It amazes me how many companies implement the stupidest polices. I know I've had my fair share of them throughout my work experience. The most recent being at my current employer. There is actually a policy stating what specific places in the building have to be called. For example, the cafeteria has to be called the cafe, the basement has to be called the lower level and the store (carries company merchandise and miscellaneous snacks) has to be called the shoppe. Another good one was my "performance appraisal". I started with my current company at the beginning of this year, 2013. My manager was told by an HR Manager that a performance appraisal was to be completed on me, even though the evaluation would be for a time period, 2012, that I wasn't with the company. When asked why this needed to be completed, my manager was told "because it's required for everyone to complete a performance appraisal". Dress codes can also have some stupid polices. I never understood the dress code policy for open toed shoes we had at a credit union I previously worked for. We were required to wear pantyhose with any open toed shoes, even though you can still see someone's toes through pantyhose. But this policy was only in effect Monday through Thursday. Because apparently exposed toes is only offensive on those days...
Can you imagine how much time and energy is spent on developing stupid polices? Is this how leaders need to spent their time? Not to mention the time of the people who have to implement and enforce the policies. Chances are they could be doing something more valuable. Stupid polices can effect how a business runs in big ways. Leaders rarely look at how their policies in general, not just stupid ones, are effecting their business. But this is something they should be doing. An example of a leader redesigning polices to create better business can be seen at Zappos. Zappos has eliminated annual performance appraisals altogether and moved to having managers give their employees regular feedback on the same dimensions that were on the annual appraisals. This requires managers to give constant feedback to their employees without having the required annual appraisal where they have to remember what happened 12 months ago, or just make stuff up, like my manager had to do.
What stupid polices have you had at previous and/or current employers?
I think perhaps that the policies "made sense" at one time, but the meaning was lost and they became stupid policies.
ReplyDeleteMeaning versus strict interpretation of words.
I think this happens with all companies at some point in time. I see that this happens a lot in the current environment because policies do not change as quickly as the environment. With the technology of today people transfer information at an amazing rate unfortunately the policies maintaining these people due to politics and other things do not change as quickly making many obsolete before they are even enforced. Another issue I see with this is that many people take common sense out of the process of enforcing a policy causing them and the policy to look silly.
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