Page 36 - FCW, Sept/Oct 2018

TheLectern
So what is going on? Are govern- ment contractors and employees so dramatically different from Airbnb guests and hosts?
Admittedly, Cohen slightly oversimplifies the nature of the trust relationship for Airbnb. Chesky states in his conversation with Cohen that Airbnb is “pushing people to be more understanding and accepting of each other.”
The word “pushing” is important (maybe, to use jargon common these days among scholars and others look- ing for ways society can influence behavior in more gentle ways,
we should refer to “nudging”). The key way the Airbnb system pushes trust is through ratings. Guests review hosts based on how well they were treated, and hosts write reviews for guests based on how well they behaved.
The fact that hosts rate guests is crucial to their being willing to open their homes to strang- ers because they have greater assurance the guest will behave well. The fact that guests rate hosts is crucial to giving hosts an incentive to treat guests well and constitutes the basis for the willingness of guests to use the homes strangers provide.
Airbnb has tried to create a robust, easy system for providing those ratings by pinging guests
and hosts on departure. My prop-
erty manager for the apartment
we own in Miami, who finds guests through Airbnb, told me
that if the guest has been good
and he has had good communication with the guest, he sends in a review immediately. If guests were OK, but there wasn’t much communication, “I wait. If they write a review, I’ll respond with a good review.”
If the “apartment is dirty and dam- aged, regardless of anything else, I write a one-star review with appropri-
ate comments to warn future hosts.” He added that “this has happened two times in three years,” reflecting the basic point that most people are trustworthy.
The lessons for government
The Airbnb system displays a light touch, unlike the harsher oversight of contractors and employees common in government. However, if this simple, unobtrusive system were not present, Airbnb might well collapse. Even in a world of fundamental human goodness, participants would likely
Airbnb’s lesson for managing government contractors and employees is that we can lighten up on our draconian process- oriented rules, prohibitions and oversight.
feel the need to protect themselves by using oversight against bad actors, and the obtrusive oversight would create a downward spiral of trust.
Readers might recognize that what I am describing here for Airbnb close- ly resembles a system of past-perfor- mance assessment for government contracting that I tried to introduce
when I served in government 20 years ago. That effort has helped but not nearly as much as it could. It is not a high enough priority for most contract- ing officials, and a series of paperwork requirements and “due process” pro- tections for contractors make it harder for the government to prepare honest reports on performance.
So is there anything the government could do to make its past-performance system more closely resemble Airbnb’s?
It would help if agencies made evaluating companies’ performance a central part of contracting folks’ job descriptions, rather than emphasizing compliance reviews. I would also propose establishing a sort of past-performance grand bargain between the government and willing contractors: In exchange for reducing compliance requirements on the companies, the contractors would allow the government to develop past-performance reports with less documentation and less contractor opportunity to appeal the ratings.
Airbnb’s lesson for managing government contractors and employees is that we can lighten up on our draconian process-oriented rules, prohibitions and oversight. Most people are good and will behave well without those constraints. But Airbnb also tells us that we must have some controls because otherwise the system would eventually implode due to the behavior of the venal or lazy minority.
Let’s keep the controls more gen- tle than harsh, and let’s rely more, as Airbnb does, on past performance as our regulator. n
Steve Kelman is a professor of pub- lic management at Harvard Univer- sity’s Kennedy School of Govern- ment and former administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. His blog can be found at fcw.com/thelectern.
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