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an incident regarding a microwave
7 years ago
Story time.
This is an incident from my brother's workplace...
They had fairly high productivity a 200+ employee tech research firm (my brother being a higher up manager giving him the insight needed to get all the details of this mess. A significant contributing factor was that employees would work through lunch. I.e. everyone would bring food from home, save money, cook in the cafeteria microwaves, and eat at the desk.
With that set-up in mind ...
A SINGLE INDIVIDUAL ...
(who was, not coincidentally, a vocal "rights" type)
... would cook nauseating food. As in "stink up the office and bother everyone else" type food. It was legitimately bad enough that everyone everyone complained to HR.
And mind, an almost universal office policy implemented stateside is "don't cook aromatic foods in the company microwave." If you cook foods, regardless of the reason, and you're bothering other people with the scent: you're breaking the rules because you're lowering office productivity. End of day: if the office isn't as productive, the potential of a big pay raise for all employees gets diminished.
So, the single individual should have been reprimanded and punished accordingly if she kept up abusing microwave rights.
HOWEVER ...
The reason there's a story to be told here is that this HR manager in question was fresh out of college. More importantly, fresh out of college with the liberal-trained mindset (the type that's all about inclusion and fairness and avoiding conflict).
So the HR manager did nothing.
My brother was high enough on the ranks to talk to the HR manager frankly without repercussion, so he did. The HR Manager more or less went on a small rant about not wanting to make conflict (which is bad), not wanting to single out the individual (which is also bad). Though he strongly also suspected that the HR manager didn't want to play the bad-guy and tell off the individual ... owing to of lack of backbone and not wanting to feel bad for criticizing anyone.
(addendum worth noting: my brother is a hiring manager over his own tech division. He basically never hires anyone with a mindset similar to this ... because it typically means the employees won't have the resilience to deal with a high-stress job.)
So the stinky food went on for a while. And complaints kept pouring into HR.
Eventually HR acted.
UNFORTUNATELY ...
Instead of fixing the problem with the one person (at a 200+ employee tech research firm)
They removed the microwaves so that the individual wouldn't feel singled out.
Unsurprisingly productivity took a noticeable drop because nobody ate lunch at their desk, and everyone took generous lunch breaks because screw HR.
A direct quote from my brother (as best I can remember) "thing is, this liberal mindset fears to offend people because confrontation is bad. This is absolutely terrible in business. and because of this [HR Manager's] attitude in my workplace, nobody works through lunch, the second half of the day suffers because everyone is trying to get their minds back into work mode." All because a manager didn't want to enforce an existing policy out of fear of hurting someone's feelings.
So yeah. You can either focus on results (lowered productivity in this case) or focus on feelings (feeling bad because you have to make someone else feel bad).
Up to you
This is an incident from my brother's workplace...
They had fairly high productivity a 200+ employee tech research firm (my brother being a higher up manager giving him the insight needed to get all the details of this mess. A significant contributing factor was that employees would work through lunch. I.e. everyone would bring food from home, save money, cook in the cafeteria microwaves, and eat at the desk.
With that set-up in mind ...
A SINGLE INDIVIDUAL ...
(who was, not coincidentally, a vocal "rights" type)
... would cook nauseating food. As in "stink up the office and bother everyone else" type food. It was legitimately bad enough that everyone everyone complained to HR.
And mind, an almost universal office policy implemented stateside is "don't cook aromatic foods in the company microwave." If you cook foods, regardless of the reason, and you're bothering other people with the scent: you're breaking the rules because you're lowering office productivity. End of day: if the office isn't as productive, the potential of a big pay raise for all employees gets diminished.
So, the single individual should have been reprimanded and punished accordingly if she kept up abusing microwave rights.
HOWEVER ...
The reason there's a story to be told here is that this HR manager in question was fresh out of college. More importantly, fresh out of college with the liberal-trained mindset (the type that's all about inclusion and fairness and avoiding conflict).
So the HR manager did nothing.
My brother was high enough on the ranks to talk to the HR manager frankly without repercussion, so he did. The HR Manager more or less went on a small rant about not wanting to make conflict (which is bad), not wanting to single out the individual (which is also bad). Though he strongly also suspected that the HR manager didn't want to play the bad-guy and tell off the individual ... owing to of lack of backbone and not wanting to feel bad for criticizing anyone.
(addendum worth noting: my brother is a hiring manager over his own tech division. He basically never hires anyone with a mindset similar to this ... because it typically means the employees won't have the resilience to deal with a high-stress job.)
So the stinky food went on for a while. And complaints kept pouring into HR.
Eventually HR acted.
UNFORTUNATELY ...
Instead of fixing the problem with the one person (at a 200+ employee tech research firm)
They removed the microwaves so that the individual wouldn't feel singled out.
Unsurprisingly productivity took a noticeable drop because nobody ate lunch at their desk, and everyone took generous lunch breaks because screw HR.
A direct quote from my brother (as best I can remember) "thing is, this liberal mindset fears to offend people because confrontation is bad. This is absolutely terrible in business. and because of this [HR Manager's] attitude in my workplace, nobody works through lunch, the second half of the day suffers because everyone is trying to get their minds back into work mode." All because a manager didn't want to enforce an existing policy out of fear of hurting someone's feelings.
So yeah. You can either focus on results (lowered productivity in this case) or focus on feelings (feeling bad because you have to make someone else feel bad).
Up to you
Or, as it seems to lately be playing out everywhere: Get Woke, Go Broke.
The reason I say this is that "The Invisible Hand" is a concept that a ton of people misquote ... sometimes to the point of divine providence.
IMO = "the invisible hand" actually is saying is that "people are NOT inherently good and will take advantage of a system where they can in a way that will benefit themselves."
(which is 100% against contemporary snowflake logic)
That means the rigidity and economic gain isn't how business is built. It's just the reality of the situation that people need to accept.
Or you can ignore and watch the company go down the shitter.
But this wasn't one of my stories. This was a real world incident.
And life is a miserable shithole.
so wait, when you said "unshelled eggs" ... do you mean like unshelled hard boiled eggs or raw eggs in a container? I'm just trying to grasp the level of mess. XD
It seems weird how you're conflating this with liberalism. It's not at all. It's just a lack of a backbone. Don't blame an entire group or an entire set of beliefs just because of one loser.
the more radical a group goes, the more they become like their radical counterparts. An extreme example of this is Antifa, which a lot of people on the left will actively defend as not using facist tactics.
A lesser example is the "big boobs bad" argument touted by gaming journalists and the sort. It has more to do with puritanical censorship than anything, but it IS being touted by people who profess to be the left.
Apathy to the situation is currently a massive detriment to the left in general. Trying to automatically label everything that is evil as "conservative" is likewise vanity.
So yeah, is it the classical "liberal" definition. Of course not. Is it the contemporary definition that you'll see DNC politicians use of "inclusion" ... yeah. it is.
If you want to fix the problem, weed out the radicals from the left.