Cheat Your Employees --- It's Good Business!

I’ve noticed recently that there are several unique management seminars being offered.  Now seminars and webinars are not really unusual.  The unusual part about management seminars is their cost.  They are generally expensive.  There is a good reason for this:  The people who give these seminars have to get as much money as possible up front because most of these seminars are useless and they’ll never get repeat business!

By ‘useless’ I mean that most management seminars are either exotic theories akin to perpetual motion or free energy, or they present just common sense like ‘treat your employees right and they won’t leave’.   Which brings me right to the unique seminars.  These new seminars focus on retaining your best employees.  To me, this is common sense.  You treat them like human beings, not like human resources.  Most of all, you treat them fairly and with respect.  This is extremely difficult for businesses to do.

It is extremely difficult for the top management of any company to think of employees as people and not as resources.  This fallacy contributes mightily to a loss of productivity.  If you think of an employee as no more than a desk or chair, that is the productivity you will get.  Logically it is pretty stupid to expect extraordinary effort from a worker who knows that no matter what he accomplishes, he won’t get any credit, respect or reward.  In general, it isn’t all about money.  In fact, when workers complain about pay increases or monetary rewards, that is usually evidence of a more deep-seated management problem.  When workers feel appreciated and that the company is looking out for them, then money fades as a problem.  However, when the company takes every opportunity to increase their profits by reducing 'employee' expenses, then worker loyalty declines.

General George S. Patton put it succinctly:  “Much is made of loyalty from the bottom to the top.  However, loyalty from the top to the bottom is much more important and much less prevalent.”

When management ceases being leaders and become accountants, the company’s fortunes decline.  With the general low intelligence of management, they don’t recognize what they’ve done wrong, but become bull-headed and do more of the same.    

Since I’ve been a considerable amount of time with two different companies in two different markets, I have seen the same stupid management tricks.  For example, when the job market gets tight and it’s hard to find jobs, every company I’ve been with has cut employee benefits.  It’s almost like clockwork.  As soon as the employment market is down, the company begins to cheat its employees.  

In contrast, I have never seen a company come out and cut management bonuses to save money.  I’ve been at some companies where they announced that, but you find out later that they never did or intended too.  My guess is that they thought their employees were stupid.

While at that major medical manufacturer, there was an incident that demonstrated the duplicity of management.  This particular year, sales were down.  The company usually netted a half billion dollars in sales, and their usual ‘big’ sales month was September.  Because they usually raised prices in October.  This particular year, even after September, sales were down by 90 million dollars.  This is an almost 20% decline in sales year over year.  That September I was in the bank that was just down the street and I overheard a teller and a manager talking saying how they had trouble cashing the bonus check of the vice president of sales.  They actually mentioned him by name.  From the implication, they had trouble coming up with enough cash.  I was stunned.  Here sales were down by 20% and the vice president of sales, whose job it was to get sales in the door, was getting a bonus check.  You would bet that if it had been a bonus for the employees, they would have yanked it immediately.

That same company, the second year I was there, cut employee benefits.  During the presentation of the new benefits plan, the presenter kept saying how this was a considerable improvement in the benefit plan.  The problem was that everything that was a considerable improvement was a cut in benefits.  Finally I got it. It wasn’t an improvement for me, but for the company.

The plain fact is that managers cheat employees because they believe they are doing the best for the company.  This distortion of mind makes it easy to rationalize making employees pay more for health insurance, because they are lucky to have a job in this economy.

The plain fact is that management, even the president, CEO or whatever they call themselves, are supposed to be part of a functioning entity.  They are people (or human resources) that have a job to do to make the company successful.  Once they begin to think of themselves as feudal lords guarding their divine rights, the company falters.  As soon as management begins to think of themselves as more than just a common worker, things go wrong.  This is also the behavior that causes workers to create unions.  This is a whole another subject.

Another area where management works earnestly to cheat their employees is the yearly review process.  We’ll take that up in another blog entry. 

How to Piss Your Customers off --- GoDaddy Edition

If you have ever tried to read your mobile phone billing statement or you ever tried to renew some subscription online, you know that there are all sorts of money traps lurking just beneath the surface.  Despite the protests and the periodic messages you get about how they are ‘improving their statements’, what they are really doing is hiding all the relevant information.  Over the years I have seen perfectly readable (and itemized) monthly statements (I’m looking at you, Cox Communications!) become more and more obscure so that you have very little chance of understanding what you are being charged for.  

This, of course, is because the company you are dealing with does not want to explain to you why they are charging you.  It is also the reason they hire phalanxes of idiot customer service representatives.  The worse these people are, the more likely you are to hang up without having to be told the truth.

My current problem is with GoDaddy.com.  Yes, I do have a vanity website (which I won’t tell you where it is) and, although I haven’t updated it for years, I still do want it available.  It was created with Microsoft Frontpage (about 2001 I think) and since I no longer have that program, it would be a hassle to try and download the whole structure to being to work on it.

So I’ve been hosting with GoDaddy for a number of years and it was only last year with I noticed that the marketing weasels had gotten a hold of the company.  

The first evidence is what I mentioned above.  When I got a notice from them for renewal, I noticed that the webpage I arrived at, was close to unreadable.  The page was very busy with advertisements, my ‘bill’ was in a small section at the center of the screen with a large amount of money required and my only option was to go to Checkout.

This, of course, was the old magazine subscription scam, where you get a decent price as a new customer, but, as a loyal renewing customer, you have the privilege of paying two to three times as much.  

At that time, I managed to argue them down to a semi-reasonable amount, however, it took a lot of my time to call ‘Customer Service’ and again, waiting for them to run back and forth to the person really making the decisions.

So, recently, I got another email alert from GoDaddy.  GoDaddy is very careful about informing me when I have to update credit card information.  I’ve also noticed that they are not very good about informing me when my website hosting is down, or if I’m not taking advantage of benefits I’ve already paid for.  GoDaddy is also one of those myriad of companies that will flood you with emails on sales or just about anything that will cost you more money.

 The fun began immediately with the email.  Under the bright red banner announcing ‘Credit Card Expiration Notice’, was a dire warning that I should renew my products now and not have to lose all my stuff.  The email did not include any convenient links so that I could update my credit card info.  Of course not, that would not net them any money.  To update your credit card info, you have to log into your account, at which point you are confronted with a page full of advertisements and the only link relevant to what you want to do is a small black box, ‘My Account’ in the upper left.  Then you are confronted with a menu that includes a lot of stuff you don’t have.  You have to click on the payment tab, click on the small link that says ‘View Payment Types’, then click on the Visa or Mastercard link next to the last four digits of your account number.  As you noticed, there is no simple tab or link to ‘My Account Information’ or ‘Update My Account Information’, nor do they tell you what link to hit to update your credit card info.  There is, however,  a large box for ‘ExpressCheckout’.

The interface is damned awkward!

Now I got myself into trouble, unknowingly, by noticing a menu tab for expiring items.  I clicked on that so that I could renew without having to come back to this abortion of a web interface next month, or so I thought.  The renewal button brought me to a statement that gave me the one (1) option of paying a horrendous amount of money for 2 years of hosting.  But then it did something else.  It presented me with a list of options for hosting.  Noticing that there was an option for half the price they were expecting me to pay, I click on that, and, like a smart consumer, removed the higher price at the checkout.  I proceed to checkout and suddenly I’m confronted with a ‘Getting Started Page.’

Hmm, why should I get a getting ‘started page’?  After all I’ve been hosting with them for ten years!  So I click the button.  I’m asked which domain to attach to the hosting.  When I try to enter my domain, there is a quick flash of some red text, too fast to read it and then I’m back to the same question and the same blank box.  Finally I try enough times to read the error message.  It tells me I can’t attach my domain to that hosting.

I’ve tried really hard not to have to call customer support.  If you’ve read what I’ve gone through with various customer support systems, you understand that  a) I won’t get anywhere, b)There will be a distinct last of expertise on the other end of the line and c) I won’t get anywhere.

I call GoDaddy support.  It’s a little shorter set of menus, I only have to enter my customer number and I get through to a support person surprisingly fast.  However, he doesn’t identify himself, this may not be good.

The first piece of information I discover is that the hosting I’ve just paid for is only for new hosting (remember the magazine scam I mentioned earlier).  He says that to use the new hosting, I have to cancel the old hosting then attach the domain to the new hosting, but, before that, make sure I backup my website and then upload it to the new hosting.  Wait a minute!  You mean that this technology company can’t move my website over?  I ask this knowing full well that my website does not really have to move, all they do is make some changes to my account.  The harddrive it’s on makes no difference.  I go after the hosting also:  “Why doesn’t the page tell you that the low price is only for new hosting?   Why doesn’t the page tell you that?  You mean I supposed to happily pay twice as much for a renewal?  That’s stupid!”

The response I get is crass:  “I’m sorry you feel that way, sir.”

EXCUSE ME?  I SHOULD FEEL THAT PAYING TWICE AS MUCH FOR THE SAME ITEM IS NOT STUPID?

Of course, this customer support person is pretty much unarmed when it comes to an argument.  I state my case without yelling.  His only response is to go running off to his supervisor.  This is the usual scam that you find in car dealers where the sales person sympathizes with you, however, his boss says….

He comes back with a couple of alternatives:  Yes, they can move my website for me, but it would cost $150.  I laugh in his face.  I would be paying $150 for nothing.  Of course, that is the whole idea to make money off the customer with a return of almost nothing.  This is GoDaddy’s customer service at its best.  Do for the customer only if it’s lucrative.

Then, of course, I’m misled.  He tells me they are willing to update my hosting for an extra 18 months for nothing.  That’s what he said, but that’s not what the meaning was.  What he should have said that he’d transfer the purchase I just made to my old hosting which would calculate out to 18 months at the inflated renewal rate.  Unfortunately I didn’t catch that until I got off the phone.

I always wondered when the mission of customer service switched from helping the customer to tricking the customer into paying more.  Yes, a company is in business to make a profit.  Years ago, companies would invest a certain amount of money and expect a certain percentage return.  Now, it seems that we have company officers desperately running after every rolling penny.  That’s not a pretty sight.

Of course now that I’ve had this ‘wonderful’ experience with GoDaddy, I’ll be looking for alternate hosting.  Maybe I’ll leave then come back.  Then again, I’ve never gone back to AT&T.

The unfortunate part of this is that when someone from GoDaddy reads this, the customer service person I talked to, who had nothing to do with the policies that caused the problem, will probably get a reprimand.  The ugly marketing SOB that created this mess will never think about it has he flies to his 2^nd vacation home.

There Is No Such Thing as Multitasking

There was a lot of commotion in the business world over ‘multitasking’.  Multitasking is a computer term that was stolen by business consultants.  Of course, you know the definition of a business consultant?  This is a person that either cannot or will not produce any useful work.  They make their living by cobbling together random concepts and selling them to managers as the ‘better mousetrap’.

The original definition of ‘multitasking’ was the ability to do more than one task or job at the same time.  If you have a computer with a single core processor, guess what?  It does NOT do multitasking.  That single core will stop, store the status of the current task, then begin the next task.  At some point, it will store the status of that task and move back to the first.  Since there is only a single core, only one thing can be worked on at a time.  THIS IS HOW THE HUMAN BRAIN WORKS.

The human brain can only do one conscious task at a time.  What business calls ‘multitasking’ is jerking your chain around from task to task like a kid with ADHD.  There have been many studies of multitasking and the universal conclusion is that multitasking kills productivity.

Check out this article which quotes some studies:

http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/a/costs-of-multitasking.htm

The easiest example of how people cannot really multitask is this:  Take one pen in each hand and try to write two different articles on two different subjects at the same time.  Don’t worry, nobody can do that.  As far as I’m concerned, listening to music and typing a memo is not multitasking.  All the music is doing is filling the dead time between thoughts.

Now that we know that multitasking does not work (remember all those videos of people texting in their cars and getting into accidents?), what are the ramifications for business?

Multitasking gives the multitasker the illusion of productivity.  While studies show that productivity is lost, the multitasker believes that they are accomplishing more.  This is because the brain is constantly occupied.  Never mind that the multitasker is training his mind to NOT concentrate on a task, but make it jump around like a caffeinated squirrel.

The cartoon strip ‘Over the Hedge’ (and the movie) features an out-of-control squirrel named Hammy.  Hammy darts around crazily, has a short attention span and is generally not the one you’d want to rely on.  However, this is what multitasking entails.  This is how multitasking will train you to act.

For management, multitasking is another win/win.  Your manager can load you down with projects, jerk you randomly from one project to another, complain about your slow progress in the ones you aren’t working on, and, finally, shift his work to you.  Oh, and of course, at your yearly review, your bosses can complain about your lack of ability to get the job done.

When a manager begins to ‘talk’ to you about multitasking, you can be assured that he is really confessing on how bad he is at prioritizing your work.  The next step is where prioritizing work will be pushed down to your level.  Don’t be deceived here.  This is another scheme like ‘empowerment’ which is just another way of shifting responsibility and work load to the next lower level.

When a computer multitasks, that is, a single core processor, every time a task is switched, the present state is saved.  Then the new task is loaded, or if it has been worked on already, reloaded.  The advantage is that the computer has infallible memory of where it was before.  Not so with human beings, when we jump between tasks, we not only have to find the paperwork and/or computer files, we have to remember what we were doing and what we were thinking at that time.  We may also have to ‘switch gears’ in moving from an analytical task to a creative one.  This takes time since we are not computers.  This leads to the conclusion that every time your manager jerks your chain to send you off in a different direction (or task), he is making sure that your efficiency declines.  If he does it fast enough, you may get nothing done!

Of course all this is too complicated for your typical manager to understand.  He’ll take the easy way out and require you to put in unpaid overtime.  Because, after all, you haven’t been able to get your work done!