The Big Box retailer I work for recently held their annual Pow Wow to celebrate what the company achieved in 2009 and to unveil their big plans for the rest of 2010.
Big Box retail loves to develop detailed plans, rolled out with theatrical flare and ambiguous nomenclature.
These plans are normally based on incorrect assumptions, flawed conjecture and a lot of information with no knowledge. They are therefore grossly inadequate at helping associates manage their day to day struggles.
The speed at which business changes means that any plan, especially the ones that are grand in nature and extremely detailed, are out of touch with the realities in the store before the first PowerPoint slide splashes on the 100 foot plasma screen.
But no matter.
Since these plans look good in the annual report or in the boardroom, they are followed to the letter by managers who don’t understand them, but who are too frightened to question them.
All of my senior management was at the meeting. Everyone from the store mangers on up. Some 2,000 people crammed into a giant conference room in the bowels of a random humongous casino in
I can’t help pointing out that a
Given the fact that the current business environment is completely unstable, what the company is actually doing is placing a huge bet on whatever plans they have dreamed up in the Ivory tower.
Just like in Vegas, the odds are not in the bettor’s favor.
I was not in attendance at the annual meeting so I have no first hand knowledge about what the company is actually planning to have us lowly hourly associates do. The information I have gotten so far consists of a nearly incomprehensible memo from my store management and whatever snippets I can glean off the employee website.
I am left alone to read the corporate tea leaves and try to divine what I am supposed to do in 2010 to contribute to my company’s success. Here’s what I think I have figured out so far:
· I am supposed to participate in a Service and Sales Offensive. I am to provide service, and the sales will follow. I am not sure, but I think I am supposed to provide that service in an offensive manner.
· I am supposed to stop making it so difficult for the customer to make a purchase.
· I am supposed to get rid of bad habits. (I’ll start by not eating ice cream right before I go to bed).
· Wait, page three of the memo says I am expected to have a focus on sales. Maybe I am supposed to focus on the sales that don’t occur following my offensive service?
· I am supposed to do things differently because change is good.
· I am supposed to buy into what the company is trying to accomplish.
· I am supposed to have a positive attitude about the changes I am making and whatever it is I am buying into.
To help me understand the steps I am supposed to take to help the company achieve its objectives for 2010, I have been given some interesting facts that provide support for the steps I am taking.
- 37% of customers shop in my store and purchase elsewhere. (I think I am supposed to be happy about the 63% of customers who buy in my store or maybe I am supposed to ignore them and focus on the 37% who are going somewhere else.)
- Customers like clean restrooms
- Customers don’t care about selection and price anymore; they are looking for better service. So we are expanding the products we carry and lowering the prices on hundreds of items across the store, while limiting future hiring to part time staff only.
- Customers want someone to listen to them. (I think I am supposed to find my customers other customers to talk to).
- Customers have high expectations about everything.
Well, one thing is perfectly clear, I have no idea what the company’s objectives are for 2010 and I have no clue as to what resources I have been given to help the company achieve those unknown objectives. I know that I am supposed to make changes regarding how I do my job, but I have no idea what those changes are supposed to be.
But that isn’t the worst part….not by a long shot.
I’m not sure, the signals from the company are still fuzzy, but if I am not mistaken, I think I have been “EMPOWERED”!!!
Telling your employees that they are EMPOWERED is just another way of way of telling employees; “Sorry, you are all on your own!”
If you are EMPOWERED you are allowed to do anything to make the customer happy…except for the things you are not allowed to do.
Being EMPOWERED as an associate is kind of like being a dog wearing a shock collar hooked up to an invisible electric fence.
Like the dog, you can’t see exactly where the boundaries are, the fence being invisible and all, so the only way to know how far you are allowed to go is to wander around until you get a painful, bone jarring electrical shock.
But unlike the dog, the EMPOWERED associate’s boundaries are constantly changing. One day you are allowed to offer a customer free shipping to meet a competitors offer and the next day ZZZZIIIZZZS, you are reprimanded for offering a customer free shipping to meet a competitors offer.
For three weeks you re-arrange your hours to better service customers and then one day, ZZZZAAAAPPPP!!!! you find that you are forbidden to work anything other than you written schedule without three days notice and the signatures of corporate management four steps up the corporate ladder. Since you have violated policy three times, you are informed that the next time it happens you’re fired.
After a while you become even more like the dog who, after being shocked enough, just sits on the porch all day. It’s better to stand around and do nothing than to try to do something, which means perhaps risking your job. Maybe you’ll get fired, you don’t know, and that’s the point. Being EMPOWERED actually increases an associate’s powerlessness by filling them with a form of job loss paralysis.
Being EMPOWERED means that you can not be successful. If you don’t break the rules to help a customer you are subject to dismissal, but if you break the rules to help a customer you are subject to dismissal.
Heads you loose, tails you loose.
Vegas would love to have its gamblers EMPOWRED. The odds are not just in the houses favor…there are actually no odds at all. The gambler (or the associate) looses 100% of the time.
Being EMPOWERED is another symptom of the demise of big box retail.
Empowerment is just another way of the corporation saying:
“Hey, we have absolutely no idea of what to do. We can’t come up with anything better so why don’t you guys at the bottom of the pay scale just take your best shot? Maybe it’ll work?”
Big Box retail loves to talk about how empowerment helps associates by giving them more control over their day to day activities. Big Box raves about how associates love the fact that they can take “ownership” in the company’s future success and how much better it is for management to have loads of EMPOWERED associates running around the store, since EMPOWERED associates can practically mange themselves.
Really?
I love not knowing what the rules are day to day?
I love not knowing if something I did (or didn’t do) two weeks ago is finally going to come to the attention of somebody who thinks my actions were reckless and I am shown the door?
I love “owning the store” while being paid in a year what my CEO makes in a day and a half?
If I have so much power, then where is my compensation for wielding that power?
If I, as an hourly associate, am EMPOWERED to take control of how my store operates and how the company’s customers are serviced, then why don’t I get the paycheck that the people who used to have that responsibility got?
Seriously, where is my money?
Last year, one of the worst in the company’s history, the top five executives of my big box retailer received salary and stock totaling $101.3 million. They averaged $2,026,000 which is exactly 65 times my annual take. The top dog took in $3.84 million which tops what my EMPOWERED ass got by 120 times!
The way I see it, being EMPOWERED is just another way for me to take on duties that used to rest with mangers up the food chain. Ok, then why not pay me some of what they got now that I am doing some of their job?
Like I said, the information trickling out of the corporate brain trust regarding what associates are supposed to do in 2010 is still sketchy.
Additionally we are into the second month of 2010 and we still don’t know what raises, if any, we may be getting.
Is it too much to hope that somehow the new responsibilities for associates are aligned with increased compensation for taking on those new responsibilities?
Probably.
If I have been EMPOWERED, then God help me! I don’t know how I’ll find the strength to do my job while shouldering the burden of the company’s 2010 plans.
Maybe the company will give me a button that says, “don’t bother me…I’m EMPOWERED!”
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