Run The Play To Perfection

Linsey Aranciata, our Global Sales Director with both a “Hunter Mentality” (she has a t-shirt that says so) and a deep love for mushroom yard art, just got in trouble for spending too much Company Time on her podcast.

We’re fine with employees running side hustles. You wanna…

• exercise

• have a kid

• take care of your kids

• run to the bank

• visit the doctor

  
  

It’s all fine. On Company Time even.

But not for more than 300 minutes per workweek. These blueprints aren’t going to draw themselves people. Go pick up that prescription on your own time please.

So we scheduled Linsey’s reprimanded for the quarterly Company All Hands.

We were so excited to make such a huge scene oh goodness we had this elaborate plan to make it seem like she was going to win an award—we even got a trophy—then *BOOM* we’d pivot to listing her offenses (402 minutes a week editing podcast episodes, using company computers even!) and otherwise make an example of her abhorrent behavior.

Complete with the over frequent use of the word “disappointed” to form a nice little mini monument to her malfeasance in hopes it would deter other employees from acting malfeasance-ly.

That is, until Panama, our Workforce Experience Designer, pointed out that we’re supposed to criticize in private and praise in public, not the other way around. And that we don’t want people to leave here in general, but rather “…grow and flourish and contribute…” etc. etc.

Sheesh. Workforce Experience Designers have a knack for taking the fun out of everything. She even made us disassemble the prop guillotine and platform Matt Carmichael, our Visual Operations Designer, custom made for the occasion in his garage.

We heard he almost got arrested loading it out of his GMC Sierra.

And criticize in very private, apparently, because it turns out, according to Panama’s research, even a mild reprimand during say a meeting basically eradicates all willingness to participate and/or contribute while “…creating a culture of compliance that kills companies in the long run.”

So our whole fun public execution got wrecked.

Then Theodore “Ted” Newport, one of our other High-Pressure Sales Leaders, stopped and checked out the podcast itself, and reported Linsey has 1500 subscribers and a 4.9 out of 5-star average rating on Apple Podcasts in the US, then delivered the unusually cheery evaluation of, “Hey, that’s a solid and promising independent podcast she’s got there!”

Gah.

So for now we let this Company Code Violation Class IV slide, particularly after we learned that Linsey refers to our company in her host bio, and thus we’re receiving “favorable market sentiment” purely from association, at least according to Dalton Humphries, the Competitive Intelligence Analyst on our Consumer Insights team. Who we normally don’t listen to because he smells like eggplant and always acts as if he knows important stuff we don’t know. Which he clearly does, which is why we’re all bent about it.

In the meantime, to inject some fun back into our operations management, we’re going to mess with our continuing education programs again. They’re too easy and logical and boring. That’s why we drew up an obstacle exercise based on the Marine Corps Leadership Reaction Course, where our teams must solve a physical problem under pressure.

It’s gonna be so great: Relocate a 10-foot conference table from the Meeting Hall to the exact middle of the IT Department without letting IT know. Our money is on at least five attempts that result in abject failure before anyone realizes the only way to make it work is interdependence and coordination.

They forget so easy. For the record, designing this obstacle course took approximately 600 minutes of Company Time across three planning sessions, which Dalton Humphries has already flagged. So we’re reassigning his parking spot.

Reglardless, we’ll let you know how they do.

Do you like waffle houses and anything else to do with waffles? We sure do! Share this story with a traffic cop and we’ll send you a coupon to this great place outside of Amarillo where you get an airplane bottle of this great maple liqueur they make out back in a defunct shipping container. It’s simply divine