Employee Development: Creating the Corporate Robot
Posted on October 27, 2007
Filed Under Fake Culture, Society | 1 Comment
Today I was asked to fill in a short questionnaire at my part-time job. In a fantastic display of bureaucratic stupidity, I was led along a path of externalised office conditioning. The questionnaire was about team building, but it wasn’t made clear to me why I was being asked to fill it in. Anyway, my boss handed me the form, robotically repeating the sound-bite that ‘there are no right or wrong answers’ and that I should be honest. Of course when someone tells you that, you know instantly that they are about to analyse your personality. Naturally, as I work under authoritarian rule, and am sub-ordinate to my bosses – I lied, telling them what they want to hear.
So after I filled in the form, the boss took it away to check it (he was excited like a kid at Christmas and clearly wanted to know my ‘results’ immediately). He spent about 10 minuets in his office, and then went home for the weekend – telling me only when I asked, that he would let us know ‘in a few months’ what the forms are all about.
The questionnaire obviously didn’t tell him whether or not I would use my own initiative. Google being what it is found the same questionnaire on the Internet, along with the scoring parameters.
Here’s a sampling of the questions:
• Team members call out one another’s deficiencies or unproductive behaviours
• Team members quickly and genuinely apologize to one another when they say or do something inappropriate or possibly damaging to the team
• Team members willingly make sacrifices for the good of the team
• Team members know about one another’s personal lives and are comfortable discussing themand so on…
So at first glance the questionnaire is about my perspective on the team. But the scoring card tells what it is really about:
• A score of 8 or 9 indicates that the [employee's] dysfunction is probably not a problem for your team.
• A score of 6 or 7 indicates that the [employee's] dysfunction could be a problem for your team.
• A score of 3 to 5 indicates that the [employee's] dysfunction needs to be addressed.
The higher the score the more strongly you agree with the statement. So whether an individual discusses their personal life with another person they probably don’t get on with – is a ‘dysfunction’. This then is the truth of the illusion of corporate working life. Under this guise, true dysfunction isn’t really dysfunction; genuine human behaviour is actually dysfunction.
Offices (and most corporate environments) are a parody of a true social environment. Interactions are dominated by rules and regulations. Always the spectre of the team and corporate agenda hangs over everyone’s heads. The carrot on a stick, and authoritarian rule (the fear of losing your job, or some lesser ‘verbal’ punishment) all lead to the programming of the corporate robot.
The corporate robot becomes another fragmented facet of our personality, conflicting with our other conditioned programming; all of which attempts to reduce us to a set of binary parameters.
The conflict: Do I answer the questions truthfully, knowing that by being a genuine human (i.e. wanting my own space, liking some people whilst not liking others, getting bored in meetings), is going to be seen as dysfunctional. Or do I lie on the questionnaire, telling them what I know they want to hear – and giving them a false impression of who I am.
Most people will choose the latter – quite often without even realising the internal conflict. Those who choose to answer truthfully will no doubt be dealt with (“A score of 3 to 5 indicates that the dysfunction needs to be addressed.”)
The true nature of the form is revealed as: Is the employee’s corporate conditioning strong enough, or does it need addressing.
The best bit of all this, is that the bosses also get a form to fill in. This time it is on their perspective of the team. However this isn’t to develop an analysis of the boss, but instead to create an overview of the ‘team’. Thus the boss is infallible, his world-view is not biased, he knows his place in the world; a true corporate robot. Blindly, he fails to realise that his information and interactions are based upon the functional lies (of the corporate robot), and the dysfunctional truths (of genuine human behavior).
Backwards is forwards, up is down, black is white. How did we manage to get it all so wrong?
Comments
One Response to “Employee Development: Creating the Corporate Robot”
Leave a Reply
Team building is really necessary for a very successful implementation of business plans.’*,
[ Quote ]