The words we use to describe our world influences our experience in it. When someone wants to manipulate you one of the first things they might do is get you to change the way you describe things in your everyday life. One example that applies to the workplace is when Administration became Human Resources. People were equated to things like water, or power. Things to be used to achieve a goal. Unfortunately it is the nature of humans to misuse resources. A piece of firewood doesn’t care if you use it up, and equating a human to something like that allows you to distance yourself from the humanity of an employee. Resources are meant to be used up and discarded. It’s a toxic way of thinking. Also, not to derail my point to far, but calling things toxic is also new language. In the past I might have said harmful, but toxicity implies a poisonous nature; inherent danger. Someone else might have simply used the word because it is fashionable, but since I am aware of these sorts of tactics I’m also aware of them working on me. Which is to say you might not always trust me too. Anyway, I started working in the years just after administration became human resources and watched things deteriorate further and further. Big business has rarely been in the habit of taking care of the nameless cogs who make the money for it, but over time the care taken has fluctuated. We are living in a time where a lot of lip service is paid to the value of human life, while in practice it is treated as cheap and replaceable. Businesses that treat employees suffer from more internal theft and damage because people can tell when the command structure doesn’t care what happens to them. That kind of cancerous treatment infects all parts of society as it spreads from business to business. it leaves us, essentially, where we are right now. Unfortunately the change is going to have to come from the top down with companies who are run by people who aren’t ruled by the love of wealth and power. That is going to be the fundamental stumbling block for change. We live in a time when people with wealth and power feel invincible and immortal. They don’t worry about what will happen when the coffin lid closes. It is my opinion that a person should try to live in some level of service to their fellow man. According to the gifts he, or she, has. I make funny stories on the internet to try and ease the daily suffering of others. I do it as cheaply as possible so it can help as many people as possible. Which is why my patreon gives everyone the same stuff regardless of the pledge level. People are still very generous though. I like to think that it’s because they think I’m worth more than the dollar I ask for rather than out of pity. I’m not sure I want to know the actual truth though. XD

Anyway, be wary of people who want to change how you speak. They rarely do it out of a desire to benefit others. They want to control how you think. Resist.

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Are Carol & Thom still together?

Yes.

A friend of mine, who is a self-made millionaire, wrote her Master’s thesis on Ethics in Business, and flat out showed that the best way to make money is to keep your employees *happy*, and wanting to do a good job. A big part of that is paying them well, and giving them time off.

Well, it’s nice to know I have a similar line of thought as a self made millionaire. Maybe I’ll get all the way there someday too.

Improving employee moral improving productivity and efficiency is known information. As in, during the Industrial Revolution, a study was made as to the benefits of increasing light levels in the workplace, and it came up inconclusive in regards to the intended research as a result of the increased communication and interest in the employees increasing production. I remember hearing about it during my University Accounting Course.

The problem is, the people officially running the show are far too often far away from the employees doing the work, especially in environments like Chain Shops. The fact that the employees are often dehumanized, being seen less as a human to be more of an easily replaceable cog in the money making machine, and “money making cuts” are seen as beneficial, regardless of actual results by those sufficiently removed from the daily operations just makes this worse.

the flipside of the idiom “boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that’s why I shit on company time” is that if boss also makes a dime or “I” also make a dollar, than shitting on company time would be a lower priority

One can sell any management strategy with the proper title. “Be A Decent Human Being” sounds like a good course, but it needs a title replete with terms like synergizing, cross-platform, and leveraging.

I figure there’s no more easy clout to be had with the terms crypto or blockchain.

Culture is the form of mind molding/control that is still the easiest to hack from below (bold claim!). Once, one is aware of it and of of the power to change language at will, grant or deny acceptance.

That is, unless the communication space, access, and rules are dominated top down.
Or implicit power structure, which is messy to figure out to navigate.

However, try this out on inattentive people, and they will get irritated at you fast. As like basic stuff does not appear to work anymore – which is annoying, of course. First thing, they suspect ill will, or next, incompetence and try to teach you again the ‘right’ (aka habitual) way – in their brain’s desperate attempt to maintain a comfortable level of inaction.

But get a megaphone and play your message on repeat, to generate your propaganda/ads, and everyone feels smart about themselves for even recognizing it again, no matter the content. (except if they get aware, then that shifts around)

The trick is to not get too tempted by the easy route.

The problem, I think, in both business and politics is that both are focused on the short term. In business it tends to be next quarter returns or the end of the finacial year.
In politics, it’s always the next elections. What I think needs to happen is that we need to think in the long term. Years, if not decades ahead. Sadly, long term thinking doesn’t come naturally to humanity as a whole, let alone those whose jobs depend on metrics and other people’s approval.

Pehaps because long-term thinking is often derailed by unexpected events.

The ability to adjust is part of long-term planning. Thinking everything in rigid terms is as bad as short-term thinking. Have a goal, but adjusting the means to reach said goal is vital to it. Successful long-term planners take this into account.

Don’t personally agree with that; businesses often make decades-long plans, like investing enough to build a factory complex that will last them decades. If anything, I think this might actually be the problem; businesses focus on the millions or the billions, the massive decisions. But make all the decisions you want, they won’t mean squat if you have no staff, or they barely work. Big business loses sight of the day-to-day business that actually makes them money; the look so much at the aggregate numbers that they forget there’s variability, that you can improve the big picture by working on the small picture across the board, and not only by focusing on big decisions with big impacts.

You know what Jackie? I have something to tell you about your funny comics and attempts to ease the daily suffering of others.

It works. Every time.

Well done my friend and thank you for even trying.

I work at an IT company. My job is in the lower upper management (Director) level of my company, and we believe in treating people like people. We believe if you don’t pay your employees well, give them time off, and let them have some independence, they tend to hate work and do worse. Engagement, benefits and pay are the key.

Most managers who tell you that “going back to the office is important,” and, “you can’t trust employees too much,” are actually not very good managers. Or leaders. What these people want is to micromanage and flex their position of power over their direct reports. And that’s a terrible way to do anything, especially in leadership positions. Those who refuse to pay employees what they’re worth are being led around by a Board of Directors who just want to squeeze the business for a few more years before abandoning it to its demise. Those that don’t “show just tell” are basically worthless managers.

If you want to lead and/or manage, you have to understand you work for the people who report to you. Not the other way around. Employees work for the COMPANY to provide a living for THEMSELVES. Good managers (or coaches, as I call them) work to keep things from destroying a good work environment, which is making employees happy (or at least making it easier to work, not harder).

A bad manager makes everyone work for THEM and never fails to remind the employees of that fact. Or fails to help their direct reports in stressful situations, resorting in them throwing people under the bus and not paying employees full value.

I work for a delivery company that the founders originally had a really solid business model and made a point of treating their workers well. Then they became billionaires at like 25 or something and retired so the board of directors took charge and things have gotten progressively worse and worse. We aren’t allowed to make *any* decisions anymore, instead a learning algorithm does all the thinking for us, despite the fact that it was never “taught” anything. For instance the only data point it has to relate addresses to each other is their distance from the warehouse, so as far as it’s concerned an order 15 minutes east is next to an order 15 minutes west despite them being 30 minutes apart. Us humans, who know the city and are able to easily tell which orders should go together to minimize delivery times, are not allowed to override the algorithm’s order assignation no matter how nonsensical said assignation might be, often ending up with orders on opposite sides of town resulting in absolutely abysmal delivery times. Now they’ve decided they don’t like it when we deliver the orders in a different order than the algorithm thinks would be best, so starting today we won’t be able to access more than one order at a time in the app, meaning we will be forced to take them in whatever nonsensical order the algorithm dictates, even if that means crossing town five times instead of two or going in circles because of one way streets and road closures due to construction instead of methodically taking the shortest trip possible between the orders.

If the algorithm did what they think it does, they’d have solved the “Travelling Salesman Problem” in mathematics and could sell it to google or various governments or basically whomever for hundreds of billions of dollars since that’s one of the holy grails of mathematics with corporate applications. However the board of directors don’t know anything about how AI and learning algorithms actually work, they’ve been sold magic beans by whomever is in charge of developing the program because “we’re living in the future, thinking computers are smarter than the disposable grunts doing the work, so they must always be right”, never mind the fact that deliver times have increased almost ten fold since they started pushing this crap and branches like ours that used to be in their top performers company wide are now constantly under threat of failing.

And that’s not even the worst part of working there, it’s just the most blatantly stupid since it’s causing them to leave millions of dollars worth of lost business sitting on the table. We now get assigned hours *randomly*, as in every week we get a list of the shifts that will be available the next week, put in for the hours we want, and then those shifts get assigned randomly to people who put in for them, with the only weighting being whether or not we’ve dropped shifts in the last two weeks, if we have we get lower priority. I’m gonna lose my benefits next year because they changed the policy so that you only qualify for benefits if you work 30 hours per week on average, which is literally impossible under this scheduling system.

Thank the gods that I’m starting a new job tomorrow that sounds like it will be much better, if possibly more risky given it’s with a new start up that given how they explained their business model makes me question how the company actually plans to make money in the long term, right now they’re getting by with ridiculously low overhead costs so nearly 100% of the revenue is profit, but that isn’t really sustainable as the company grows. At least they pay their workers stupid well (which is part of how I question how the company makes money, because almost everything goes to us instead).

Outside investment can be the either the best or the worst thing that happens to the company. Usually worst, because they don’t know the product or the people working on the product (or the culture) so they undermine the business.

I may have said it before, but this is why my theory is that corporations shouldn’t exist. I don’t mean “big businesses” should be illegal, but the whole idea of companies owned by a million stock holders is bonkers. The actual owners of the company will mostly be randos who only pay attention to the stock prices, and thus will only want to vote in board members who increase those stock prices. They don’t know jack about the business, they don’t understand the long term plans, they don’t know or care about how much health insurance the company pays for, etc. And the flip side of this is that the board will only care about stock prices, or things that look like they will increase stocks (new marketing campaigns and such). And if they screw up? They retire with a golden parachute and go screw up somewhere else–there’s no lasting consequences. Even if the company does terribly illegal things, it’s rare that the people at the top can be held accountable–they tend to be fired and that’s the end of it. The COMPANY will have to pay massive fines, and all the stock holders will then lose money, including all the teachers and factory workers and whomever that invest in those stocks for their retirement, while the actual people who decided to adulterate their own product to cut costs won’t have to pay anything. So as crazy as I might sound, I think businesses should be legally restricted to 1 owner; there can be investors, people who are owed a portion of the profits, but 1 person is at the top. There are large businesses that have been built up with one boss (Facebook was, for example), but if this limits the size of businesses, so be it–better than businesses that grow precisely because they are amoral and barely accountable.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again:
Happy employees = Happier customers.
Happy Customers = More spending.
More spending = Higher Profits.
Higher Profits = More opportunity for improvement and expansion.
Higher Profits & More opportunity for improvement and expansion = Happier shareholders.
Happy shareholders = happier management.
Happier management = more willingness to keep happy employees happy.
Management being more willing to keep happy employees happy = Happier employees.

Cyclical.

2556 Human Decency.

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