My friend recalled one incident at his company where the boss asked for ideas to show gratitude to the housekeeping staff. Housekeeping staff is the one that cleans up the office and premises. So the HR came up with a brilliant idea. The idea was that the office staff will do the cleaning for one day, so that the housekeeping staff need not clean for a day.
On the day, the staff members were juggling between their work and cleaning up the office. Each department was in charge of cleaning their spaces. Now one lady went a bit further and put some flowers in front of the department hall. So other teams too started getting flowers and decorated. Some went ahead and got decoration materials and started doing extra decoration using balloons and plastic items.
The entire office was now cleaned up and also decorated. The boss came, and expressed happiness openly and one department which did extreme decoration was appreciated with a prize. What happened later is interesting.
The office staff didn’t clean up the washrooms. The housekeeping staff had to do that job!
After this, the boss asked that all the decorations should be removed once the office staff leaves. The housekeeping staff members who were happy they were not supposed to clean up, got a surprise work! They had to climb up and clean up all the decorations on the walls and ceiling. They had to anyway clean up the washrooms as usual. But the washrooms were used as a space for preparing the decoration materials and some paint was spilled there! So, in the end, this whole exercise which was planned to show gratitude to the housekeeping staff turned out to give extra work to the housekeeping staff.
This is how corporate events aimed at doing something charitable end up troubling the people at the bottom!
The same way, some companies have “no vehicle day” type of nonsense events where the staff is expected to come in public transport or cabs or autos and no parking is provided. It leads to more chaos than providing any long term solutions. Better would be if the company can join hands with other companies around and the government agencies and provide free or subsidized group transport facilities regularly, which not only helps the workers, but even does an effective contribution to reducing traffic in the area!
