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Brick No143: They Work For You
By Matt Weston, Thursday 5 May 2005 They Work For You If you haven't voted yet, a link. A link to a non-partisan, volunteer-run website I should say. I couldn't send you a message on election day without at least including a slug of political intrigue. In politics, no one can hear you scream. It's only in the months running up to an election that politicians really worry about what plays in Preston. And the rest of the time, as the They Work For You "about" page puts it, there's a "democratic disconnect" between the voter and the MP. Between elections, most of us don't know the name of our constituency or our MP, never mind what he/ she does or says in our name. So TWFY aims to connect that disconnect. It's turned the unwieldy Hansard public record into a searchable, useable database. Plug in your postcode (go on) and see how your MP (or ex-MP) voted on every key issue; read his/ her written questions and answers; get an email alert every time your MP speaks in parliament; and post comments on debates and statements. It makes it easy to keep tabs on your MP. And it aims to fix the "us and them" relationship between voters and politicians. But the politics industry isn't the only one to suffer an "us and them" problem. Millions of businesses share the same disconnect with their customers as MPs have with their electorate. "I pay your wages!" There's no getting around the fact that (collectively) our customers pay our wages. But what is fixable is the idea that the customer does the hiring (i.e. You Work For Them). If your relationship with your customer is a simple employer- employee one, that's one-way respect. And one-way respect is degenerative. Instead, "pick them like they pick you". Next: the makers of They Work For You believe "there is little wrong with Parliament that a healthy mixture of transparency and public engagement won't fix." And the same is true of most business "us and them" relationships. An example: a software support business I know had an "us and them" problem (shown in lower than expected contract renewals). After getting feedback it turned out that the main bugbear was that customers didn't know what the business really did on their behalf. The only time they heard from them was the quarterly invoice. They fixed the problem by making their work transparent: by logging all support calls, and by detailing all activity for their customers once every fortnight . . . in other words, you hear from them about 130 times as often as you hear from your MP. Bric-A-Brac (1) If you liked They Work For You, you might also like www.writetothem.com (by the same makers). (2) There's a great article in May's Wired magazine written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. "How to beat the expert industry". Remember to sign up: back to top |
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