Check Out the Self Checkout

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When I consider “People First and Customer Obsessed” as a key element for thriving cultures, it is NOT an HR principle, as much as a core business ethos and mindset. Ideally, it reinforces leaderships’ commitment to designing jobs that tap into our ability to create and contribute with minimum risk to our physical and mental well being. In this regard, technology savvy leaders have a big responsibility in reinforcing this principle and belief.

Check out this Wall Street Journal article. In this case, Uniqlo uses rather old technology, RFID, to create a great self checkout experience. As noted in the piece, “this tech isn’t much more advanced than scanning a barcode, but it just works in a much smoother way... It doesn’t feel like you’re doing labor.”

Self checkout has been around for a long time, but in most cases the tedious work has been transferred from an employee to a customer. Subsequently, most customers hate the traditional barcode scan self checkout experience. The RFID Uniqlo application is much different. They created WOW. As the WSJ reporter noted in testing the system, “I felt that wow when I pressed the start button on the self-checkout screen and watched the machine begin ringing up my items even before I put them in the box. Never had I been so psyched to pay for clothes I didn’t need.”

Yes, in this case, “checkout” clerical jobs or cashiers are replaced by technology. However, other than a paycheck and if it’s a good day, a cherry exchange between the customer and clerk, the traditional checkout cashier experience has little value for the employee or customer. So in the spirit of People First and Customer Obsessed, this type of job is ideally replaced with a WOW. In the Uniqlo example, customer wait times are reduced by more than 50 percent, accuracy increased, and employees can be repositioned into more value creating roles.

This is a model for the explosion of AI and machine learning. Replace tedious, unsafe transactions riddled with waste and design with People First in mind. People are very capable of adapting when it’s smooth and easy to do so. We move on to do more meaningful and creative things.

Challenge everyone to take the waste out of as many processes as possible rather than transferring to it elsewhere (like customers/patients/students, etc). Embrace the People First mindset and the technology to facilitate it! (Note to my friends in healthcare: Please, please do this more).

Think Big, Start Small, Act Now,

- Lorne

One Millennial View: I’ve never used self checkout without the need of a human employee to assist, and usually avoid them if I can. That being said, hey, whatever new service that doesn’t include one of those electronic tip prompts for me doing something mostly myself is fine by me!

- Garrett

Edited and published by Garrett Rubis

Check Out the Self Checkout

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