What can a broken kiosk say about your culture?

Culture needs to be renegotiated between leaders and their people in every major decision if you want workers to buy in.

When an airline approached a design consultancy to help them build new heavy duty mobile kiosks for their boarding gates, they learnt something simple yet profound about their culture.

The executive in charge of the project came with a detailed list of requirements to share with the designers: he wanted a rugged kiosk with a longer battery life, and greater capacity and connectivity.

The problem, he explained, was that the kiosks had to be moved between boarding gates and were often damaged in the high traffic environment or ran out of power when busy staff forgot to plug them in.

This led to delays and customer dissatisfaction - both extremely costly for the airline. Their profits depended on boarding planes quickly, and having happy customers who would drive repeat business.

The designers were thrilled: this sounded like a meaty project! They had one stipulation: before they started designing new heavy duty kiosks, they wanted to go and watch the existing kiosks being used.

The airline client asked if this was going to cost extra. "Why should I pay for your extra time to look at our old kiosks when we already know what we want to change?"

The designers persuaded the airline executive to proceed on the basis that he would only have to pay for their extra time if he agreed at the end of the project that it had been valuable and created a better outcome.

So the designers went on a field trip to the airport, and what they saw there changed everything.

The (almost exclusively female) customer representatives who used the kiosks were easy to recognise at the boarding gates: they were sharply dressed in uniforms that had been selected to project the airline's brand, and to make them instantly recognisable with bold colours and styling.

The designers watched the airline staff interacting with the kiosks and their customers throughout the day, and a previously unspoken problem leaped out at them.

The women working at the gates were all highly visible and wearing skirts.

When they needed to move the kiosks from one boarding gate to another, they were unplugging them from the power sockets at ground level by kicking the plug (which sometimes damaged the kiosk), rather than crouching down in view of all their customers and using their hands.

When they moved to another boarding gate, the female customer representatives didn't choose to bend down to plug the kiosks back in and replenish the power supply.

The designers spoke with staff at the gates who confirmed that they hated the existing kiosks because they didn't feel comfortable crouching down in their skirts to plug and unplug them while all their customers were watching.

So the designers went back to their studio, challenged the brief and proposed a mobile phone application that staff could use to check passengers instead of the kiosks.

The results:

• the mobile phone app was much less expensive than rugged kiosks would have been

• boarding times were halved

• customer satisfaction improved

• employee engagement and satisfaction for the customer representatives improved significantly

Perhaps more importantly in the long run, the senior executive in charge of the project learned that the airline's stated culture of excellence, safety, caring etc. had to be "negotiated" with employees in every major decision if he wanted their support.

Empty words on a "values" chart aren't going to inspire employees to show up at their best.

Listening to your people with respect, and getting their input on decisions that potentially affect them, is a great way to build a stronger culture and a more engaged team.