Posting from work... [short rant]

[MonkeyDragon]

Whizbang's already said what I was going to. Yeah, restricting workers' outlets in an effort to force them to be more productive doesn't work in the way the people doing it would hope it to. Most often it just lowers morale, makes the workforce feel resentful, and has them find other ways to utilize their 'goof off so I don't go nuts' time.

This fits very neatly with my personal theory about morale and work performance. I would be willing to bet that if one took a look, one would find a strong correlation between employee morale and various kinds of shrinkage. Employees that are happy and feel valued and appreciated by their company will give their best effort. If they know that their efforts are noticed, they'll take pride in thier jobs.

However, if they feel the company doesn't care, then they stop caring. Why be excellent if being mediocre gets you the same amount of praise? Why work hard to make the company profitable? Beyond that, I've found that workers who feel they are being mistreated by their jobs are more likely to try to "get some of their own back." In my job, this would mean something like giving away drinks, abusing the employee discount, or just ignoring policies. Hence, shrinkage.

I try to keep my work standards high no matter what (out of spite if nothing else), but it's a lot more tempting to not pay for that whatever when I don't feel appreciated than when I know that my company values me.

 

[jollyninja]

My last job had such a tight policy that you could not go to anything but a specific list of approved sites, it was a sales floor job so i spent most of my day staring off into space or planning my game, until they cracked down on carrying a notebook that was not the official work blue book refference sheet. then all i had to do was stare. I personally created over a million dollars of sales per year for that company before the policies, in the next year it dropped to under 600k and i eventually quit. there was literally nothing to do all day unless a customer wanted hands on service.

now I sit at a desk all day with a computer in front of me and fill in my time posting on enworld, it's great.