How do you know what is really going on in your organisation? You get financial reports, you get absence stats, you know which targets are being hit and which are not, you know the areas of high staff turnover and you know the vacancy levels but these reports just reduce everything to numbers. Your senior managers tell you what’s going on but how much do they really know and how selective are they being? There are the responses to your blog but the same names keep coming up and how representative are their views? You can visit work places and talk to staff and occasionally you do learn something but these events are stage managed you only see and hear what they want you to see and hear.
The answer is to go undercover. Show up in disguise, pretend to be someone re training and on a work placement and find out what people really think and what’s really going on. This is the idea behind channel 4 new TV programme Undercover Boss. Growing a beard, wearing glasses and dressing down may seem a rather elaborate way to find out more about your own organisation but it makes good T.V. The cameras like to give a close up of the facial expressions when staff are called in to see the chief executive and realise it’s the trainee that struggled to do keep up and who kept saying is it always this busy.
I don’t think it is necessary for every chief executive to don a disguise and go under cover. I do think it would be a good idea if every senior management team viewed the videos of these programmes at their next senior management team meeting because there is a remarkable consistency in the issues raised and the observations made by the chief executives despite the vastly different business that took part.
Each programme has highlighted problems with communication not just staff saying they don’t know what going on but front line managers saying that issues they try to raise don’t get a response. There were a number of examples of false economies where basic maintenance had been ignored or broken equipment not repaired due to the need to cut costs. Often new staff did not have a proper induction and on the job training varied depending on the commitment and enthusiasm of the local manager. There were a number of examples of the over reliance on the use of casual staff causing problems with consistency and quality of service and a concern that experience and competent staff risked being lost because of perceived limited promotion opportunities and a lack of flexibility in salary structures and rewards.
All these issues were a surprise to the chief executives involved who thought that that policies and procedures were in place to address these concerns and that managers already had the power to deal with them. Each programme finished with the chief executive explaining the changes they were going to make as a result of their placements and inviting those they had worked with to help led on make the changes.
Blair McPherson is author of People management in a harsh financial climate www.blairmcpherson.co.uk