Recycled Bullsh-IT

In my “What Skill Shortage?” blog I talked about the trials and tribulations of recruiting fresh meat into your organisation. To have a good chance of keeping them for a productive period of time (more than a week is useful), you need to check what it’s like as new starter and make sure that they survive the culture shock of your far-from-perfect organisation.

When they join a new company, they will most likely be indoctrinated into how to work by means of an induction course run by HR. Your HR Business Partner will probably burble on about: what a happy, slappy place the company is; how great HR are; the shared vision of customer service excellence; how great HR are; Elf & Shifty (may have misheard that one), etc.  Add the all-day obligatory history lesson and hagiography of the current leadershits (no need to be modest), and they are likely to remain clueless as to what the company is really about and what is in store for them as an employee.

We are Family

As their line manager, I’m sure you will show them the ropes (useful when it all gets too much) and introduce them to the people that matter most – receptionists, post room, cleaners, catering, the kid who fixes the printers – and help them avoid the timewasters and negs – most of the other managers, execs, salesmen, and the coffee machine bore who haunts the kitchen or vending machine. Congratulations! They are now a (ID) card carrying member of the company and ready to do your bidding.

Road to Hell

If they are observant they will have started to detect variances in the reality of working there from the official line. The happiness they were told about may just be an illusion. It can be faked in open sessions, but turns to derision when the managers (yes, you) leave the meeting, or more likely retreat to your own office from the cavernous open plan space they have been dumped in. Nicknames for the higher ranks run from unflattering to anatomically impossible. You will be amazed at how many Richard Heads and Juan Kerrs work in the higher echelons of the company. Top TIP: make sure they know what the real names are and train them to use them otherwise terminal embarrassment awaits. Also, morning prayers for the everlasting health of your supreme leader may not be bellowed out with complete sincerity. Town halls and departmental meetings are entirely buzz-free (but bull-full), and makes them wonder who the wake is for, until they realise it’s for all of them. Quality manuals are used to prop up wonky monitors. Presenteeism outnumbers absenteeism, and both outnumber the few who keep everything running.

Stuck in the Middle with You

This siege mentality breeds a collective underground mood that permeates the lower echelons of the organisation. It can be difficult to categorise, but I’ll have a go anyway:

• We’re all in this together, but the management are stood on our shoulders when the brown smelly stuff starts rising
• I would do anything for love [of my mates] but I won’t do that [pointless report for your line mangler]
• We do our best for our customers DESPITE what management tell us to do
• We’ll work around the patently Kafkaesque processes and systems that the suits and their advisors have imposed on us
• We’ll fake sincerity during our meaningless and pointless annual appraisals, so we get a 0.3% pay rise instead of 0.2%
• We’ll organise our own social entertainment, thank you very much, rather than the forced jollity and excruciating team events dreamt up by the Stalinist Employee Relationships Committee

Sometimes this shop floor attitude becomes so toxic that the overall company performance goes down the pan. Customers can tell if your company don’t care about them through the actions and inactions of your staff. If you don’t have enough staff to respond to emails/texts/tweets, or the people they get through to sound like bored automatons, your customers will get irritated and drift away.  TCF means Treating Customers Fairly. If it comes across as T*** C*** F***, you are in big trouble.

It Doesn’t Have to be this Way

The way the individuals in a company behave and react is influenced by many factors. So here are my Seven Golden Virtues for a Positive Culture

• Prudence:  Being careful with people and budgets – people will take a dim view when the company is wasteful of (their) time and money (that could be used to give them a pay rise or bonus)
• Justice: Fairness and equality bollocks pop up all the time in company blurb, but making it real for people requires a transparent process for decision-making that demonstrates the executive (and other wrongdoers) can be held to account
• Temperance: Having senior management show some self-restraint in the size of yacht they buy with their inflated bonuses would be a start. Even better would be a humbler approach to acknowledging those who are actually delivering the results for the company. HINT: Not just the ones at the top.
• Courage: Moral courage is doing the right thing in the face of severe provocation, populist demand, peer pressure or bullying from above. Seeing their manager take a personal stand for them is one of the most powerful motivators you can have
• Faith: To truly believe, people need a vision of a better place to aim for, and a journey they are willing to take to get there. Not a fatuous mission statement
• Hope: We all need to think that one day we can rise from Technician, 3rd Class to at least Technician, 2nd Class. Preferably with access to a better coffee machine
• Charity: This isn’t about hand-outs, which just demean people, but being concerned for and helping colleagues to improve and be happy in their work

Something Better Change

Real company cultural change takes time, and needs to come from within the people that make up the organisation. You can create the conditions to improve the positive aspects of your company’s culture, but if you try to impose behavioural change you will end up with a culture of fear and loathing, or at least sullen insolence. If you are starting from a low point it could take 3-5 years to recover the mood and emotional engagement required to qualify as somewhere that not only is highly productive, but is also a great place to work.  It is also easy to destroy this within 6 months if change is imposed too quickly and insensitively. 

We Are All Made of Stars

A new management team may be thrilled at the chance to transform a company, but most of your employees want to carry on doing whatever pays their mortgage and food bills with as little stress as possible, thank you very much.  If the new A(-hole) team are smart they will realise that by focusing on gaining the confidence of staff, selling them a plausible and better future, and allowing them to have a say in the journey, they may even create an optimistic culture as well as the numbers required.  And don’t, whatever you do, charge for coffee…

John ‘Sericulture’ Moe