Let’s face it, bureaucracy sucks. It’s annoying, it impedes creativity and hinders workflow efficiency. It pisses off members of a team and can stunt progress. Yet, as organizations get larger, having defined processes and policies becomes more important. I’ll explain why with a story:
Last quarter my team at the NU Entrepreneurs Club was putting on a large event. We use a web application to send out email blasts to our members, Madmimi, and we deal with lists of thousands of email addresses weekly. A Director on my team wanted to attract more attendees to our event, so he loaded thousands of additional email addresses into our system and sent out a massive email blast. Unfortunately, this resulted in many of the emails being marked as spam and I had to explain to the folks at Madmimi that we did not mean to send “spam” and were not violating the terms of service of the product.
The issue was that when our organization was much smaller, it was ok for anyone on the team to send out blast emails since the lists were a lot smaller and it didn’t make much of a difference either way. But now we have grown into a well known brand on campus with thousands of dollars in funding and hundreds of members. We need to have strict control on our brand and how we interact with our members. So I took the following actions:
I created clear, easy to understand policies governing how we send emails.
I wrote a brief 1 page document that spelled out very concisely who was allowed to access our email program (and re-distributed the login credentials accordingly), and what specific lists could be accessed by each person.
I wrote a brief email to my entire team notifying them of the policy.
I made sure that everyone understood the new simple policy, and I also transparently stated why we had to institute the policy: our organization has grown and we need to make sure we send only the right emails to the right lists and not make a mistake.
How do you create an effective policy?
1. Make it short and simple: No confusing language.
2. Share it with everyone: Nobody can follow a policy they don’t know about.
3. Use common sense: Only make a policy when the alternative of not having a policy is a worse headache than the policy itself.
4. Don’t make policy for the sake of policy: Do it when necessary, don’t touch anything if you don’t have to.
5. Get everyone’s input: People are more likely to respect a policy that they feel ownership of. Get their insight and have them help create it.