Circus Office

Its really hard to understand what is taught in an MBA programme nowadays. What the security guard understands in our office is hardly understood by any one in our management, if studies are meant to teach you things & not just to decide what pay package you are to get & at what grade are you to be employed, the B-schools arent doing great job of it. The current crisis being alternate saturday offs , which are given in turns to half the staff, so that the office is functioning on all saturdays. This move was meant to make sure that the office does not lose business on saturdays as well as keeping the employees happy.

The first mistake was that the staff stregnth was never measured to see whether half the staff will be able to keep the office functioning on a saturday. Now saturdays have become stressful days for some persons(including me as it means i end up filling up for 3 people & that too across departments, so this work which i generally dont do & am not qualified for, is expected of me every alternate saturday). There goes the employee morale.

The Second Mistake was that, like i've said above, some staff are filling in for off duty employees every fortnight, which means that what has happened in the past 2 weeks they have no clue whatsoever, which also means theat execution of any deal will take more time than average, as the replacement worker has to refer to the past weeks correspondences etc. Late execution means unhappy customers. Which again proves that just keeping the office open 6 days a week means nothing if you are going to make your existing customers unhappy.

There has also been a side effect to this whole episode. Groupism amongst the staff. On one side there are those who want alternate saturdays off & on the other those who dont want saturday offs (or rather they want saturdays off or on to be applicabel to all the staff simultenously). A team in such circumstances cannot develop, which makes the daily functioning across "groups" a challenge now.

Now the last year or so i've been in this employment i have seen alternate saturdays to be off for 3 months, then we'd had 3 months of saturdays working, now we're again planning to have saturdays off. Which goes to prove what a management without a strategy does, it works on trial & error, trying (or hoping) to get it right the next time. When the management thinks that there are some problems which are too trivial to be analysed & then there are only a few problems which are important & which require careful study that is when the mistake occurs. The biggest mistake that i feel any mangement makes is when it tries to analyse & attach importance to the problems. What needs analysis is the future course of action or the solutions.

Keeping alternate saturdays off or on, on the face of it might seem a trivial problem but even without a MBA degree i could point the potential flaws (some have already started to surface). Atleast twice the company has gone through the same mistake. This time i am hoping to make this the last decision i will see taken in the company.