A Direction for Employee Satisfaction

If we’re going corporate…

We might be well served to look at those that have symbiotic relationships with their highly satisfied, engaged, and empowered employees.

Look at all the bad press MacDonald’s has gotten and remember that learning that the burgers only have 15% meat or that the nuggets are filled with ground chicken faces (I’ll let you figure out if that’s a typo) wasn’t what made it happen. Instead, a lot of it can be attributed to their poor treatment of their employees. Let’s not model ourselves after a dying (and irresponsible) fast food chain.

But, we’re in a time of budget crisis, how can we possible do this?!?

Having a good work environment isn’t all about ping pong tables in the break room and new iPads. It turns out, and here’s the shocker…money can’t buy you happiness.

The kind of money that helps is money that we have at UNCG. The biggest salaries go the people least likely to stick around, but that doesn’t mean that the lowest salaries are what keep people here. So, step one: everybody earning under $XXk (note the two digits there…don’t come with cap in hand if you earn six figures) gets a raise. I don’t care how you make it appear in accounting, it can be done, so let’s do it. Partly it might come from skimming off the top (for example, do we need a new Vice Chancellor for University Relations if the department has four people? Not sure, but it’s a question worth asking) and part might come from savings I’ll discuss in a moment. Point is, it can, and should be done, as a baseline, a minimum of what employment should be.

It’s much more than that though.

Liz Ryan, contributing author for Forbes explains it well:

“Rather than focusing on new programs to make employees happy, we should be taking away the obstacles that keep people at work disempowered and disconnected from their mission [and that of their place of employment]. Leadership in the knowledge economy has more to do with removing impediments to teamwork, collaboration and new ideas than with installing even more programs and policies than we already have.”

Basically, it will save us money AND increase our devotion (and therefore energy, creativity, contributions, etc.) to do away with the unnecessary structures that degrade the quality of the work environment AND cost us the most money.

I’ll only give one example, for now, but: In University Relations (back when that was what it was), staff such as David Wilson and Chris English were salaried employees. And yet, they had to fill out time sheets. These time sheets were entered into a system developed by department admin Sherri MacCheyne. The system never worked particularly smoothly and had to be fudged and fussed with just to accept information that it turned out was absolutely useless. It didn’t improve the relationship between Sheryl and her co-workers, didn’t ever actually measure the amount of time spent working, and we can see the countless headaches this ridiculous and unnecessary activity has caused.

Remove the bizarre requirement for time sheets and here is what we would have had:

No UNCG3 scandal, a whole host of dedicated employees still working here, none of the legal fees associated with the prosecution of this idiocy, more time for Sherri to devote to work, more time for Chris, David, et al to devote to work, countless hours of work that never would have showed up on the time sheets anyway happily performed by dedicated employees, whatever the hours were that Imogene Cathey, Benita Peace, and Jamie Herring dedicated to this, whatever productivity was lost as people attended forums and tried desperately to understand secondary employment…

I probably don’t need to go on. All of this from one unnecessary structure. How many more are there that could so easily disappear generally improving everybody’s lives AND the financial situation of the university?

I don’t know, but I’d sure like to find out.

The Chancellor Needs to Answer

Now there has been a settlement, the final admission by the university that it didn't have a leg to stand on. Not one, not a stump, not a lean-to, not a dream, not a prayer. There wasn't even a whimper despite the promised bang.

Where is the evidence of egregious wrong doing now?

The lies should stick in Linda Brady's throat.

And if the faculty had any guts at all, they would be at her office on Monday morning demanding that she answer for herself. She should beg our forgiveness and she should leave now. There isn't enough crow to serve her what she deserves.

This. Is. Unacceptable.

We do not forgive.

We do not forget.
Expect us.

Ridding UNCG of Parasites

It has been several thousands of years since rulers realized that a population guided by principles of mutual trust was much more productive. This doesn’t mean that societies end up living in pure harmony, what it means is that the laws and rules put in place were designed to facilitate interactions between people who were not friends or family members. The benefit of creating comfort for ongoing interactions among large groups of unrelated individuals comes from the non-zero-sum nature of information and knowledge. The more that more people know, the more knowledge those people can produce none of which limits the amount of knowledge available to others or for future discovery.

Robert Wright uses the metaphor of the brain to describe a productive human system. The more neurons (people) the more the overall knowledge the brain can both access and produce, nurturing the health and growth of the brain itself (and therefore its neurons). There is nothing to be gained from a rogue ‘neuron’ conquering and destroying others. It eventually damages the brain to the point that the neuron itself cannot survive – in other words, it leads to a total loss.

Should each neuron in the brain insist on working by itself, there is no doubt that things such as language, writing, medicine, or cake could never have been developed. If a neuron were to, let’s say, refuse to answer emails or always work with its door shut, it would not be contributing to the growth of the brain’s potential but instead would be a parasitic entity trying to benefit from the production of others while failing to contribute any value of its own.

If the goal of the collection of neurons into a brain is the advancement of opportunity, information, and benefits then there is a requirement for mutual and transparent communication. This has been demonstrated through an exercise known as The Prisoner’s Dilemma. The situation offered as an example is that of two prisoners who are being separately interrogated – cooperation is in their mutual interest but there are also two primary barriers to this cooperation.

The first barrier is the inability of the two to communicate with each other. You cannot communicate if there is a wall (either physical or social) between you. If your door is shut, your attitude is hostile, and your emails unanswered, communication for mutual benefit is impossible.

The second barrier is one of trust. If you cannot openly communicate with a person who is neither a friend or family member, how can you develop the ability to trust that they will do what is in the best interest of all? If they continually indicate that they don’t trust you by engaging in regular practices of anti-social behavior, the possibility to believe that their actions are or will ever be designed to be of mutual benefit is nil.

The question then becomes, why would two (or more) neurons in the same brain, ostensibly working for the betterment of the brain as a whole (and therefore the mutual benefits to its neurons) not build the possibility for open communication and trust?

The answer would have to be that they are either a sociopath or that they see a benefit to themselves that requires or is contingent upon sacrificing the health of the brain. They have other goals.

Obviously, this is a metaphor.

What I am asking here is this:

If members of UNCG’s administration (and here I am thinking particularly of Paul Mason, although he is simply representative of the type of executive that UNCG’s new public management culture has favored) are interested in the growth of UNCG as a university (that’s the brain) then how do we explain their actions?

We can’t.

Instead, those actions become explicable only if we realize that they are not working for the positive growth of the university as an institution of higher education. They have a separate set of interests…and to find out what they are, you have only to follow the money.

The faculty, staff, and students at UNCG are feeling the impact of the zero sum game being played by upper administration. Each time a neuron dies, each time a person disappears from the collective consciousness of that brain, it entails a loss of knowledge. We are each weaker for it. Certainly there are times when through growth or death, we will lose people who contribute to our overall well-being. At other times, though, we must look to surgically remove those who cause damage.

Recently, our mind has been deprived of Lyda Carpen, Beth English, Chris English, Betsi Robinson, Debbie Schallock, Andrea Spencer, and David Wilson. We have also been injured by the loss of Helen Hebert, Laurie Sims, Nelson Bob, Linda Carter, Patti Stewart, Steve Gilliam, and many others.

There is a continual, concerted, and intentional effort to carve away those who would send signals of alarm at the rampant parasitism. As with all parasites there will come a time when the damage is so severe that both the host and parasite are lost. In the short term, however, the benefits to a few are great enough that they will willingly sacrifice everyone’s potential for mutual benefit in order to collect as much as they can right now.

They are fools to sacrifice so much for so little. They give up more than they will gain. Even the corporate world understands that the non-zero sum gains to all are greater than the momentary theft of current assets. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and Freddie Mac demonstrated quite clearly what happens – you could have $1 billion now but end up disgraced, jailed, and ruined or you could accept $1 million per year and be remembered as a hero. Short sighted greed will never buy long term good.

UNCG’s administration has gone corporate…but it has gone out of date corporate. Google, Costco, IDEO – these companies and many others realize that happy employees are more productive employees. They understand the non-zero sum nature of the collective brain.

I’m not suggesting they are philanthropists. Running a business isn’t a charity. However, they are smart. They see the benefits that come sharing, from feeding the brain, that are longer term and more sustainable than those that can be obtained by being a parasite. They also are working for the success of the company as an entity. UNCG’s administration has forgotten about the success of the university as an entity and become obsessed with the simple reproduction of administrative structures.

The UNCG community isn’t under attack. It’s up for sale.

I Was Going to Wait Until Tomorrow...But: REALLY?!?

I thought I was done for the night, but I just can’t walk away from this…this pathetic attempt at a response. Linda Brady should be laughed out of the city. Is she really Andy Kauffman? Surely there is a hidden camera somewhere just waiting to leap out and yell “surprise!”

I’m referring to the latest salvo limply tossed by UNCG in the ‘moonlighting’ debacle that Mason engineered.

Brady has now complained that the use of personal equipment by the employees in order to do their job was actually not them attempting to do what they needed to do for the betterment of UNCG but actually a problem because:

 “such use of the employee’s personal equipment was inappropriate and could have resulted in the university being liable for the repair or replacement of equipment which it did not own.”

Stop whining.

When Wilson and English covered the ground breaking work that was being done by professor Robert Anemone, Mason refused to allow the employees to invest in the equipment that would be necessary to properly perform their work for the university (this despite the savings that must have landed some extra money for the department budget since the staff was disappearing like chocolate at a Halloween party). Wilson and English, out of dedication to UNCG, purchased the necessary equipment out of their own funds.

How dare they!

This story made the UNCG Now feature, was featured on the Anthropology Department’s website, as well as a number of other high publicity locations and yet, rather than rewarding the staff’s efforts to carry on (as we were all supposed to be doing these difficult economic times…) it has now come back as a complaint against them.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Brady noted that officials found at least 30,000 pictures and 100 invoices for $258,000 worth of work for Artisan. Wonderful, let’s take a look at that.

1) How much of that was work related to Carpen? Why does she keep having to respond to the charges of all three each time the issue is addressed? Is she also David Wilson and Chris English? Has she been wearing a mask? Is she able to change height? That’s something that UNCG might want to capitalize on then.

2) How many of the 100 invoices were for work that was done on UNCG’s ‘time’? What’s that? None? Oh. Okay.

3) That $258,000 is gross, right? That means that their expenses could have been, let’s say, $249,000? So…they made $9,000 in that case. Between 3 people.

4) 30,000 images. I’m not impressed. A single wedding shoot, for example, could be 4,000 images.  But again, how many of those 30,000 were Carpen’s? Why do we keep lumping the three together? Is it because taken individually the case seems even more pathetic than it already is?

UNCG employees were told by Edna Chun and Charlie Maimone at a presentation specifically called to address the confusion and fear that these arrests caused that they should “use common sense” to determine if their activities constituted an ethical violation.

Carpen did more than that, she got the approval of not just one but two of her supervisors. I don’t know from which set of social mores Brady and Mason derive their common sense, but let’s suffice it to say that I’m surprised they can cross the street because simply looking both ways and having a walk/do not walk sign might still not be enough evidence that crossing was permissible. Maybe that’s why Brady’s parking space is so close to her office.

Brady stated: 

“I do not find your belief reasonable that your after-hours use of university-owned equipment was permissible because it did not occur during work hours.”

I wonder how many people find it believable that she is retiring because of a plan she made seven years ago?

Leaving that aside, though. Wasn’t Carpen fired because she signed off on time sheets that were incorrect? If anything else was lodged against her it was that she was doing work using university equipment on university time. Brady was specific in her statement to the faculty and the email transcript. It turns out now that it wasn’t on university time. I wonder if there are any other details that may be, shall we say, less than accurate.

Her final argument is that they could fire anybody they wanted to whenever they wanted to anyway. Well, if that is true, it’s the only part of the argument that stands. There was no reason to fire these 3, no reason to arrest them, and no reason why either Brady or Mason should still be employed except possibly in picking up trash off the side of the highway.

I’m remind of the time that a friend of mine’s daughter was reprimanded for hitting her brother. Her response:

“I didn’t. And I was done anyway.”

Maybe she should be the next chancellor at UNCG.

Visit www.facebook.com/uncgcleanhouse and show your support for transparency and justice at UNCG.

Why the Long Silence?

Allen Johnson noted yesterday that the Board of Trustees continues to uphold the claim that we will all be shocked and horrified once the truth comes out as to the full extent of the ‘egregious’ crimes committed by the UNCG3.

When exactly do they have that scheduled?

The promised shocking truth didn’t come out when it went to the DA. The only truth that emerged from that was that all 22 charges were dropped.

This horrifying truth didn’t come out when the three went through their first round of the grievance process and the independent arbiters recommended that the firings be rescinded. The truth there was that the university couldn’t stand up for its decision to fire them.

The mind-blowing truth was not revealed when the latest panel to review the case was unable to come up with anything more damning than that Carpen used a laptop for work outside of UNCG and that the incorrect time sheets she approved did not constitute an ‘egregious’ violation. Are we to believe that the members of that panel were so obtuse that given all of the information, they were still unable to pass a judgment on activities as truly heinous as the administration has promised occurred?

The failure to provide the documents requested as part of a public records request on behalf of the News & Record might have led to the depiction of the gross misconduct…if UNCG had ever bothered to fulfill their obligation to provide the records.

The Board of Trustees has the power to allow more information about the case to be released to the public. 

Let the terrifying truth be unleashed then! 

Cover your children’s eyes and protect the damsels from the horror!

Still nothing?

Maybe, just maybe, that’s because the hope is that if they simply keep delaying, we’ll all forget. They never thought Carpen would take them to task. They’ve been playing this game for a while and had come to believe they were invincible. Now, they are just stalling for time and hoping for a miracle. 

They think we’re stupid enough or busy enough or afraid enough that we’ll accept their straw man as a genuine effort.

No thank you.

So, Linda...which part of the truth are you trying to hide?