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Bad management punishes everyone. Unfortunately, this is the rule not the exception inmost organizations. Funny how privileges usually go to a select few, but every one is punished.
Bad management punishes everyone. Unfortunately, this is the rule not the exception inmost organizations. Funny how privileges usually go to a select few, but every one is punished.
Not sure anyone is really punished here. Everyone has a job and is getting paid.
Employees used to be able to purchase slightly damaged product for personal use at the company's cost which is very low. One person at one of our 12 locations had been putting together the products and selling them on Craigslist and Ebay for quite the profit. This had been going on for a couple of years and was only found because a plant manager's wife had gone onto Craigslist and was browsing the "For Sale" stuff in their area. Oops.
So that person got fired for misappropriation because it turns out they had also been stealing some of the stuff as well as buying non-damaged stuff and passing it off as damaged. The company comes out with a rule of no more employee sales, period.
Another one was revocation of tobacco use on the company property. This shop I worked at as HR in Kentucky must have had 75% of the employees who were smokers. The plant manager was one of those hardcore anti-smokers but he didn't make too much of a big deal over it until someone threw a lit cigarette into a trash can and set it on fire. We had a meeting with all the employees and told them that smoking and all tobacco use would be banned from the property if any more incidents happened. So everything was okay for about 4 months and then one of the supervisors runs into my office hollering for me to call the fire department because the warehouse is on fire. Several employees admitted to smoking in it and putting their cigarettes out on the floor. After that, tobacco use was banned from the property.
Don't abuse company privileges, kiddos. You just ruin it for yourself and your co-workers.
My company used to allow people to work from home at their own discretion. People abused it by not working on their "work from home" days so the company took that privilege away. (The people who abused it are mostly still working here.)
I used to be deeply suspicious of "work from home." Had a guy try that on me that I hired cross country, 2006-8, and indeed it *was* one of many scams he cooked up to skim this or that from the role. He was a second story man, as they used to say, disguised as White Collar. I had him fired in 2.5 years, dunno how it took me that long (lazy of me, actually).
Then you get someone like Marissa Mayer from Yahoo who famously banned "work from home" at Yahoo, I feel it was a bazooka to swat a fly. Some teams need to be co-lo'd, I've run many a small team that runs a sequence of projects and having one or two teams run in scrums is productive and communicative. One job I'm thinking of, had core team in Bellevue WA, two others WFH in Seattle, and a second team in Redmond. Fairly close, geographically. I've run a lot of successful software cycles that way, in a scrum-like manner (working the backlog continuously and other processes).
Now I'm in a situation where we, the workers, cluster to the project. I call it Swarming. We are literally scattered nationally, in the U.S., plus Canada, plus Brazil and Argentina. They call groups of us together to work projects. This AM I called an all-team that caught about 8/12 due to holiday week, no big deal. We had me, home office in Seattle, my architects in Indianapolis and Boston respt, another company's lead in Charlotte, client in OKC, couple in Dallas, one or two didn't catch where. We swarm in, and may never all meet (in this case I'm leading a kickoff in OKC mid-January for a week, others will be at the client site up to four weeks).
In that unusual situation, obviously if the projects are national it is irrelevant where we are. We function fine working at home. It is a bit weird, but I am very rarely bored because picking up the phone (Skype) or email, or IM (also Skype) reveals lots of comms waiting to happen to forward (something).
That may be unique to management consulting, what I've described....
I had a fairly large hospital change it's dress code policy because they didn't like the slight burgundy color of my hair...3 YEARS after they hired me with the exact same color. Out of 3500 employees it was me and a woman who had a grey streak in her hair front that she made fuschia. They made a huge deal out of it and for a while I thought I would have to get an attorney. The new policy read, "no UNNATURAL hair colors...pink, green" will be allowed". So I got the brightest, Clairol Jazzing "RED HOT RED" and made it bright red. They could not do anything about it...and I was there x 15 yrs.
Once upon a time, there was someone who came in 15 minutes early to achieve a turn over on shift. He counted that early 15 minutes as over time, day after day, week after week. It came to the attention of the next level of management so they changed our hours slightly so there was an overlap and no more employee decided over time. Which is the way it should be for overtime is not a device for an employee to use to milk the system.
Once upon a time, there was someone who came in 15 minutes early to achieve a turn over on shift. He counted that early 15 minutes as over time, day after day, week after week. It came to the attention of the next level of management so they changed our hours slightly so there was an overlap and no more employee decided over time. Which is the way it should be for overtime is not a device for an employee to use to milk the system.
We have people who do this at the start and end of their shift, but they're not working' they're just clocking in a min too early and out a min too late. They thought they'd never get caught getting 30 mins OT every day...idiots.
It's typical to punish the group for the actions of one person. I've seen it happen tons of times, and not just at work... I remember I had a math teacher in the 9th grade who would turn off the window AC unit and open the windows when a couple of people wouldn't stop talking. Not fun at all in a hot Alabama September.
Probably the most common cause of this is "casual Friday". The vast majority come to work on casual days in neat jeans, polo shirts, etc., but there are always a few who have to push the envelope. Ripped, faded jeans, t-shirts with offensive graphics, athletic shorts, skimpy tops. It's usually the ones that management are "afraid" of who are the biggest offenders. So, rather than confront the offender, everybody gets punished by casual Friday being abolished.
It's the old 20/80 rule: 20% of the workforce cause 80% of the problems.
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