No, not a passenger or freight train, but a corporate train. I had the pleasure of spending the past two days in corporate training, learning all about the joys of teamwork and mentoring. Pardon me while I fucking gag. I say we offer a bounty to the first person in our office who can spot a single damn thing that is changed in how we do business as the result of this training. Nope. There was only one reason we underwent this training – so someone somewhere above me could say that we did. Let’s see. Last year it was employee empowerment. Before that it was TQM. What will be the flavor of the month next year?
And what a gig that trainer has! What do you think that guy makes? I figure it had to be $1500 a day at least. You have to wonder if he thinks he is doing something worthwhile, or if he acknowledges that he is just making a buck, boring the shit out of the majority of the participants of his seminars.
And management has no clue that they are actually pissing the employees off. Having a reasonable person explain why things could be done in a humane way, makes our practices appear all the more unnecessary and irrational. And is it supposed to make me happy to hear some guy tout some “brilliant” idea, and have management gush over it, when I could dig out of my files memos suggesting the same damn thing years ago that vanished without a trace into someone’s circular file?
And on the subject of people unclear on the subject. My direct boss is the type who zealously hoards power and information. Always has been, and I have no reason to believe she will change. Occasionally through the training, each table would have to work as a team, after which a spokesperson would present their results. EVERY TIME it came time to hear from my boss’ table, guess whose voice you heard as the spokesperson? It got to be a wonderfully predictable joke. Unfortunately, only part of the office apparently could perceive it.
When your boss wastes huge chunks of your time like that, it is hard to push yourself to be productive. And let’s see, I’m also supposed to get to all that crap that piled up over the last two days while I was prevented from doing it?
Twice a year my really fucked-up old company would have staff retreats for all divisions. A time to do the budget, agree on goals for the next FY, reorganize new business priorities.
Oh, yeah, and air all the vitriol, bitterness, and personal infighting that had built up since the last one. Everyone would come back from the retreat even more demoralized than they had been before.
Rules of corporate training sessions/retreats:
*the idiots will speak the most
*the idiots are the ones in charge, so you can’t actually call them idiots
*there will be cookies and bland sandwiches slick with mayonnaise
*just as some kind of agreement or resolution is reached, someone will bring up a totally unrelated issue that needs to be argued.
*someone will always try to be the “middle child” and but into a big argument. (Hi dropzone). Both of the combatants immediately turn on this person.
*one guy will always be furiously trying to boot up a failing laptop.
*the trainer or moderator will try to act like a cheerleader for your idiot boss. I believe this is a clever tactic done on purpose - for the duration of the retreat, you transfer your loathing to him or her.
Once we went to this spa in the mountains in West Virginia. BEAUTIFUL PLACE. Did we see the sun or go outside ONCE? No, we spent 3 days in a conference room bitching at each other. The conference room had a huge window along one wall - I remember staring directly at it for three days. Fortunately I sat with the rest of the peanut gallery at one end of the table, and we played the game where everyone writes one sentence of a story while only seeing the sentence right before theirs, and we read it out loud at dinner.
Thanks for bringing up the memories, Dinsdale. I’ll be in the fetal position under my desk if anyone needs me.
I normally despise staff retreats or day long training sessions, the material is dull, the speakers are worse and I find them to be a huge waste of time. I think of how much real work I could be getting done if I wasn’t there.
We just had an all day staff retreat that we set up ourselves. There was no upper management or agency training staff. We held this outside under a tent and we all just sat around in comfortable lawn chairs drinking our favourite beverages and discussing the real issues that confront us on a daily basis. There was only one organized team building exercise and it worked wonderfully to get some people together on things.
No fights broke out and everyone enjoyed spending the latter part of a glorious afternoon barbequeing and eating mountains of food while we continued to work.
It was a picnic with a purpose. We finished early and people actually stayed afterwards to have a few cold beers.
You had cookies? You were loooky! Achhh, we used to dream about having cookies. Our boss made us drink the sweat off his brow and eat week old mold what grew by the lake. We worked thirty five hours a day down at the mill and still had to find time for a seventeen hour conference on productivity. When we complained, our boss would cut us in two with a butter knife and dance on top of our grave singing glory haleluyah!
