"The inherent danger in well-timed increases in benefits is the suggestion of a fist inside the velvet glove."
That's the 5th Circuit, describing what Starbucks did to its Buffalo stores once a union showed up. The court's recent opinion in Starbucks Corp. v. NLRB reads like a playbook of exactly what not to do during an organizing campaign.
My son is a high school senior. His school has a tradition called the Senior Corner — a spot in the Upper School commons, television included, that seniors earn as a rite of passage.
Not anymore.
The TV is gone this year, and the explanation is that last year's seniors were too loud and disturbed nearby classrooms.
Last year's seniors. Not this year's. The kids who caused the problem graduated. The kids paying for it did nothing wrong.
That's not discipline. That's an institution that didn't want to do the harder work of identifying who was actually being disruptive, so it punished everyone instead.
Sound familiar?
It's the same move John Morgan, of the law firm Morgan & Morgan, bragged about on video — describing how he monitors remote employees by, in his words, "putting cameras up employees' backsides."
Watch everyone. Make sure nobody's slacking.
That's not oversight. It's an admission that he doesn't know which employees are the problem, so he's decided to treat all of them as suspects.
Blanket discipline or surveillance is the corporate version of taking away the TV. It's what a manager reaches for when identifying and addressing the two or three underperforming employees feels like more work than monitoring everyone.
It's not a performance-management strategy. It's an avoidance strategy masquerading as one.
And it backfires in the workplace for the same reason it backfires in a school commons.
Your best employees notice.
They notice that their discipline, output, and integrity bought them nothing. That they're being treated exactly like the person who actually earned the scrutiny.
Once people figure that out, you've traded a performance problem for a morale problem. And morale problems are much harder to solve. Once you've killed morale, it's incredibly difficult to win it back.
If you've got employees who aren't working while remote, that's a real issue. Address it with them. Directly. Personally. Document it, manage it, and if it doesn't improve, part ways with them.
What you don't do is turn your entire workforce into a surveillance target because two people gave you a headache.
That's not management. That's giving every employee a reason to wonder why they bothered being good at their job in the first place.
Punish the offender. Not the workplace.
Here's what I read this week that you should read, too.
Business owners, officers, and managers, this is why you need to pay attention to wage and hour issues.
Tow truck driver Marquis Mariscal sued JLS Towing, alleging the company misclassified him and other drivers as independent contractors and paid them a flat rate per vehicle towed, no matter how many hours they worked. No overtime, ever, even past 40 hours a week.
He not only sued the company, but also its president, Summer Settle, personally, claiming she directed the company's operations, set schedules, made hiring and firing calls, and controlled how drivers got paid.
The EEOC has lost right to claim that it's for "equal employment opportunity."
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission exists to investigate workplace discrimination. Yet, on August 18, it signed a settlement promising never to do that again, for one group of employers, forever.
The employer is the Christian Employers Alliance. CEA sued the EEOC challenging its guidance treating gender identity discrimination as sex discrimination under Title VII. Instead of litigating it, the agency gave CEA everything it asked for.
