Day #57 - Be nice to them, they're in charge (Part 2)

Today went quite well, I went to physio and the chap that is treating me was very pleased with the progress that I've been making. He went through a few new exercises with me and hopefully my recovery will continue. After that I had a decent meal at the college and had a brief chat with an old friend about microcontrollers. I guess that I must be a little obsessed by electronics but that is geekdom for you - no half measures when it comes to something with wires.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about "gatekeepers" and descision makers that have in their power, the ability to ruin or make your day. Now I don't want to come over like some kind of snob or someone with an elitist agenda but if that is how it feels to some folks there is little that I can do about it. I know that folks that work on the phone must be interviewed and go through an evaluation process before they get their job. I realise that they have a job to do and often that job can be difficult with awkward customers contributing to the difficulty. I am also aware that a person's environment can alter their thinking and that a "commercial cultural climate" will often have the unwanted side effect of conditioning workers to behave in a certain way. This can happen regardless of the countermeasures put into place to prevent it happening. In a boring job, folks get bored. A collective attitude can develop and that can permeate all areas of an organisation. It can be very subtle and at first or even second glance not appear to exist but further scrutiny and critical examination of certain factors within an organisation can be very revealing. This can often be to the detriment of the organisation and completely undermine its' commercial viability. It can lead to a laissez faire approach to customer care in some instances but in more extreme situations it can be life threatening. Public inquiries, internal memos, news articles all bear testament to this. It is not the final result of a boring job but it can be and managers ought be aware of this lest any stagnation begins to manifest itself which, in the best case scenario creates some miffed customers or at worst, no customers.

Once upon a time a I worked in a job that had such a bad attitude amongst the staff that there was open animosity towards others in the organisation that were doing EXACTLY the same job for EXACTLY the same client. You would hear folks blowing off steam about "those stupid wank*rs" that were standing in the same spot just hours previously. Their working conditions were so poor that they really felt that they had to let off steam against someone and so it was that they did - to eachother. The crazy thing about it is that they never for one moment questioned their superiors, that would have been a way out of a job. They accepted everything that the higher echelons threw at them and willingly. The sole object of their derision was "those stupid wank*rs" on another shift. They also seemed to have a bit of a problem with people that worked in sanitation for some reason as well as those that didn't speak English as a first language.

The company was run with all of the precision and operational flow that one might expect in such a situation but the one factor that could have prevented their ultimate demise was that they felt no need to brief the folks on the ground about the nature of the work that they were doing and the importance of good human relations. All that was presented were polemics on how vitally important the work itself was. I will not go into further detail but I will say that owing to their ineptitude and absence of foresight at a management level they cultivated a situation that led to events that culminated in the collapse of their host company and as a consequence a situation that made them untouchable in the industry. Thousands of people lost their jobs within a very short space of time. The bitterest part of it was that in the job market the company name was not one that made you a desirable asset to other prospective employers.

I will return for a moment to the phone support people. On the phone it can be very easy indeed to be either intimate OR detached. One can cover that ground very quickly in the relatively short duration of a phone call. How often have you been in contact with a person on the phone that you didn't know and found yourself engaged by their voice? How frequently have you found yourself veering towards flirtatious behaviour on a phone call to a stranger? It is easy for this to happen owing to the anonymity that the phone can provide. Of course we are not completely anonymous but we are sufficiently distant to make us slightly more daring. The inverse is also true. How often have you found yourself being more aggressive or rude to a person that you didn't know on a phone call? If we are to think about this we can safely say that it is owing to the fact that a degree of separation exists between ourselves and "the other" that we can become more assertive in our interaction. The level of reciprocity in either positive or negative emotions is enhanced by the loss of proximity. This may explain why many folks can return from a holiday with slightly more that they brought with them on their outbound journey. The loss of inhibition and increase of promiscuity is enhanced by anonymity.

At this point I am going to leave this topic but hopefully I will recall some of the other points that I wanted to make. Thanks for having taken time to read this and hopefully you will return to read another entry.

G'nite.