Fewer policies is the best policy

"I feel more comfortable with gorillas than people. I can anticipate what a gorilla's going to do, and they're purely motivated." - Dian Fossey

'Something happened to me last week, and I have been thinking of it ever since. At the moment it happened, I thought of you, so now I am hoping to put it to rest by writing you a short e-mail."

Thus begins an interesting and instructive story from Rodney Highsmith of West Palm Beach, Fla.

He continues: "Friday, after my workout, I realized that I had left my prescription glasses on one of the weight machines. I returned to the gym a couple of hours later and asked the young woman at the reception desk if anyone had turned them in. She immediately reached under the desk and brought forth a thick binder, and started to scan the pages. After a minute or so, she told me that nothing had been turned in.

"I returned the next morning, hoping that the cleaning crew had found them. I walked up to the same large counter and asked another young woman if my glasses had been found. She pulled out the same large lack binder, but then was interrupted by a phone call. The call lasted long enough that another woman came over to ask if she could assist me. I told her about my missing glasses, and she walked back and retrieved them from the far end of the counter. By this time the first employee has ended her call, looked in the black binder and assured me that nothing had been found.

"I am sure that there is a corporate cog somewhere that designed a system to track missing items, and that new employees are carefully trained to use the black binder instead of their eyes and brain. I later found out that the young woman who found my missing glasses was 'in training' so she did not follow proper procedure."

I'm going to take it as a compliment that, when confronted with incompetence, Rodney thought of me.

And naturally, I hope that his e-mail cleansed the stench of bureaucracy out of his nose. Meanwhile, his message got me thinking. The gym was one of the national chains, and anyone who has worked in a large organization can tell you what happened: Lots of people leave things at the gym, and so someone started a lost and found box. Simple.

Then, however, someone leaves a wallet or a iPod, and the employees, raised in our culture of casual morality, would think nothing of helping themselves, perhaps boasting of such "finds" as a job perk.

The box that started out as lost and found ends up being abandon all hope. I suppose prescription glasses and jock straps would be about the only things not taken. (I can even envision a new class for tastelessness: "That hat was so ugly it stayed in lost and found for weeks.")

While all of this explains how companies end up with a policy on lost items, it doesn't forgive them for doing it poorly. And that's probably why you had trouble getting it out of your mind, Rodney -- the conflict of being confronted by someone trying to do good badly.

So, for all the management people reading this, here's the formula: A policy doesn't just solve a problem, it creates new ones.

One reason companies end up with so many policies is that they are trying to anticipate everything.

Then, with instant irony, the one thing nearly every policy fails to anticipate is the policy not working.

In the case of Rodney and his glasses, the policy needed an antipolicy paired with it. The first time he stopped in, the desk clerk could have told him, "We're supposed to log everything into this binder, but let me get your name and number, and I'll double-check and call you."

Now you might think that that's too much to ask of a company and its clerks -- after all, they are in the exercise business, not the lost-and-found business.

However, for me, the real test of a company is how it does all the things they are not getting paid to do -- how they keep the restrooms and the parking, how they handle lines and complaints and all the rest.

It's the retail equivalent of the difference between a guy and a gentleman.

So, when it comes to policies, the fewer the better.

But as soon as you have one, you have to add this one above it: It's our policy to assume that all policies are screwed up.

Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com.