CBS premiered their anticipated new show Undercover Boss after the Super Bowl last night. It was a genuine show about an executive of a large company, in this case Waste Management, going undercover to ‘learn from the front-lines’ about problems in the company. The executive, in true executive form, then ponders what he or she has learned and alters company policy armed with this new firsthand knowledge.
Again, a nice show and quite interesting. It was definitely entertaining, and good to see something in the media portraying ‘The Corporation’ as something other than evil. That said, though, I found I few issues with the program.
First, and most obvious, is that this approach doesn’t scale. The Big Boss interacts with a handful of people over a week and then draws policy-changing conclusions from these interactions? Surely they’re aware of sampling errors. Also, I wonder about the culture of a company where the executives are so far removed from the goings-on of the company that they are not even aware of the effect that their decisions might have on the average worker. I suppose that’s possible, and may even be common – but that’s exactly the problem that needs to be addressed, not the specific findings of the round of investigation. For what else has management not been exposed to?
What went unsaid in the program is the fact that employees [obviously] had no voice for which to channel their ideas through the organization. It took a CBS programming idea and one brave executive to let management know that women garbage truck drivers need to be allowed time in their routes to go to the bathroom? As someone passionate about ideas, and involved in the creation of an application which is focused on giving employees a voice in the idea process within organizations, that was startling to me. The bathroom policy doesn’t need fixing, the company culture which allows problems to hide in plain sight for years does.
If there are any executives reading this who have been turned down by CBS for a future episode of Undercover Boss, I’d like to offer you an easier way to learn from your employees – contact us to discuss Kindling, our idea management and collaboration tool. Going undercover is cute, but spend your energies creating a culture of open collaboration around innovation for your company – it’s a much more effective use of your time.
Rich Ziade said:
Excellent post.
This particular example makes me think about all those jobs/industries where a computer isn’t part of the work day. How does a garbage man on the road get that feedback back up? It presents new challenges for tools that funnel up ideas/feedback.
OWD said:
I actually found Larry O’Donnell and wrote him a personal letter about my feelings on the show. After I picked my HR Manager-wife off the floor when she saw that one plant’s idea of ensuring employees were on time was to dock them two minutes for every minute they were late, I showed my exasperation myself with the clueless, deer-in-headlights bunch of lazy people Larry called his staff. Since when does the President/COO become the first one who finds out that one of his front line personnel is doing four jobs, or that someone’s been on dialysis 18 years? The COO makes policy, to be sure, but it sure wasn’t communicated – or followed up on – by anyone who called themselves a manager.
Now, I realize that this was a reality show and lots of stuff was cut out so that there was some modicum of drama and “the big reveal” at the end, but jeez, who are these guys? How about monthly reports, 360 feedback, one-on-ones…and, what butt was the company’s collective HR head up into?
Scott Schwartz said:
@RichZiade re: employees without computer access contributing.
…but most everyone has a cell phone. Let those employees contribute via SMS (good way to enforce brevity) or by leaving a voice message that’s machine-transcribed. Twilio, Jott, and other voice cloud providers are great at that stuff and offer APIs to integrate with Kindling or whatever other apps you want to sync with.