Yammer - the end of civilisation as we know it? Or ... just another opportunity missed ...

Recently the Sausage Factory was stimulated by an incursion of potential communication. Workers at all levels and of all persuasions were being invited to join a new and user friendly social networking medium called Yammer. Yammer was designed by some as-yet-unsung genius specifically to facilitate communication and innovative cooperation within large organisations. Each Yammer domain is restricted to the people who have an email address with the particular organisation they work for. So Sausage Factory workers, who all have an email address of the form name.name@sausage.gov.au, would be able to create a blog or discussion group that could be seen only by other denizens of the Sausage Factory. It's a bit like a mini Facebook for factories.


Well the glorious light of enlightenment and potentially creative spontaneity lasted for less than a week really before being unceremoniously snuffed out. Access to Yammer from within the Sausage Factory was simply removed without any discussion; "the page cannot be displayed" is the only message anybody has ever got about this.

For those of us who have been struggling for ages to get some kind of discussion forum and networking facility into existence because we really need it for the kind of work we do, this experience is just one more definitive demonstration that the honchos of Bangers R Us are way out of touch with the workforce; in the area where I work it is particularly dysfunctional. Even though the main purpose of the area is public contact for the provision of advice and support to all the meat and stuffing suppliers, and the Factory has various slogans about treating people fairly with personalised service tailored to their particular needs, the largely unspoken but emphatically imposed practice is to enforce a tightly scripted, prepackaged set of "products" with a very 'one size ought to fit all' flavour [so to speak]. The phone staff in the main contact area of the factory must follow the dictates of an on-line information dispensing system which is essentially a gigantic recipe book. A recipe book without an index or table of contents, by the way [I kid you not!], and which furthermore does not have a search function of any significance. Can you imagine that? An on-line system which purports to be an all encompassing knowledge base and yet we cannot search for content; we cannot get to the actual page we want by searching! All the "search" facility does is indicate which "chapter" the information is in.

It is like someone giving you what they say is a map of a city but all it does is offer you a choice of which major road to start on; which city gate to go in through.  But wait, there's more! Because this so called "industry standard" tool does not have "breadcrumbs"; there is no facility providing a a record of the path you followed to get where you did, all there is is the browser back button and history.

But I digressed didn't I. The issue is that often we come up against new situations which are not covered by the 'scripting'. Well it stands to reason that you can't fit the universe of sausage making into a neat little box, so there are often times when we need to do a bit of troubleshooting and innovative problem solving. That requires communicating with other people to see if someone else has already solved this new problem. May be it is just a case of knowing where the information is hiding. But the Sausage Factory honchos seem to have a profound aversion to front-line workers doing anything except "OBEY!" The real policy is Economies of Scale Through Specialisation of Function and total control from the Centre. It is as if nobody at the Sausage Factory has understood why the Soviet Union fell to bits!

Yammer had the potential to become a really useful networking facility, but it was squashed in the Sausage Factory with no discussion and presumably therefore with no recognition of the creative potential it could unleash. The impression we front-line workers get is that The Chief Sausage Maker and his trusted offsiders do NOT trust us.

Tyrant Solipsism

Tyrant solipsism is the mental condition of persons in positions of power and authority who become less and less able to perceive or understand ideas and points of view which are different from their own. Maybe some academic somewhere has a fancy-pants term which means this but I haven't seen it, and somebody has to say it out loud!

This time I have been provoked - the last straw if you like - by a recent mind boggling experience in my part of the Sausage Factory. Great Changes have been afoot for a long time now as the Factory has creaked and rumbled into the twenty-first century. A big problem with the Factory though is that for every good idea that one of the workers has there is a committee somewhere ready and waiting to squash it flat. Sort of like one of the old jokes: "What is a cowpat?" Answer: a pancake designed by a committee.

Oops! I digressed - so easy to do. The thing is the workers in one of the main production lines have been given some completely new machinery for making one of our most, em prevalent, flavours ['popular' would not be a popular word for it]. Certainly this type of sausage is the sort most people end up with. Along with the new and very complicated production machinery have come a whole swag of new ways of doing things AND a brand new computerised reference tool come procedural guides system called "TRAMS". TRAMS is is supposed to be the first and main tool for those of us working in the Phone Orders, Recipes, and Culinary Tips department [PORCT].

TRAMS may be short for Trams an' dentural something or other, I dunno, but it is meant to be the bees knees and totally wonderful. In fact the damned thing is ten times worse than the previous on-line guide book we used. And to think how we used to complain about the old Culinary Express! That's learned us good and proper!

This TRAMS is a disaster because it is slow as slugs to use, is made like a labyrinth so you get lost in it all the time, and splits everything up into tiny micro morsels of information which you can't do a search for, and which are spread out umpteen layers deep without any facility for searching, no map [or 'breadcrumbs" either], and we are instructed NOT to reverse! So it's like trying to drive through a city of one-way streets at night in a heavy fog, with out a map, and your not even supposed to reverse back up to a previous signpost or any intersection we just want to check back on. But no matter how much we complain and demonstrate clearly how totally bad it is, the honchos - Senior Sausage Sages [SSS] - who decided we need it are steadfast in ignoring us. It is like as if some evil magic has blinded their eyes and twisted their noses so anything we say, write, cry, scream[or whimper], or otherwise try to do just seems to the SSS as a nasty smell. Some months ago the SSS enlisted the help of an outside organisation to run a survey of what staff think and feel about their work, managers, and so forth. The SSS were apparently shocked and amazed to discover that we the workers think it them who are on the nose.

So what did the SSS do in response to this report? Firstly spend months cooking up a mass of power points and graphs and buckets of whitewash to show that everything is mostly just fine and wonderful and they kn0w how we can learn to see things that way. But then secondly - which is the thing which has really p****d me off - they spent god knows how much for a trained, professional psychologist to come and talk to each team and basically tell us that we can only be happy if we resign ourselves to our fate.
NB: the Arabic word "KISMET" came to my mind. Wrong message folks!

The theory given was that we must learn to become totally accepting of the abject powerlessness of our situation and admit that we choose to be in this particular job. Othewise we can never bee happy and we will suffer from the affects of stress and it will be our own fault!

Well I don't blame the psychologist woman who was paid to deliver this message; she was clearly not told all the facts about the situation. Either that or she has a somewhat trite and facile view of life. It is one thing to remind people that sanity and well-being requires acceptance of things which are unchangeable but it is quite another to recommend sublime acceptance of obvious neglect, incompetence and wrongdoing in the organisation one works for. Basically the woman skated over and away from the whole ethical dimension of the situation. All the people I spoke to who experienced their team's session with this psychologist were definitely NOT impressed and many were really annoyed. Some just felt more disgruntled and more determined to try and find different employment. Some, like me, felt insulted. I think that if this psychology session was really thought to be a useful thing which will make if easier for workers in the PORCT area to do their work, then it was too facile. If on the other hand it was a deliberate attempt to hose down dissatisfaction and make workers believe that feeling bad about working in the place is all their own fault then it is an example of unconscionable cynicism and furthermore a waste of public monies.