Are Your Standards Real or Just Empty Words?
Many homeowners belong to an HOA (Homeowners Association). These organizations provide common services — such as maintaining shared spaces and negotiating contracts like trash collection — and establish home and yard standards that residents agree to when purchasing in the community.
My area has two HOAs, and they enforce their rules very differently. Mine prohibits RVs parked on the street for more than one night — yet some neighbors keep them there all summer. The limit is three overnight cars in a driveway, yet one neighbor regularly has eight to ten.
The other HOA is a different story. Park a car outside your garage overnight, and you will hear about it the next morning. Put your trash out the night before pickup, and a violation letter arrives. Want to paint your house a different color? Not a chance. Swap an outdoor light fixture without approval, and it may be removed.
Both HOAs share many of the same rules, but the difference is in enforcement. The other HOA takes its standards seriously and enforces them consistently. Ours enforces rules only when a neighbor complains — and even then, the process rarely has real consequences.
Personally, it’s a tough choice — I don’t love being told what to do — but I admire the other HOA’s clarity and consistency. With them, you know exactly where you stand. With mine, not so much.
Examples From the Car Wash World
If you have a uniform policy but let employees dress however they want, you’ve created a “shadow policy” — one that says appearance doesn’t really matter.
You have a policy allowing cell phone use only during breaks, but your loader slips a hand into their pocket to check it between cars.
There Are Three Parts to Setting and Maintaining Standards:
Develop the standard — Write the standard in the form of an operating procedure or policy.
Train the standard — Ensure employees understand it, can perform it, and know why it matters to the organization and its customers.
Enforce the standard — Review, remind, admonish, and praise employees when standards are followed or not. Your employees will test whether your standards are real or just words in a policy manual. Once you enforce them consistently, employees will find it easier to follow them than not.
You have standards, whether you know it or not. Make sure they’re written, trained, and enforced — and both your carwash and your team will be better for it.
