Inevitably, in a large organization, front line workers’ pressure to perform and/or apathy results in a public relations nightmare.
What PR Says:
- Our values are above such behavior.
- Our employees have a much higher standards than this behavior.
- Such behavior is repugnant to all of our employees.
- These is a rare bad apple that will be sought out and dealt with.
What Management Says:
- We have goals to hit.
- You are prohibited from doing the 1,002 things on this list.
- To prevent you from doing the above 1,002 things, you must follow these 37 procedures for everything you do.
- If anyone screws up due to being in a rush, we will add an extra 4 hours of annual training on this and add it to the mandatory weekly meeting agenda.
What the Front Line Worker Says:
- You pay me a fixed or minimum wage. As Chris Rock said, if you could pay me less, you would.
- You cap my pay at a wage that prevents anyone competent enough to do a good job from actually staying around to do it.
- In your interest in getting rid of a worthless employee that you didn’t have the guts to deal with individually, you also fired two workers who knew what they were doing.
- Breaking the rules as a last resort becomes a more common occurrence with every layer of ass-covering bureaucracy you add and every shred of competence you take away.
- The only way you’d last one *shift* in the field is if you hid in the manager’s office for the duration.
