The Diary of a Reluctant Management Consultant

Cost cutting reaches rock bottom...

It’s been just over a year since Lehman Brothers tanked and during the week Ben Bernanke optimistically said that the US is technically out of a recession, which is great news for the ex-Lehman Brothers’ employees cleaning windscreens in New York. I don’t think we’re out of the woods just yet, although with Eskom increasing their CEO’s salary and magic pseudo-share options, you’d never say. So, just before those now cliché green shoots take hold, your company may decide to have one more round of cost cutting.

Here then are my Top Ten Signs that your company might be cost cutting:

10. Elevator music is now provided by a graduate with a Casio keyboard, who is surprisingly better than the usual elevator music

9. The company’s shuttle bus is now taking tourists on trips to Soweto

8. Under the guise of being green and promoting employee wellbeing, all the escalators in the building have been turned off

7. Participating in Corporate Social Responsibility activities now means helping your fellow man by manning the call centre after hours

6. A cover charge will now apply for all birthday parties, farewells, baby showers or any other celebration held on company premises

5. Company contributions to retirement plans have been reduced and have now been replaced with the option to join a pyramid marketing scheme (all calls must now be answered with “Do you have a dream?”)

4. Training budgets have been significantly reduced which means teambuilding events will now be held on Skype

3. The employee assistance line now diverts to Dr. Phil

2. The budget meal in the canteen is now called the “Zimbabwean Dollar” option

1. The toilet paper in the bathroom mysteriously goes from two-ply to one-play recycled

Employee of the Month

Over an awful lunch in our awful canteen, one of my colleagues was complaining that another valuable “asset” in the company is being rewarded, even though we all know he’s a Work-shy Lazy Bastard (WLB). Despite the fact that the reward is fairly inconsequential, similar to those quality “employee of the month” frames at your local McDonald’s, it does irk a lot of people that the guy who puts the ‘ass’ in ‘asset’ is being acknowledged for his ephemeral hard work. Yes, this is very unfair. Perhaps as unfair as Jethro Tull winning the 1989 Grammy for Best Hard Rock/Metal performance instead of Metallica, but the WLB must be doing something right. Somehow or the other, he must be creating the impression that he’s a hard worker, someone who goes the extra mile, someone who’s a quality employee. Don’t hate the playa, hate the game, as my hip hop lovin’, my pants are hanging below my bum, is Metallica a brand of car polish, 23 year old team member always says.

After careful observation of the WLB in its natural habitat, the cubicle farm, I have discovered some really neat ways for you to create the illusion that you’re the business shizness (I may be spending too much time with the 23 year old). With minimal effort, and I really do mean minimal, you too can soon be the proud owner of an “employee of the month” certificate.

Businesses that experience resource constraints (short-staffed if you’re in retail) are always talking about cloning their staff. A pipe dream perhaps, until of course genetically modified crops finally work their magic. But this can now be achieved by simply sending e-mails very early in the morning or late at night. People get these sneaky e-mails and think that you’re really putting in a special effort. Meanwhile, you’re just sitting on your couch, sipping a beer while watching illegally downloaded episodes of “House”. It’s remarkably easy to achieve. For Outlook 2007:

• Open a new mail message
• Click on the ‘Options’ tab
• Click on the ‘Delay Delivery’ icon
• Under the ‘Delivery options’ section, select the time when you would like your e-mail to be sent (try not to choose round numbers, go for something like 02:23)
• Click ‘Close’, then ‘Send’

Colleagues will be astonished when they see you’ve been working at 02:23! A hard worker like that is surely deserving of reward.

Another shifty WLB trick is to block book your diary. Simply set-up nondescript sounding meetings with yourself. Things like ‘Budget Meeting, ‘Team Meeting’ or ‘Performance Review’ will all suffice. When people try to book meetings with you, they’ll see how frightfully busy you are. Some will even call to try get a precious hour of your time. Cancel a fake meeting and they’ll love you even more for accommodating their humble meeting in your stressful schedule.

People who have meetings all day are always rushing from place to place. To validate your impenetrable diary, you must do the same. No matter where you are going in the building, even it’s to have a nap in your car, you must get there at pace. Look frustrated if you can, it adds to the effect. If you get stopped by a colleague, tell them that you’d love to chat but you’re running late for a meeting, but he’s more than welcome to book some time in your diary… Another quick tip, leave meetings early, because naturally you have another meeting to rush to!

A quality employee is also a knowledgeable employee. Thus, it’s important for you to demonstrate just how knowledgeable you are. This can be achieved by using a lot of jargon and abbreviations, mentioning random obscurities or by simply making things up. Ask people what they think of the new King III report. Question whether the GL has been updated with the EQTs, the MMs and the NCDs ASAP. Object in meetings because you feel the group just isn’t taking GR58A into account. Wait a week for someone to thank you for raising the important GR58A issue, which thankfully, has now been resolved. Go ahead and start making space for that “employee of the year” award!

Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I have to send a few e-mails this evening…

Office Superman, you will get noticed!

A strange sense of giddiness overcame offices across the country this week. Women prancing round the office in shocking pink dresses, garnished with flowers in their hair, men wearing goofy ties over t-shirts and even one brave individual sporting a Superman outfit! I’m told the latter is an engineer, which explains so much. He probably wears his underwear on the outside regularly. The reason for all this frivolity is Spring Day, the 1^st of September for us lucky Southern Hemisphere residents. And later in the week came Casual Day, a fairly recent and pointless invention, if it wasn’t raising money for charity.

I find invented holidays and celebrations very annoying. There’s really no need for Secretaries Day. Why celebrate only one thankless but necessary profession? Surely then we also need to celebrate Uninformed Call Centre Agent Day, Random Guy Who Fixes the Photocopier Day and Lazy Canteen Cashier Day? Then there’s National Braai (barbeque, if you’re not South African) Day, the patron of which is rather unexpectedly and incongruously, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu. Who would have thought that one the side benefits of winning a Nobel Peace Prize is getting to champion the cause of grilled meat? Gandhi was a shoe in if wasn’t for the hunger strikes…

Spring Day sees the company cheerleaders dash around the office the night before draping streamers over desks, balancing balloons on credenzas and leaving party hats on your desk – the cheap kind with the flimsy staples and elastic that will graze your chin when it snaps (blame the global economic crisis for this too). When you walk in the next morning it looks like someone had a children’s party the night before and didn’t clean-up. All that’s missing is the clown… until of course the engineer in the Superman outfit arrives.

Now, Casual Day is very different proposition and requires more crowd participation. Basically, you donate some money to charity, get a sticker proving your benevolence and in return you get to wear casual clothes to work. Genius… if you work for a company that still dresses up formally. The last few companies that I worked for have all had fairly relaxed dress codes, thereby negating any desire to dress up casually on a particular day because a poster in the canteen told you to. If you still wear suits and ties to work, then I see the benefit, but this is becoming rarer in companies today. I wore a suit and tie on my first day at one company a couple of years ago and they asked me to stop that because it was intimidating the staff. Lucky they didn’t see my 10MB Excel “people off payroll” spreadsheet…

I guess Casual Day reminds me of school where we called it Civvies Day. Same concept, you bring some money and a can of food for the poor and you get the privilege of not having to wear your school uniform. The money and food went to a good cause, although one year we were asked to bring cans of more basic food stuff. Seems the poor had very little need for John West’s canned mussels, asparagus spears or artichoke hearts. Think of it as canned food re-gifting. Private school, go figure. Civvies Day was entertaining, especially the one year when we managed to convince two new boys that it involves a ‘best dressed’ competition, causing them wear tuxedos the next day, much to our amusement and their distress and no doubt, long term trauma. It was very funny though… An idea perhaps for when your next intake of graduates start?

Tomorrow, I’ll go to work where the Spring Day decorations are probably still up, limply adorning my cubicle. For entertainment value, I think I’m going to dress up as Desmond Tutu next year…