Employee Satisfaction, part II

As usual, I missed the next best Employee Satisfaction meeting inflicted on the workers by BS, thank the zombie jebus. I did attend a few that were real humdingers, but nothing that could compare to the horsey incident, or the one that happened shortly after I was quit, which some employees called the Ship Happens incident.

BS got hold of yet another management tutorial, this one called It's Your Ship, written by naval officer Captain Abrashoff. The last management primer they promoted was Who Moved My Cheese, a book about dealing with change that was obviously intended for readers who can’t comprehend the complex adventures of Dick and Jane. BS management the cheese book, and passed it to the workers who a) felt it confirmed our beliefs that management operated on a four year old level (they were fond of inserting cartoon characters into official training videos), and b) knew change was a part of life before it became an Essential Management Concept.

Anyway, I didn’t read the ship book but I did a little (very little) research and it looks pretty good. If you want a book on management principles and you’re actually able to manage people instead of just issuing standardized simplistic aphorisms and your ability to grasp concepts goes beyond the Dick and Jane level, I highly recommend it. From what I read, the underlying concepts are that you should analyze situations and challenge assumptions before proceeding instead of just applying conventional wisdom (whatever the hell that is), and you should focus on the things under your control. Both are good things for any manager to know. Naturally, BS management totally fecked it up.

The Captain knew he had little control over his crew’s pay and a survey showed that pay wasn’t a big motivator for them anyway (you don’t join the military to get rich – you do it to get girls and kill people on the taxpayers’ nickel), so he put that issue aside and focused on the things he could affect. BS management read that and decided it meant they should assume no workers are motivated by money and it should not be a consideration for them either. The author further demonstrated how he valued the input of his people and let them take ownership of their tasks whenever possible so their pride and innovation would become part of their work. BS took this to mean that every business should be modeled after a ship’s operation, and that the employees were ultimately responsible for their own morale. If they were unhappy, it was their fault for not trying harder.

BS upper management videotaped a seminar wherein they explained all this (giving the poor Captain credit) for middle management, and then challenged them to implement these brash new ideas. BS middle management did this by having all the employees sit in a hot, crowded meeting room and watch the videotape. Yes – instead of trying to motivate the employees, they let them watch the tape explaining how they should all be treated as underpaid sailors who should learn to motivate themselves. That was funny enough on its own, but BS heightened the irony by making them work through lunch in order to watch it.

If there’s one thing my current job doesn’t do, it’s provide enough blogging material. Maybe I should file a complaint.