PMTD: Irony and Corporate Double Speak

My company does an annual employee appreciation week in the fall called People Make the Difference. They also use the slogan throughout the year at pep rallies, in corporate communications, and on a sporadic basis to remind the worker drones how valued our contributions are. The gist of the message is always that our firm offers our clients a valuable service but that service would be meaningless without the dedicated legions providing the personal touch. It is our employees who bring real value to the services we provide.

Bleach! It may not surprise you to hear that I find the message to be bullshit. I'm not above waving the corporate flag or being proud of whom I work for, but lame corporate platitudes and the feel good corporate psychology of month isn't enough to win my buy-in. It's fine to say that your people make the difference when you really encourage your people to solve your clients' problems and give them the flexibility to implement creative solutions, but I don't see that here. I don't see a company that tries to be a customer service leader. I compare the way that I was trained and supported as a phone rep at Merrill versus the way that the frontline people that I support here seem to be trained, and I find that while both companies may trumpet superior service, only at Merrill were people given the training and tools to really do that. There's a secondary issue that since none of the employees here are 6, 7, 24, 63, whatever registered, there's no need to hire people who are smart enough to pass those sorts of exams. And so they don't. And so [some of] the employees don't necessarily have a certain base level of knowledge or education to come up with creative solutions - to actually make a difference.

In a business where people really did make the difference, it would be hard to imagine a sale of the business without the employees who were so critical to the operations. The papers left laying on the printer suggest that this business is about to be sold without any of the people going along - just the accounts and the technology. People don't make the difference; assets under management make the difference. Clients make a difference too. And client trading platforms really make a difference. People, not so much.

There's still been no confirmation that the papers I found mean what I interpret them to mean, but the lawyers around here are sure scurrying around and spending lots of time with outside counsel in a way that suggests that something is going on. Besides being unable to sleep, I'm having a harder time than normal focusing on getting work done, especially work that is long term in nature.

Jonathan 4/23/2007 07:43:00 AM