Jack Vinson has been trying to explain "
what good looks like".
His first example was of a CEO who stood by the front door bang on starting time so that (s)he could smile, heartily greet the latecomers and give them a slip reading:
"Thank you for coming to work today. I was here at 8:30 am to welcome you. Would I have the pleasure of greeting you tomorrow morning at the same time? Signed, CEO" *How would this play on white collar work? I think it would be an interesting test of quality on the part of the CEO and the "participants" in this little exercise.
Why the CEO, what's the impact? Well, the thought pattern goes that if you score a black mark with this person then that's career suicide. More immediately you think of the safety of your current position. Not worth the risk so you show up on time.
All makes sense so far. So who are we trying to catch? Your disengaged 9-5ers who basically take the piss.
Who are you likely to catch? All kinds:
your piss-takers (PTs)
your legitimate late attendees (doctors, dentists, exceptional traffic, one-off unreliable child care, etc...)
your hard working joe's that finish on time that'll happily do the extra 5 minutes at the end or take it out of their lunch break
your sloggers who were in the office until 7pm the night before finishing off a vital piece of work but still wanted the semblance of a regular evening to themselves and rather than sacrifice sleep they get a full cycle's kip, rush to get ready but still sadly end up 10 minutes late in the morning.
As the CEO are you going to treat all of these people the same? Maintain a warm smile, say good morning and hand over the slip. Lets say you do. What is the outcome going to be?
You'll probably shake up the PTs. They know they're likely on thin ice with their line manager and so won't continue risking it with the big cheese liable to catch them too. Good.
Legitimate late attendees. They may bin the slip as soon as read comfortable in the knowledge that it was an understandable one-off. They would be explaining the situation to their line manager anyway.
The hard working joes are likely to take offence thinking "it's not as if I don't do the time anyway. Sheesh, what an ass."
The sloggers, these will be agitated the most. If the note, smile and a good morning is all that is communicated then this experiment will be a huge negative on them. They are likely to be left thinking "I give this company two hours of my time last night to meet this important deadline and I get this grief over 10 minutes the following day. You won't catch me doing that again then."
Executing this experiment verbatim looks like a huge risk to me. However, it does provide a rare opportunity for some brief one on one time between a CEO and an engaged employee who might ordinarily only lay eyes on each other once a year in a presentation whilst the CEO spouts out the year's results. Such a meeting could be valuable to both parties.
All that is needed is for CEO to be able to distinguish between the latecomer types. Perhaps integrating
Christina Pikas' suggestion and having the CEO lurk about the night before will help and as well as a quick review with the managers on site determining as to who are the people (s)he is trying to sort out.
*
Original post by Joyce Wycoff - This was applied to a blue collar environment where things work a little differently. They get overtime and productivity, measured in widgets per hour, tends to be rather fixed. When I was doing such work in my teens clocking-in solved this problem. You're not in on time; you don't get paid.
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