Behind Eimear’s desk was a large framed poster of the sort loved by international financial companies and small marketing firms. Three hands, one black, one white and one yellow, intertwined beneath a slogan that said “Together we are One”.
Someone in HR figured that a few motivational pictures were all the staff needed to get them to go that extra mile. Bugger pay increases, a feeling that you were all part of one big happy team was all that mattered. To Eimear it looked like the sort of picture you’d find in a Credit Union. Every time she saw it she was reminded of the time she told her mother she’d been promoted to Manager. Next time she was home she found out that her mother had told all the neighbours that Eimear was now a Bank Manager.
Eimear had been promoted to Manager as compensation for not getting a pay increase. She didn’t tell her mother that bit. It got her a better desk and an invitation to the weekly management meeting. This turned out to be more of a punishment than a reward however. Regular meetings are fine the first couple of times, but they soon turn into the office version of water boarding. A feeling of drowning in a sea of nothingness is common to both.
Each manager gets a few minutes to update the team on issues the boss is already aware of and nobody else cares about. As a general rule, if you have to wait a week to hear something at a meeting, it can’t have been that important in the first place. After each manager has used up their allotted time talking about transaction numbers and the planned team night out at the bowling alley, the boss gets his turn. Generally he’ll just regurgitate what he’s been told at the senior manager’s meeting but with a few alternations to soften the blow of negative news. So where he might have been told that sweeping redundancies are planned, he’ll tell his team that the company is looking at some strategic restructuring initiatives to maximise synergies.
At Eimear’s first meeting the boss didn’t feel like softening the blow. Desperate measures were called for. If the department didn’t trim its expenses by 10%, then New York would do it for them. Eimear was a dab hand at spreadsheets, so the boss had asked her to put together some numbers beforehand.
“Salaries make up 50% of our budget, rent and services 40% and stationary 10%.”
That last number fell off his lips with an excited murmur. It was clear to him what needed to be done. “Lets cut stationary”, he exclaimed. “Those bastards think they can get a new pen every time they open their desk and what is it with the amount of highlighters we go through? Are we running colouring competitions? And why are we buying calculators for people? Don’t they all have Excel on their computers?
The managers looked at each other and shrugged. Once the boss got a crazy idea in his head, he was like a dog with a bone and no amount of logic would change his mind. Eimear was innocent to the ways of the office however and she had the full analysis of costs in front of her.
“The vast majority of the stationary budget is paper. And we can’t stop that because we’re legally obliged to maintain hard copies of all data and print reports for clients. When you take out paper, we hardly spend anything on stationary.”
The boss smiled. Eimear and her colleagues were simple number crunchers. He had been invited into the secret group of senior strategy thinkers that were trained to think outside the box. The previous November the boss had spent a week at an off-site planning meeting in Barbados. The purpose of the meeting was to plan expense cut backs in the coming year and no doubt the calming influence of the 5 star resort they stayed in helped. One of the messages the boss came back with was that the monetary value of expense savings were less important than the message they give.
“Once the staff realise that we have tightened our belts on this issue, it will be easy to whip them into shape. Fear is a great motivator”.
The managers trooped out dejectedly. They had a quick meeting outside the boss’s office and agreed to keep quiet about the stationary freeze in front of their staff. Being a coward is a lot easier when you do it as a group.
Over the coming weeks the staff learned all too well about the freeze. Pens ran out first. People started stealing from their kid brother’s pencil case, so that outsized Bart Simpson pens became common. Highlighters were next to go and the office became monotone as a result. People started clambering under desks to retrieve pens that had been dropped months before and had gathered dust and fluff.
The archiving team was hardest hit. The nice filing envelopes they used were culled. Luckily this was before Ireland’s ban on plastic bags, so a strict re-cycling program was put in place. In years to come, archeologists will find the bank’s archiving site and wonder why Tesco plastic bags were used to store documents for 6 months in 1999.
Frank had been avoiding Eimear since the disappointment of his pay review but he saw this as a chance to impress with little effort. He had a mate who worked in the London office and he emailed him about their dilemma. A week later a box was delivered by courier. When they unwrapped it, a large red cross was drawn on top and somebody had written “Emergency Stationary supplies for our beleaguered colleagues in Dublin”. Frank and Eimear were suddenly overcome with a feeling of shame. The bloody English were patronising us again. Then the opened the box and their mood changed instantly.
“File dividers! I haven’t seen those in months.”
Soon a scrum formed as the team scrambled around the box like starving children at a feeding station. They scurried back to their desks which armfuls of posted notes and refill pads and for a morning at least, Eimear didn’t have to listen to complaints. She took the box to the re-cycle bin and noticed the courier ticket on top. It gave the charge which she knew would be routed back to her department. It was greater than that month’s normal stationary budget.
Eimear smiled. As her boss said, it’s not about the amount of money saved. It’s about the message.
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