1- When I was working at a hotel (major chain) they had a thoroughly stupid “Enjoy your stay 100% or it’s 100% free” policy. I would NEVER allow this policy at a business, even though superficially it sounds good, because
a) any decent well run hotel is going to do this anyway if the guest has a legitimate complaint (e.g. air conditioning wouldn’t work in mid-July, couldn’t sleep because of noise from neighboring room, etc.)
b) this encourages deadbeats and horse’s asses to demand and (almost always) receive 100% refunds for the stupidest reasons (e.g. [all real] room service was 10 minutes later than it should have been, a hurricane caused the power to go out for 20 minutes [duh!], hotel not convenient to restaurants, steak underdone in hotel restaurant, etc.). While some of the complaints were legitimate, they didn’t warrant 100% refunds (refund the price of a meal perhaps or take a percentage off, but not 100%).
Unfortunately the hotel’s masters refused to reconsider because they felt the 100% guarantee was a great calling card that brought in more business than it refunded. Personally I felt that they could have saved hundreds of thousands per year (that could be used in employee salaries and benefits) by being fair and reasonable but not ridiculous in what would comp a room.
2) Another hotel I worked for insisted that we call X number of guests per night at least one hour after they checked in to give them a poll ("how efficient was your check-in? How friendly was the staff? What can we do… "etc.). The regional supervisor would not hear the absolute truth, which was that guests didn’t want to be interrupted to take a poll- perhaps they’re sleeping, perhaps they’re watching TV, perhaps they’re making sweet love, but even if they’re just vegetating they don’t want to rate the friendliness of the Coke machine on a 1 to 7 scale.
3) This is one I always felt guilty about: when I worked for a large mortgage company we always charged for anything we sent a client. If they wanted a copy of their mortgage or a copy of their appraisal or a copy of their title or abstract etc., we had to charge. Now, while I understand recouping printing/postage and even a modest fee to defray the cost of the employees in records, the fees were ridiculous (minimum of $20 and could run as high as $100) for printed records! We were specifically told to not mention the exact fee unless asked but rather to ask if we could put the fee on their monthly mortgage (and many borrowers, assuming that the fee was a rational $5 or less, agreed without asking the price). Incredibly unethical place (I was also told point blank, though never in writing, to outright lie to the customers on a number of issues as well, and I had a boss so stupid that she was furious when she learned that half of her employees were performing at average call volume or below and would not hear of it when somebody tried to explain STATISTICS FOR COMPLETE FREAKING OYSTERBRAINS to her.
What are some of your asinine or unethical policies that you’ve had to carry out?
Working at Subway:
“You can get a footlong for only a dollar more!”
“Chips and a drink?”
I HATE when people try to shill extra stuff like that to you. The customer can see the prices right behind you. If they want it, they’ll ask! It pisses the customers off, it wastes time…arrrgh.
Asking every person going through my checkout line whether they had (or wanted) a Target Card. “Would you like to get 10 % off your purchases today by getting a Target Card(or later Target Visa Card)?” Most people don’t want to get such a card (or already have one) and if the purchases are under $20, the guest is not saving enough money to make getting the card worthwhile. (in my opinion.)
My previous school: Student must wear button-down shirts (fine) and those shirts must at all times be tucked in. School board members made frequent visits to see if students in the halls had their shirts tucked in.
Current school: While we encourage our students to express themselves creatively through their clothing, and have a wide range of goth, punk, hip-hop, and eclectic homemade styles- students are not permitted to wear pajama bottoms to school. Mind you, this is a school where I had a girl dress like Jack Sparrow for four months straight, another frequently wears a tiara, another has a Keanu-in-the-Matrix-Reloaded cassock, and one occasionally wears a wispy skirt and gauze wings. But no pajama bottoms.
An employee may not write a letter of recommendation for an employee applying for a position outside the chain of newspapers at which I was working.
I would tell my reporters the rule, then anytime they applied to another newspaper I would give them a recommendation. It was one of major reasons I was fired from paper. I repeatedly did it after I was told not to.
I used to work for EDS (I won’t say where, though). I worked at a tech support helpdesk. We were organized into teams of about 15 people per team. Our department had a policy that no more than 2 people on any one team could request the same day off. This usually resulted in people requesting time off over 1 year in advance of the days they needed. Now if you happened to get sick and couldn’t come into work on a particular day, then that was ok as long as you called into your team leader and let them know.
Vacation day policy was assinine enough, but management then started screwing people out of their approved-by-management vacation time. There were people who had been approved for vacation days, then were told they had to come in anyways… usually with the excuses of, “We didn’t know you had those days off and scheduled somone else to be off,” or “Yes, we know you were approved to have these days off, but there are too many people on other teams that have those days off, so we need you to come in.” A lot of people suddenly started getting sick when they couldn’t get their time off that they wanted for vacation.
I worked as a supervisor for a LARGE corporate travel agency in the DC area several years ago. There were several supervisors each responsible for a team of 7-10 agents.
A new office manager instituted a policy that no more than one agent on a team could be away from his workspace at a time. So, If Thaddeus was getting a refill on his cappucino double-latte, then Gomez had to await his return before going to the potty. As another slap-in-the-face, we were instructed to have a physical item (the “pass”) that the employee had to have with them when away from their workspace. Ostensibly to ensure that the policy was enforced.
However, if New Office Manager happened to see an employee up and about, she would demand to see the “pass”.
I often was involved in a conversation with her that started with the words “Where’s so-and-so?” When I responded with “I don’t know”, I’d get the lecture about not being a responsible supervisor and how my team’s not at it’s fullest capacity and what if we get hit with a swamp of incoming calls right now.
I had to remind her that we’re all adults here and how’s about we start treating them like that?
Yeah…THAT went over well!
Come to think of it, I’m not really adhering to the spirit of the OP. That is, I never DID enforce that policy.
I had the fun task of managing a bunch of teens at a mall music store.
What I would personally expect out of a teen working part time at minimum wage:
Run a register, put stock away, clean and straigthen stock, smile and say “hello” to customers and ask them if they needed help if they looked lost, help customers find cds and dvds, keep busy, come in when scheduled, dress neatly in uniform.
What corporate wanted me to have the teens do:
Strike up conversations with every customer asking them about their cellular service and telling them how Virgin Mobile was better and they should buy a new phone from us, badger every customer to sign up for a $8 membership that will save them $5 for every $100 they spend, badger every customer to sign up for Entertainment Weekly, badger every customer to buy a cd case, badger every cutomer to buy an extended warranty on their walkman or playstation, badger every customer to pre-order their cds and dvds at our “mall” prices, badger every customer into buying a gadget that fixes scratched cds. In other words, turn them all into annoying pushy little salespeople. If they’re not constantly harassing everyone that walks into your store to buy extra crap, they’re a disposable empoyee.
We had recently instituted a policy that said you could wear denim on Fridays (ie - jeans and jean skirts).
One of my employees came in wearing jeans and a denim shirt. A passing VP went aploplectic whilst passing my team when he saw the shirt and told me to send him home to change as a denim shirt was not allowed.
I approached the employee and told him he’d have to go home and change because denim shirts were not allowed. Yes, this made me look like an idiot in front of my employee.
He then had an apoplectic fit and stormed off to HR. He came back all smug and said that the VP of HR had said he could stay.
She later passed by me and my team.
She was wearing a denim shirt. Yes, this made me look like an even bigger idiot in front of my employee.
Dueling VPs should belt it out amongst themselves and not involve middle managers.
My Catholic high school demanded that all girls wear stockings all year round. No A/C, upstate NY, knee length A-Line skirts. That was uncomfortable. Then the girls were wearing thigh-his with the elastic rings. SOMEHOW, and I can’t imagine how, they found out and you then had a nun doing periodic checks for those.
And for the boys AND the girls, you had to ask permission to remove your wool sweater and always have it on in the hallway (with no breeze at-tal) at all times.
When I was working for the State of Oklahoma, I once had to inform a frail, blind elderly man that his tiny check from the state was in jeopardy unless he reduced his net worth by cancelling a small life insurance policy whose cash value had grown until it was in excess of what the law allowed as an “asset” for a recipient of Old Age Assistance. (Old Age Assistance was the state’s equivalent to Social Security, largely used by people whose former employers did not pay into the Social Security fund. )
When I delivered the bad news, the poor old man burst into tears. He had been paying the premiums on this insurance policy for decades. It was a matter of pride for him that his burial would be paid for, and that his children would not have to go out-of-pocket to give him a decent funeral.
Luckily, I have never had to enforce senseless corporate policy in my line of work, so I have nothing to contribute to this thread other than that this reminds me of the observation by George Carlin, “You wouldn’t believe how stupid the average person is, but what’s worse is, half the people are even dumber than that!”
On the other hand, my stepson worked at a call center for a short time where, on a particular contract, between calls the CSRs were not allowed to stand up, walk around, read, do crossword puzzles, surf the net, talk to each other… basically they had to sit in their cubicle and stare at the wall when not taking a call. It wouldn’t have been so bad except that the dozen or so reps on the contract took a total of maybe five calls in one week, so there was a LOT of sitting around doing nothing!
I used to work for a computing center in my dorm. We were told that if a user had a problem, we were to listen to them describe it and tell them the appropriate action. We were not allowed to get up and go look. Mind you, it was 1 room with 10 computers. You could easily see your desk from anywhere in the room.
The number of times a frustrated user would say, “I don’t know what’s going on, couldn’t you just look”
I left there to go to the University computer center and the policies were much better.
I didn’t have to enforce these facilities-related policies, but as an HR drone I had to explain them to incoming new hires. I use “explain” loosely; it might be more accurate to say I tried mightily to justify the policies to new hires and make it clear the company was serious about them while at the same time not jeopardizing my position by letting on how completely stupid I thought the policies were.
The policies were simple: Both blue pens and paper clips were forbidden.
Okay, well, maybe the paper clips weren’t “forbidden,” per se, in that they were still around the office, but the CEO had dictated that no additional paper clips would be purchased and there would be no boxes of paper clips in the supply closet or anywhere else. His rationale? Paper clips can be easily moved from one set of paper to another. A paper-clipped set of paper going into a file drawer wastes that paper clip. Before filing said set of paper, remove the clip, staple the set of paper with a regular stapler, and put the paper clip back into your personal stash for later reuse.
It didn’t take long before there was a vast black market in paper clips. One enterprising fellow had recognized the potential immediately and began collecting them even before the policy went into effect. He had thousands of them in a small bucket locked in his desk drawer.
The blue pens, on the other hand: those were, in fact, forbidden entirely. Seems that the CEO had read somewhere that blue ink doesn’t photocopy as cleanly as red or black, so he made the entirely rational decision to completely eliminate blue ink from the workplace on the off chance that whatever was being written might have to be photocopied some day and would be somewhat less than legible on the resulting copy.
Not only were blue pens not stocked by the supply people, but you could actually tattle on someone if they had a blue pen, and someone from facilities was supposed to come and take it away from you. I never saw this myself, but that’s what the original memo suggested.
These two policies were the first things to disappear after the board fired the CEO for unrelated malfeasance.
I once had a job where I had to do an upgrade sales pitch to every customer. Now it was a good upgrade and usually well worth it, but plenty of customers had heard it all before and it just wasn’t a good deal for some customers. Our lines would move soooo slow because we had to make this long complicated pitch- complete with rebuttals- to everyone.
Cool clothes are cheap clothes! I spent high school in an assortment of wacky thrift store stuff, vintage dresses, homemade wire-n-nylons wings, cheap halloween store makeup and homemade clothes, mostly out of duct tape and bed linens.
