We’ve had threads and threads on this one. Like any idiom, the sum of the dictionary definitions of each of the words is not the meaning of the whole.
The practical meaning is “Don’t waste effort trying to change the unchangeable. Accept the situation as it is and work from there.”
The cynical meaning is “Management refuses to do their job removing easily-removed obstacles, so you workers just have to climb over them every day, day after day, and not bitch about that fact. Because I, your Exalted Leader, said so.”
I haven’t heard about that program in particular. But employee engagement (How’s that for corporate speak?) and creating a culture conducive to good business is important to us. The thing about these kinds of courses is that you can’t just take a class and expect any changes. Especially when it comes to improving engagement and changing company culture. It’s a process that you’re never done with.
Couldn’t find Gulman’s routine quickly. But it goes (very approximately) something like:
“I hate phrases like ‘At the end of the day’. They’re always followed by some meaningless platitude. ‘At the end of the day, family is important’. I’m sorry. When? Ohhh. At the end of the day! ‘At the end of the day, it is what it is. It is what it is. I hate that. You didn’t hear that in the Martin Luther King speech. ‘I have a dream. It is what it is.’ ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, it is what it is.’ I hate lazy speech.”
One time when I was working, we were trying to close a deal with someone that was a friend of someone that I had once worked for, or something.
This guy made it very clear that because he knew someone that knew us, he was a “friend” and felt entitled to whatever “friends and family” discount we had. Which we didn’t really have, because we typically dealt with other professionals - not friends or family.
But we gave him some sort of discount because we wanted the job.
My job required working in his large luxury apartment when it was under construction and for a few months after move-in. Typically, we go up in the service elevator and check in with the construction manager.
But I was so tweaked at the stupid “friends and family” thing that I persisted in going to the front reception desk of the building every single day and telling the doorman that that I was here to see Mr. Rich - tell him it’s his friend, Ann.
It drove him crazy - which was why I did it. And if he tried to suggest I use the service entrance like everyone else, I would remind him of how important our “friendship” seemed a few months before.
I’d taken the term as having descended from the ping network utility which sends a short message to a server expecting a short message back, for no reason other than to verify the health and online-ness of the server. Then the term was extended by analogy to human communication to be any short message where no immediate response is expected other than acknowledgement of receipt of the message. And then it leaked out of tech companies into the general business lexicon.
(The ping utility being named for submarine sonar thing you mention, but in the sense of sending a pulse out to listen for the echo to test for the presence of something, rather than the specific sound it makes).
My big pet peeve when someone complains to a business on facebook and their response begins with “That’s not the experience we want you to have” double pet peeve when they preface it with “Oh no!”.
Well, yeah, no shit, I’m sure we can all agree that you didn’t want that person to slip in the parking lot.
Same responses appear very commonly under Google reviews. They don’t bug me; they seem like pretty reasonable things to say. “Your pizza was dry and came with the wrong ingredients…” “Oh no!” It’s just a variant of “My bad!”
Yes, these responses have become cliched from overuse…but is that even avoidable?
If someone said they were going to ping me (having not heard it in this context before), I’d assume they’d mean they’d get a hold of me. However, my mind would go to networking, not sonar. But it would still be, IMO, used incorrectly since a ping expects a reply. But it’s not like terms aren’t used incorrectly/differently than originally intended anyways.
It also bugs me when someone refers to a picture that they’re in as a selfie. My understanding has always been that a selfie is a picture you take of yourself. Saying ‘can you take a selfie of me’ is inherently incorrect.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve almost replied with them as well. But I think it’s partially because I’ve read them so many times it’s the first thing that comes to mind when someone complains. Maybe it’s more that I’m sick of hearing it than anything else. I think it also feels, at least a little, like they’re skirting responsibility or at the very least brushing off the complaint.
Look at like this: If you complained to a restaurant about your corked wine and dessert that had mold on it, would you feel they were taking it more seriously if their reply began with “oh no, that’s not the experience we want you to have” or “I’m so sorry, I’m going to…”.
I also have to remind myself that a big part of managing a corporate social media page is just damage control. Look at the facebook page for Amazon, I’m willing to bet it’s just a handful of drones putting out fires hoping that most of them just go away. If you pick a complaint and follow it, often times the person will have to reply multiple times before it gets escalated in any meaningful way.
Ah, employee engagement. That’s one you’re going to hear a lot of. I just recently had to endure a 45 minute presentation on this. You want employee engagement? Stop cutting our sick days, vacation time, pay people enough that they aren’t worrying about how to pay the bills and micromanaging everything we do. If you’re spending all day monitoring Zoom calls as a leader or manager (There’s a massive difference there) to ensure that everyone is clothed and has their camera on, you have way bigger issues than employee engagement.
Pink’s concept of autonomy, mastery, and purpose is what drives employee engagement and for that you can’t be a control freak. As @Odesio says, a simple class isn’t going to change things.
Also, Buy In; if it was a good idea, you shouldn’t need to sell it. Fuck that.
I work in IT, and I HATE the idea that our users/colleagues/people we serve are our “customers”. It implies that we’re providing them with some service, and they’re paying us for it, and can take their business elsewhere. None of which is true, except for the fact that we’re providing them a service.
It also tends to accrete a lot of harmful customer-facing stuff like “the customer is always right” and the idea that we should be focused on making our “customers” happy. Neither of which is true, or even correct in IT. Our jobs shouldn’t be concerned with making some uninformed manager “happy”, but rather with providing the best service that we can within the time, budget and security constraints we’re laboring under. That may or may not make the business “happy”, as what will make them so may not conform to the above three constraints. And we end up with managers who don’t get it, and think that “customer happiness” is a legitimate goal in corporate IT, and want to know why the “customers aren’t happy”, and the answer is invariably because they want something that’s insecure, too expensive, or can’t be done in the time frame that they desire. And somehow with these idiot managers, we’re on the hook for not making the “customer” happy in the face of all this.
May I push back against the complaints against that one? I think the hatred of that phrase comes from middle managers taking it ultra-literally.
From my understanding, the original idea from that was if I was shopping in a store and the price tag was mismarked for $11.99 but it was really $39.99, then isn’t it better just to eat the $20 instead of potentially losing the customer and all of his friends that he tells about how your store runs a bait and switch clip joint that is trying to rip people off?
In other words, you were completely legally right to tell the customer that the price was indeed $39.99, but shouldn’t you just fight another day about that and make the customer “right”?
The problem arises when the customer calls you a sawed off little motherfucker and demands that you not only give it to him for $11.99 but give it to him for free and gift wrap it because of your insolence and then demands to the manager that you be fired. In that sort of case, the manager should have YOUR (the general YOUR) back and tell him to go pound sand and don’t talk to his employees that way.
Like most phrases, people tend to deal with them in absolutes. Of course, the customer is not ALWAYS right, but the phrase has a meaning different from that absolute.
That brings up the concepts that probably go unexpressed a lot of the time, because they’re skills underlings need to develop on the QT: “managing upwards” and “managing expectations”
Oh that’s not even on the QT anymore. I’ve had managers say to my face “you need to learn how to manage up”. Also, “bring me solutions, not problems”. If my manager is a toddler who can’t clear obstacles and needs to be managed by underlings, what are we even doing here?
My sense of that phrase is that while managers probably do have some leeway to comp an unhappy customer, in practice it’s more to say that it’s not the host’s place to judge or manage the tastes of the guest.
i.e. if someone says “I’ll have that $100 wagyu ribeye charred on the outside and slightly charred on the inside,” the server must not say “are you SURE about ruining a fancy steak like that?” They should ask “would you like your ketchup on top or on the side?” If I’m paying you for something, then the proper way to serve it is exactly how I order it, with a smile and no commentary.
The problem is that the phrase itself is an absolute. It’s not ‘make the customer happy’ or ‘listen to the customer’ it’s ‘the customer is always right’. And to make it worse, it’s gone from something that’s told to employees by management to something customers say to workers to justify their actions and/or demands.
I work in retail, I think the only people I’ve ever had tell me that the customer is always right are customers.
See, that makes sense. To alter a scenario that’s happened to me to so it’s similar to that one, if the customer said “I’ll have that $100 wagyu ribeye charred on the outside and slightly charred on the inside" and you replied “I’m sorry, the kitchen closed a half hour ago, only the bar is open right now” and customer demands you open the kitchen back up because they’re always right…well, they’re wrong. In my similar-ish situations, I’ve had to go on to defend my answer by explaining that the kitchen staff isn’t even here any more and no, I can’t go make it by myself, I don’t know how and no, I can’t call them back, they’re already home and no, I’m not going to call my boss. And, after all that, I can often still expect a nasty email about my behavior (since they’d have no reason to know I’m the one that gets the emails from the website), so that’s often amusing.
I’ve been watching Superstore lately. The little cut-scenes where they show customers doing stupid shit like it’s no big deal, yeah, that’s pretty common. My store isn’t a big box Wal-mart type place, but most of these situations seemed pretty grounded in reality.
They’re definitely good skills to have, but a lot of the time what I’ve run into is that while us peons have managed upward and tempered the expectations of our direct manager, he(or she) hasn’t done a great job of doing so up his chain, and nor has his boss, etc… So what happens is that we (the peons) have laid out to our immediate managers what we can handle and in what time frames, and what more work/reassignment will mean in terms of what we have going. But all too often, there’s a broken link in that upward management/expectation management, and the high brass don’t get told that something can’t be done when they want it to be done.
My cynical personal feeling is that the chain of passing that information upwards usually breaks when someone has the decision to make between abject toadying (and grinding their underlings), or telling their superiors no. I’ve seen low-level execs and higher-ranking middle management choose to say “Yes” to things they shouldn’t too many times to believe that they’re doing anything but trying to look personally good at the expense of their workers.
Now there are times when everyone involved DOES communicate upwards, and the head guy doesn’t care, but more often than not, someone breaks and just says “Yes” instead of communicating upward and explaining that the superior has a choice to make- which project won’t be on time, what doesn’t get funded, etc… In my experience, it’s rarely a “Say yes to the VP, or lose your job” type situation for the middle managers, but rather a “Now’s my chance to look good by getting ALL this stuff done!” without really considering one’s workers or what they have going.