Passing thoughts
I’m feeling a bit ill this morning, so have phoned in sick for the first time in a while. Feverish, sweaty and debilitated, that sort of thing. Very light headed and wobbly on my feet, so I’m taking a day out to flush whatever I’ve picked up out of my system.
Mrs S was watching the BBC news this morning as I was in the kitchen and something she said struck me as elegantly apposite. “No one listens to the front line troops any more.”
This strikes a chord. All the blogs I read with very few exemptions have a common bitch; top down management with no two way communication from those who make the big policy decisions. An almost arbitrary ‘Let’s try this and see what happens’ attitude from on high.
Dave Copperfield’s blog (As are most of the other Police blogs) is continually full of the drolleries of having to do five reams of paperwork before attending to the real job of ‘keeping the Queens peace’. Frank Chalk and Vinny Quinn (Ex Bloom) blog about the ironies of dealing with children whose parents responsibility seems to have ended around conception as the State seems to want to be everyone’s Mother and Father (Oh yes and the vagaries of School Inspectors). The NHS blog Doctor and Mental Nurse provide an inside track on the insanities perpetrated within the National Health Service. Even the sage Bystander of the law west of Ealing Broadway sometimes gets overwhelmed by the flood of poorly thought through legislation that constitutes criminal law ‘reform’. As for me, I know Parking Enforcement isn’t a popular job, but like cleaning the sewers, some poor sod has got to do it and at present I’m one of them.
We’ve all got one thing in common; we’re the front line troops often being sent over the top to confront superior firepower with popguns by higher ups with an apparently tenuous grip on the situation.
Rant over. Now I have to go. Right now if you catch my drift.
Mrs S was watching the BBC news this morning as I was in the kitchen and something she said struck me as elegantly apposite. “No one listens to the front line troops any more.”
This strikes a chord. All the blogs I read with very few exemptions have a common bitch; top down management with no two way communication from those who make the big policy decisions. An almost arbitrary ‘Let’s try this and see what happens’ attitude from on high.
Dave Copperfield’s blog (As are most of the other Police blogs) is continually full of the drolleries of having to do five reams of paperwork before attending to the real job of ‘keeping the Queens peace’. Frank Chalk and Vinny Quinn (Ex Bloom) blog about the ironies of dealing with children whose parents responsibility seems to have ended around conception as the State seems to want to be everyone’s Mother and Father (Oh yes and the vagaries of School Inspectors). The NHS blog Doctor and Mental Nurse provide an inside track on the insanities perpetrated within the National Health Service. Even the sage Bystander of the law west of Ealing Broadway sometimes gets overwhelmed by the flood of poorly thought through legislation that constitutes criminal law ‘reform’. As for me, I know Parking Enforcement isn’t a popular job, but like cleaning the sewers, some poor sod has got to do it and at present I’m one of them.
We’ve all got one thing in common; we’re the front line troops often being sent over the top to confront superior firepower with popguns by higher ups with an apparently tenuous grip on the situation.
Rant over. Now I have to go. Right now if you catch my drift.
2 Comments:
get well soon.
In the large organisation I used to work for there was an annual(ish) employee satisfaction survey. Every time the results include a majority of respondants who "did'nt trust senior management" and felt that they "were not being told what was going on".
"Aha!" quoth the said senior managers "what we need is more communication". Across the business (every year) plans were put in place to cascade messages down from the top. Every year this well intentioned tactic failed. It failed because good communication is a two way conversation, but messages going up stalled part way home because their importance was deemed to low, or impertinence too great. Thus the senior managers (while carrying out their high level business direction tasks) never really engage with the troops, and therefore never really engage the troops in the aims of the business.
One can only observe that if you keep doing what you have always done, you will always get what you've always got before.
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