There’s the letter of the law – behaving according to exactly what has been written, and the spirit of the law – acting in accordance with general principles. The first is literal, the second, interpretive.
Spelling things out can be attractive because it provides a sense of comfort. Management is comforted by the thought that they’ve reduced risk and employees are comforted by clarity. Not sure how to behave? Check the rule book.
But there are three massive downsides to prescribing everything an employee should or shouldn’t do.
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Time to write the rules and time to read them.
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Precedent. If anything is left out of the rule book – and there will be – the employee can justifiably excuse their behaviour because “you never said I couldn’t…” To cover every eventuality, your rule book gets fatter, and the only ones who bother to read it are the ones who want to game the system.
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Stifling freewill and free thinking. Being prescriptive suffocates our sense of autonomy.
So before you or your colleagues are tempted to (have ChatGPT) create a letter of the law rule book for your team, first ask, why? What’s your behavioural objective?
There are better ways to influence employee behaviour, and they don’t rely on a dusty rule book.
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