Common Story

A common story told in my organization varies about the reasons why our 

work location does have windows. The threat of espionage was real. Unspoken things have happened from people propelling themselves from the roof to sneak a peek in the facility and having send spies to work to collect classified data. The common theme is to be careful where you go, who you talk to and who you share information with.

Each year, all employees are required to complete compliance training. Training covers the basics to avoid legal issues. Employees are also required to complete ethics training, given scenarios to demonstrate how something can quickly escalate into improper disclosure of information. This doesn’t describe “who we are” but it does describe “what we stand for”. The patent on some stealth technology is highly guarded along with some future top secret projects. The promise the organization makes is to always remember who they are working for. 

The story of spies around us promotes goals and ideals of the organization to protect the interest of the customer. This also promotes integrity and encouraging employees to follow proper protocols as necessary. It’s not so much as being paranoid, for example, which at first I thought was a little extreme to be told during orientation not to provided much information on public profiles that can make you an easy target. The consider was the vulnerability that work secrets would be shared unknowingly, therefore, each employee must identify some of the signs to avoid oversharing. 

In the recent years, the organization has shifted to include people to find ways to improve the business. For example, being more transparent (leaders meeting with employees on a consistent basis), developing peer to peer acknowledgment forum (to boost employee morale) and having a employee suggestion system. Current redesign in the organization has manager communicating to employees if you have a problem you must also have a solution. Cost, quality and efficiency are terms heavily used, and when pursuing a solution, a popular path to take are initiating improvement projects.

Most of these projects, dubbed structured improvement activities, encourage multi-function team participation but are lately ineffective due to lack of sustaining interest to continuously improve. There are very few employees who will assume some of the propose task working as an equal, but most are comfortable with doing less than more task. There have been times I witnessed managers ask for a report from another group and doesn’t hold the group accountable to meeting manager’s request. Instead, the manager will spend days to pulling the same report because they can do it better themselves. On the other hand, when that same manager gets a request from the same group to fill in their report, he gives them what they ask for or face his management, in addition to losing support from the group (providing reports even if it’s the groups job to do so). I was told if we don’t have issues we wouldn't be here working.

There is a lot of information exchange done on a daily basis. Some prefer to do it themselves so they can be the only person liable in case something goes wrong, even if time consuming. Data integrity is important and a critical focus as the company starts to measure and given incentives for performance. Some managers prefer to control the amount of data but must comply with the organizational rules to protect information and to be aware of suspicious activities.