The powers that be have decided that Priority One in getting us out of our slump (high attrition, terrible quality, makin's no money) is to Put People First. This included such earthshattering edicts as "Treat your employees like real people!" and "Make sure to talk to your people like people."

Step one in achieving this plan? Well, we might have a big morale-boosting event; we might try to poll the employees for what we can improve; or perhaps we could do manager/CSR meetings to find out what would help.

Any of those would make sense. But, what's this? A memo from the new management?

Ah. Apparently we are to strictly enforce a bunch of little rules about personal conduct on site, because this way we will tightly enforce professionalism. Mind you, when these rules didn't exist, we didn't have perfect professionalism, but for reasons utterly related to these stupid rules. In addition, there are petty new rules specifically for supervisors. Yes, our tiny little pool of overtaxed supervisors, still trying to hang on despite several losses of staff and persistent openings that never seemed to get filled, get to follow specific rules intended to make us appear "separate and distinguishable" from the staff. Heaven forfend we look like the rabble.

Yeah. Put people first -- after all, the management are people -- and we should spend our time not coaching or developing people, but enforcing their little pet peeves.

I can see that we're really turning this company around.