</font><font color="blue" class="small">( Where is that mirror you were talking about?)</font>
Present company excepted, of course! /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif
The broad brush comes from intimate experience. The working class can't afford me is another general statement from the same brush. /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif
I've been a superintendant responsible the work of seventy craftsmen. I've also ran crews from two to sixteen successfully. It isn't unusual from me to be on a job and have the supervision of the other trades along with the person having the work done discuss labor issues with me.
I get to see labor problems from just about all the perspectives.
Let me give you an example of some typical situations.
Management can't handle working with a cross section of people. So they come up with cookie cutter solutions that work with some types of people and are total disasters with others.
So they come up with a neat system that's been tried and discarded many times before but they've never taken the time to look at the system's history.
Bonus and incentive programs is a typical example. Since they assume the employees are in it for the money management sets goals with rewards for meeting them. It sounds great.
Three problems with that scenario.
One, it only really works with a very small percentage of the population. I know. I'm one. I got to be superintencdant because I was making more bonus money than twelve of my compatriots combined. It worked for me because I understood that quality paid. Doing the job right the first time and giving the crew some leeway as long as the quality never varied worked.
Two, if the goal becomes the reward then the company's goals are sabotaged. That's when quality drops because immediate gratification becomes the priority.
Let me give you an example from the real world.
My wife works at a customer care center for Verizon. A customer has a problem with their telephone service. Ideally they call in and one person handles it. Instead of investing in training so the number of people with that capability is available they decide to have people who just answer the phone and they route the call for repair.
The next step was to reward those who handled the most number of calls in the shortest period of time. You see where this is going?
The end all is the employees are diverted from working for the company and start working for themselves. They rush the calls through not getting them properly handled. The reputation of the company is tarnished. But management has handling numbers where they want them.
Three, the people who thrive best on this system are thieves. They're the ones that will lie, hide, cheat, steal, and be gone just minutes before the roof collapses. Belo's Dallas Morning News is finding this out right now. They went on an incentive program for everyone involved on their circulation numbers. It looks like it'll cost them in the hundred plus millions of dollars for rebates to their advertisers. Not to mention the shock to the value of their stock which hurts everyone.
You can look at every situation where management takes the emphasis off of doing the business of the company to doing business for yourself and there's always a disaster.
Another thing that's in vogue right now is "making it so any idiot can do it" and then complaining to high heaven that all they get for employees are idiots.
They don't seem to understand that accomplishment and it's rewards only comes with adversity. If there's no adversity or challenge then there's no sense of accomplishment or success in a task. So when the challenge is removed the reason for doing it in the first place is gone.
So management makes it all about a paycheck and then complains that all their employees are only there for the money. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif
