Shock collars?

This message brought to you by the Ghost Writer while Marti combats the impending December holidays for control of the chaos called retail.

 

I often contemplate Marti's blog, "Lighting a Manager on Fire and Other Illustrative Training Techniques".  [Does the period go inside or outside of the quotes?  That's a story for another blog, I think.]  Trying to get every leader to behave in a manner coherent with goals and values is a challenge.  As an HR Leader, I try to help them understand to create that altogether, potentially overrated, "buy-in" perceived to be critical in creating coherence.

 

Then I contemplate the other side of this -- Shock Collars and Other Means for Controlling Employee Behavior.  When confronted with the inevitably "why" question when someone does something he or she shouldn't, I say, "Lack of appropriate use of shock collars in the workplace."  Really?  Why does anyone do anything?  Because he or she COULD!  There's no room in "could" for "should" or "should not", "trained" or "not trained", "told" or "not told".  It's just because the person could.

 

So the tried-and-true next question is, "How do we make the process so the person can not do that?"  Well, that's where having wonderfully creative, intelligent, and free-will humans on the payroll hurts repeatability and reproducibility.  If we make it impossible for humans to think and act, then aren't we really just turning them into something they aren't?  A wise math teacher in the, then dawning computer age, said, "Let computers do what computers do and let people do what people do.  Computers are incredibly fast and accurate, but really stupid -- they only do what humans tell them to at most levels.  Humans are slow, inaccurate, and very smart."  I agree with this wise soul.  So is the logical follow-up question, "How do we make it so a human doesn't have to do anything related to that at all?"  And this is where we see success until...

 

"Why did the human ignore what the computer said he or she was supposted to do?"  And we're right back to the beginning of "could" and getting rid of that pesky "human element" in the process.

 

Have you heard the story of the perfect staffing solution?  The perfect staff has two employees:  a person and a dog.  The person is there to feed the dog and repair anything that breaks.  The dog is there to bite the person if the dog isn't fed or the person tries to touch anything that's not broken.

 

Is the moral of the story, "It's all about consequences"?  "Could" is really predicated on the absence of real and present consequences.  Each person's idea of a real and present consequence varies, and sadly, most of us only think of the term "consequences" in the negative connotation.  In a recent employee policy conversation, a colleague said, "These are for the 3% of the population who really need managed.  The rest get it."  Hmmm... wow.  The logical implication of this is we spend 97% of our time managing 3% of the workforce, and most of us have heard this before.

 

So here's my new, radical idea, let's identify the 3%, put shock collars on them and quit wasting our time on policies, counseling, and mistake-proofs those 3% will ignore anyway.