needs to keep his family out of the 90-plus-degree heat that saps energy in the day and steals sleep at night. This is the actual need, as separate from the many needs people will list off when you ask them why electricity is important.
I am not a power company experts, but there may be alternatives here. Temporary wiring, while dangerous, could alleviate enough of the problem to keep people happy. So could rented generators on flat-beds, with a flat charge to the neighborhood on next month’s bill. How about discounts on hotels? All of these cost more money but keep the wave of negative public relations at bay and let you focus on solving the problem.
Any good leader coming into this situation knows that she or he will have to doubly motivate slightly depressed work crews. As these work crews were driving to work, or driving into town, they saw the devastation. They’re not pleased either. You need to convert that negative emotion into a positive one, like “Look at all the people you’re going to put back on track to happy survival.” One major reason to get the PR process correct in this instance is so that negative feedback does not filter down to your employees, making them disillusioned and less likely to give a job the extra 10% of mental focus and effort that is all too frequently the difference between FAIL and succeed.
Offering incentives for those who work weekends, nights, and the more difficult jobs is a priority. Normally, workers want regular shifts and try to avoid the more difficult tasks, because those are more likely to be screwed up and to cause their own careers a ding. Motivate them toward these difficult tasks instead, and take out the hardest problems first, and then as your crews are getting exhausted, they’ll have the easy stuff to tackle.
Finally, get your PR flaks out there to run interference. If people have questions, they need to get to talk, preferrably in person, with a representative who can find out what’s going on. Your customers will understand if their neighborhood was harder hit than others, but only if you tell them how, and show them if possible. They are more forgiving than you think, but they don’t like being left in the dark.
Another little tidbit: focus first on the customers who are going to be able to help others. Traditionally, companies focus on those most likely to complain, or those who seem to have the greatest number of obstacles facing them. Instead, I suggest focusing on the customers who have businesses and services themselves to run, as getting them back online will help everyone else with a trickle-down effect.
Never promise what you cannot deliver. After Ike hit, authorities in Houston offered vague statements when asked about power coming back on. They were counting on Ike being “Houston’s Katrina” to make most people think they were in such a disaster they shouldn’t expect power for another month, and so business can proceed as usual. As a result, they issued either apocalyptic statements predicting up to two months without power, or told us it would be done on Monday — two Mondays in a row.
Instead, they should have launched an aggressive campaign to inform people and show them why some parts of town faced a different storm than others, and should have shown them the progress toward fixing it — and used that information to supercharge their own performance.