This isn’t about the Jeff Kennet addition to our Victorian number plates, but rather our house move over the weekend. Still with a throat infection, we managed to get it all done in daylight and rain on Monday.

As much as I enjoy bagging other companies out for their poor customer service, I enjoy giving kudos to those few who are an exception. Metro Movers is one of those great companies.

Before the move

Moving house is said to be one of the most stressful periods of change you can experience in your life, so I was keen to make it less so in any way that I could. This is where the Metro Movers website gave me my first boost of help. Their FAQ has some great pointers on packing and organising stuff for your move. Many of which I put into practice immediately.

Making this information free to the public, gave me a sense of trust for them. Immediately they appeared to be some type of expert in the field. They realise that moving house isn’t just about moving day and try their best to make the entire experience as stress free as possible.

Loading the truck

Matt and Jess turned up early, in the rain, and immediately set to work. Emma and I haven’t moved like this before so we were exceptionally nervous about things breaking. The blokes exhibited a wonderful balance between fast and careful which put us at ease. Furthermore, they had our entire unit packed up in a little over 2 hours. It was like watching a giant game of tetris albeit a slowish one.

Throughout the entire experience, they both offered advice on how best to organise things and exactly what we could do to help. We couldn’t pack my treasured plasma into the truck (they didn’t have the right box for it – which I forgot to order!) but they did wrap it up carefully and load it into the back of Emma’s car.

Unloading the truck

This went much faster and still with exceptional care. Both Matt and Jess were very careful to not drag mud into our newly cleaned house and helped us to move all the boxes and furniture to exactly where we wanted them. This took a little over an hour with the added difficulty of pelting rain which didn’t seem to bother the guys at all.

Rewarding your employees

Watching these two at work, I suspect that Metro Movers staff are rewarded for exhibiting their organisation’s values. I caught a side conversation which happened whilst loading the plasma into our car. I deduced that our movers would’ve been paid a bonus if nothing was broken during the trip. If it was, they wouldn’t receive their extra $100 odd. This encourage them to take care of people’s belongings – one of the main fears in having someone move your posessions.

This is similar to Zappos paying their new employees $1000 to quit shortly after bringing them on board and training them. In this case, money is used to weed out the people who aren’t interested in delivering exceptional customer service.

I wonder what we could do in our field to motivate our staff to exhibit the values and behaviours? It’s a tricky one because metrics can easily be dodged. For example, if you want to limit the number of bugs in released software, you essentially doom yourself to limiting the number of bugs actually logged/recorded, rather than reducing the actual bug count.

I wonder what other software teams and organisations do to encourage positive behaviours?

On his blog, Scott proposes a new type of credit card account. Essentially a debit card, with an interest free period attached to a savings account. It’s an interesting idea and one which anyone can put into place with a little discipline.

It prompted me to briefly explore our situation. We have a home loan with a bank that forces us to have credit cards. These cards have enormous limits which are a huge risk for us (we can easily tend to overspend!)

What we also have on offer is a 100% offset account. This works by calculating interest on your savings at the same rate as your loan. This interest is then notionally paid off your loan, reducing your monthly repayments. Let’s take this simple example:

• $300,000 loan
• 9% interest rate
• 25 year loan period

In normal circumstances, you would be paying $2517.59 per month on this loan.

If you used your credit card to defer payment of all your bills, and had $5000 sitting in your offset account, your monthly payments would be $2475.63. Saving you $40 a month. Over the 25 year period of the loan, you would save almost $40,000 in interest payments and have your loan paid off a little over a year early.

It sounds like free money. The nice thing is that you don’t have to pay tax on this interest earnt (which is considered income) as you never actually get given it. It is automatically deducted off your loan payments tax free.

In contrast, were you to deposit this money in an interest bearing account at the same rate as your loan, here’s what would happen over 25 years:

• $5000 deposit
• 25 years
• 9% interest
• $47,425 earnt

Not a bad outcome. By saving this money in a compounding savings account, you end up slightly in front over 25 years. Of course, this doesn’t take into account any tax you would need to pay on that amount, nor the fact that is it quite difficult to find savings accounts paying an interest rate the same or higher than what you can borrow at.

For us, we use a little of both tactics. Offsetting our loan payments and using any savings generated to go into an interest earning account. Here’s an example:

Loan:

• $300,000 loan @ 9% interest and 25 year term
• $5000 in loan offset account
• $40 saved each month in loan payments
• $39,188 of interest payments avoided at the end of 25 years

Savings:

• $40 deposit each month into a savings account
• 9% interest rate (for the sake of simplicity)
• $45,089 earnt at the end of 25 years

Even at 7% interest on your deposit, you end up with $32,500 saved.

Whether this is the best use of our money, I’m not sure. I haven’t spent too much thinking about it. But in practical terms for us, it works quite well.