It is Friday morning, nearly 11am and I am playing air guitar, air drum and air bass to “First time around” from the obscure, yet finger licking good track of Greg Mathieson’s “Super baked potato live”. It looks silly, but I am having a blast.
As previously mentioned, I have secret access to audio and video recording of certain strategic, yet highly confidential meetings within Hades Corp. Last night I was fast forwarding through endless middle management KPI and dashboard review sessions, when all of a sudden I found a great one.
Meeting title: Project retrograde
Attendees: real estate and facilities management senior managers
Location: a plush conference room with lots of champagne being passed around
Chair: gentlemen, gentlewomen – today we are here to discuss project “Retrograde”, which will be our effort to our companies’ relentless drive to drive down costs. I am proud of what you have achieved so far. Charles, it was sheer brilliance to cancel the contract with the cleaning company in the regional sales office and instead assign cleaning duty to the person with the lowest sales numbers. Not only did this significantly reduce costs, it also inspired the sales staff to go that extra mile.
Audrey, your idea to stop replacing light bulbs should be an inspiration to us all. We noticed that once light bulbs started to flicker and employees learned they would not be replaced, they grumbled and whined… but in the end they bought replacement bulbs from their own money.
And Joe, how could we forget your innovative way of getting rid of the “free” coffee for employees. You first switched to the most horrible, cheap brand which cut coffee consumption by half. But then you topped yourself by having leaving strategically placed pots of coffees on the burner – once the stench had circulated through the whole building, hardly anybody drank coffee.
Ideas like this clearly support our bottom line, but as our beloved CEO says: “it is never enough”, and he was not only talking about his bonus. So, as professionals in real estate and facilities management, I think we can do more. I recently had a conversation with our Chief Information Officer and we were discussing the opportunities of stimulating working from home. As you know, we now have offered the majority of our employees facilities to work from home – of course using their personally paid for broadband internet connection. If we could get 50% or more of our staff to work from home for 3 days per week, we could stop the lease on at least 3 of our buildings here at headquarters. That would save us tons of money every month we could spend on more useful things like annual bonuses for management or our shareholders.
So, let’s hear what we can come up with to stimulate people to work more from home… Kim, what do you think?
Kim: we have some old fax machines and printers in the basement which IT wanted to throw out. They are quite noisy, so we could put one of them in every corridor. Also, I was thinking of hiding several phones in closed cupboards, which we could ring several times per hour.
Pierre: I was thinking of not only making noise, but also to make the office scary. We could tweak the elevators to shudder more and add some rattling sounds. Also, we could make sure that the lights in the elevators would unexpectedly shut off at random intervals.
Chair: team, I like this. I love our creative ideas, out of the box and with focus on our core purpose. Keep going!
Maria: building on Pierre’s idea of unexpectedly turning off the lights, how about complete power failures every other day? And I am sure the IT guys will have a way to slow down the local network to dial up speed.
Kim: we should be careful not to spoil our service reputation. I would recommend we still do maintenance, but only during office hours. I will make sure we check all online calendars, so we can time when we can interfere with the optimal number of meetings.
Joe: I can remember that years ago a bird died in the attic and that created a horrible smell. I am sure we can arrange for an already deceased parrot to be stored in the ceiling above the pantry. And speaking of smells and pantries, how about leaving some nice weeks old vegetables and yoghurts in the fridges?
Maria: Yes, great ideas. From several surveys I remember that people also disliked office moves as this disrupts their work. Perhaps we can plan for seemingly random, illogical office moves? Like cramming too many workers in one room and leaving another room completely empty? Or re-arranging all staff in alphabetical order across offices?
Chair: Folks, I am so proud to be working with you. I have noted all your brilliant ideas, which all have potential and are cheap to execute. I am sure we will follow up on most of them to stimulate virtual working from home.
Disclaimer: what, you read all the fine print? are you a lawyer?
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