Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Be a Team Player and Get Shafted Quietly?

If you’ve agreed to pay your personnel according to a given arrangement, you stick with it. But what if you decide to shaft your team and ask them to be nice little team players and take it quietly?  What does that say about you?

That’s basically what’s happening at the organization where I work. And it’s wrong.

My workplace is unionized, though I myself have been in and out of the ranks of “staff” and “management”.  There are collective agreements in place.  One of the elements in the agreements is payment for overtime.  If that is the agreement you have with your people, that is what you ought to honour. But the unspoken culture on this point (amongst others) is don’t-ask-don’t-tell.

All unionized staff are eligible for overtime compensation.  But these are office folks, not Teamsters.  So they work the overtime hours, but either nobody tells them they’re eligible for overtime pay or they are pressured not to say anything about it.  Demand overtime pay and you’re not a “team player”.  I hate that term, by the way.  But only team players get the opportunities that lead to promotion.  So shut the f*** up, get back in line, and keep working quietly.

That’s pile of pure, steaming manure fresh from the bull’s back-end.  And I’m saying this as someone who’s been in a managerial position, and someone with at least some business sense.

If you have an agreement with your people, you honor it.  Not doing so is a clear, unequivocal statement about how closely senior management really takes to heart the oft-repeated mantra, “Our people are our most valuable asset.”

You show you value your people by respecting them.  Part of how you respect your people is by honoring your word and keeping your agreements with them.

Sometimes this let’s-pay-‘em-as-little-as-we-can-get-away-with game gets ludicrous.  In this case, it involves a member of my crew and it’s getting me angry.  One of my summer students from this past summer still has not been paid for her overtime hours.  Payroll is citing technicalities and passing me off to HR; HR is saying this is a Payroll matter and bouncing me back to Payroll.

I checked with HR before making an agreement with my crewmember. Now that agreement is not being upheld by the bureaucratic machinery, and it’s reflecting poorly on me and on the organization.

The organization says it wants to recruit and retain young talent, to win the cream of the crop in the war for talent.  This is one helluva way to do the exact opposite.

The organization neither keeps its word to its unionized personnel nor keeps its word to its summer students whom it says it wants to attract.  The latter is an example of bureaucratic ineptitude, which you have to admit every large organization exhibits – but the objective is to try to eliminate them.  The former, however, is manipulative, dishonorable, and reflects piss-poor character.

Yes, the organization I work with is one of Canada’s Top 100 Employers.