Ginger Piglet
Burglar of Jess Phillips MP
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
Nov 19, 2019

    #841

    Adamska said:
    I've found that regular meetings like that are only done so that the management can pretend they're doing something to help and to scope out which person they're going to blame for their own ineptitude.

    It's not quite as obvious as "work hard, play hard" (translation: we'll run you to the fucking ground and will reee if you even try to "play"), or "we treat you like family" (translation: we treat you like unpaid help and/or act like you abusive uncle not invited to parties anymore), but it's something to note.

Here's a prime piece of bollox I've learnt about. A while back I interviewed for a job at a firm which offered to pay quite well and had interesting litigation work, albeit according to their website the ugliest staff I'd ever seen. But then again, I'm no oil painting so I thought I'd give it a go.

In comes the boss. "Here at Blackwell & Beckett we believe very strongly in transparency and accountability" she said. And explained what that meant:

- They believe in holding each other to account for things
- They have weekly meetings at which billings for that week are disclosed to the entire firm
- People are encouraged to check on each others' work and challenge each other for things they did or didn't do
- Clients are encouraged to complain if e-mails aren't responded to within 15 minutes
- The staff member with the highest billing each week, in the spirit of healthy competition, gets a plastic crown
- The staff member with the lowest billing each week, in the spirit of healthy competition, has to sit in the Slap Seat (self explanatory)

I was then asked not about my experience, about my legal work, or the whole competence-based "tell us about a time when you did [thing]," but about how much I thought colour printing cost. I asked whether this was by page or by mass or what, and was told how much I thought it cost in general. I didn't know but I had a feeling I was about to find out. Apparently colour printer ink costs the same by mass as gold. And guess what - in the spirit of transparency and accountability, you would be no doubt encouraged to call out people who are profligate with their printing.

I blew the place off after that. Several months later they were still advertising for the same position, probably because they didn't find anyone mad enough to work for them.

This sort of everyone versus everyone setup, in my experience, is a hallmark of bad management. It is how a workplace would be set up by someone who denies the existence of people skills. With the constant competition to avoid the Slap Seat and encouragement to rat on your colleagues, that very quickly turns into a deadly decadent court situation where anyone who is doing consistently well is ganged up on and called out repeatedly and anyone who is having difficult is stomped on to deflect attention from one's own failings. The emphasis on billing at the expense of everything else also gives a perverse incentive to pad things out or to gouge your clients.
 
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rcvrd jan 2021