Why Written Policy is Important

By now you’ve probably seen it on the news: Southwest Airlines has had another incident where one of their crew told someone flying aboard one of their airplanes to change his clothing. If you haven’t seen it, you can check out the MSNBC account of these events. If you’ve been following the story, I imagine you’ve found it somewhere between amusing and exasperating (unless you’re a shareholder in Southwest, in which case I’m deeply sorry for you). “Boy,” you’ve probably chuckled. “What a bunch of clowns! My people would never pull something like that!”

That may be true, but unless you’ve actually written policy that covers this type of situation, it is difficult to be certain. The story notes that like most airlines, Southwest has language in its carriage contract (it’s printed on your ticket or E-ticket in the fine print) that states that the airline reserves the right to refuse service to anyone whose clothing is "lewd, obscene or patently offensive." The problem is, they don’t appear to have disseminated any guidelines on what, specifically, constitutes "lewd, obscene or patently offensive” clothing (the end of the article mentions that management is considering doing so now). It would seem that up until now, that decision has been left to the judgment of individual employees – some of whom appear to be easily offended.

Clearly, you wouldn’t want people traveling in anything too risqué, as it would annoy and/or offend some of the other passengers, but anything that extreme would probably get the wearer arrested for public lewdness before they ever got to the gate. Clothing that would cause fist fights in the aisle of the plane is probably bad idea, but it’s hard to imagine anyone committing battery over a t-shirt, especially one like the one in this case. And it’s hard to imagine anyone considering the outfit the woman in the first incident was wearing to be “obscene,” let alone “patently offensive.” But you can easily understand why the Southwest employees were not willing to take chances with it.

I don’t want to rag on the cabin crew, especially in the post-9/11 era, where everything about their jobs has gotten to be a bit more stressful than it really should be. In addition to their customer service, public relations and food/beverage service duties (which were already fairly absurd), they are now being asked to provide security and keep order in a work environment in which there’s a nonzero chance that someone aboard may be trying to kill them and all the other passengers – and there’s a near certainty that the other passengers will beat someone to death if they think there’s a chance he or she is trying to bring the plane down. What I am saying is that these people are busy enough already; they shouldn’t be trying to set corporate policy while also trying to get everyone into their seats so the plane can take off.

Any time you tell you employees to “use their discretion” you are, in fact, allowing your company policy to be written on the spot, in real time, by whoever happens to be around. That might work if you are a small professional partnership, but if your firm is a large company with people of different backgrounds and education levels, you’d better be sure that you are comfortable with your lowest-ranking people making decisions that could alienate your customers, make your company a laughingstock, and subject you to both unwanted media scrutiny and even more unwanted lawsuits – because that’s what will eventually happen.

Unless, of course, you take the time to sit down and write out your company policy in detail, with specific examples…