One way to escape Cubicle Hell.
By Malcolm Prozac,
Industrial Relations Correspondent
(well, until we replaced him with an eight year old from Bangalore last week)
Dante get me started
For those of you unfamiliar with Dante’s Inferno, the great man named nine circles of hell: Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud and Treachery. People who sinned but prayed for forgiveness before their deaths are found not in Hell but in Purgatory, where they labour to be free of their sins. Those in Hell are people who tried to justify their sins and are unrepentant.
Both groups qualify for Cubicle Hell. It’s a cross between purgatory and limbo, with a bit of red hot pitchfork up the arse thrown in.
Back door privatisation for beginners
Get to the point, I hear you cry. I’ve recently been outsourced. For the unitiated, this means that in essence you carry on doing the same job for your employer, but transferred to a new employer, usually for less money, poorer working conditions, and typically for a multinational run by 24 year old MBA sharks who specialise in transforming once pleasant workplaces into Third World sweatshops with high fives and codified whooping when somebody hits a ‘milestone’.
Being outsourced is quite an interesting process, but only in the same way that being waterboarded must be quite interesting. The process begins with you being forced into actually contracting for the very people who will eventually employ or supplant you. So far, so bad.
What typically happens is that in order to draw attention from their own incompetence, poor MDs and Chief Executives suggest that the company is under-performing due to its structure or the general incompetence of its workforce. In the area in which I work, what this means is that the organisation is usually in paralysis because of weak leaders who have all the backbone of an inaebriated squid.
Phase 1: “We have to change!”
Constant change is the friend of every shit manager in the world. It fills his days with something to do other than his / her job. Which he is generally incapable of performing. Management Boards collectively amplify this unhelpful trend. They organise performance reviews, pay reviews, efficiency drives and slaughter every child under five weekends when they’re bored. So they decide that every five-seven years, a major restructuring is required. This usually involves “cutting out the deadwood”, to wit, middle managers who actually do something for a living. The cutting process usually means redundancies or transferral to an external supplier, who assumes the risk for the delivery of the service formerly performed in-house. At a cost.
Phase 2: “Let’s find our thought leaders!”
This typically involves sourcing and interviewing any number of consultancies. For example, IBM, who now purport to be one of the world leaders in Business Process Re-engineering, usually recommending some kind of outsourcing process. I mention them, because I actually had to sit in a room with several jackals from this company for what seemed like an eternity, and while they were smugly trotting out their management-speak about the need to “tackle vanilla issues”, “set up plug and play wage arbitrage schemes” and simply “fire half the work force” I couldn’t help but think about IBM’s two major decisions to outsource “peripheral” services when they were still good at building computers – namely chip production and operating system software : the first minor outsourcer became Intel and the second Microsoft. Thereafter IBM lost their grip on the PC world, almost ruined a business which once dominated the world market and later reinvented themselves as consultants who were experts in, er, telling everybody else how to do the same.
But I digress. After a month or two of a whole plethora of smarmy bastards telling you what you already knew, and recommending that you do what you already do, but with a shiny logo and with lots of exciting diagrams and charts with ‘pinch points’ and ‘critical paths’, your directors decide that they’re “enthused”, and even more, trust the opinion — and fee structure — of these new “thought leaders” and decide to put the fate of their company (or a sizeable chunk of it) in the hands of another.
Phase 3: “Spend to Save!”
The next thing is to agree and sign a contract. It can’t be on the basis of anything as dull as a few consultants on a negotiated daily rate until the concept is proven. No, it usually involves a multi-million contract for 79 years, and a huge investment amounting to ten times the amount actually lost through any real inefficiency. The time taken to ROI (return on investment) is theoretically calculated (usually at 3-4 years) and risk and reward structures are agreed. In real terms, ROI will probably not be achieved within the agreed window, but no-one notices before the CEO who thought of the whole fucking mess either moves onto greater things or retires — usually on the basis of the foregoing achievements discussed above.
Phase 4: “Yeah, baby, let’s mobilise!”
This is where it gets personal for the likes of me. Mobilisation usually involves transferring hapless, usually guiltless staff over into the clutches of the avaricious outsourcer, usually beginning with “evaluation” (interrogation, we have vays of making you valk). It gets worse from there …
To be continued. Unfortunately.
