Michele Zanini: How Too Much Bureaucracy Stifles Innovation

We all hate tedious paperwork. Filling out transport claim documents, internal KPI tracking documentation, expenses claims… All these things can utterly drain your soul, but we do it because we must, because it’s important. But is it? Michele Zanini would say no, or at the very least, not always, in this talk from the 2024 Happy Workplaces Conference.
How do we get around this? Isn’t it inevitable in the growth of any organisation? Not according to Michele.
Michele gave examples of a few organisations that are implementing interesting and effective measures to tackle these issues. One example is Handelsbanken, a large Swedish bank that provides services in Sweden, Norway and the UK. So, what is this bank doing that’s so special?
Each bank essentially operates as its own business. Profit and loss are done per branch and only very specific practices are centralised.
“And so, they act like little startups. Each branch does and being autonomous doesn't mean that you are free from performance pressure. You still need to deliver certain results. They have this metric in banking called Cost Income ratio, which is an efficiency measure, so there's a level that you need to be at 40% or lower for that and if you, as a branch manager are underperforming, you'll get replaced. Like, you're not free. You're free to succeed. You're not free to snooze, right?
“One of the big reasons why branches exercise their autonomy responsibly… is that they have skin in the game. So, they make a loan to a customer, and they will hold that loan on their books to maturity. So, if there's a problem with that loan, it will hit their profit and loss. They're not kicking it to some other unit that deals with working out that debt, and so they will exercise that autonomy judiciously.”