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Get The Best Out Of Your Staff - Bug The Water Coolers
I've often wondered about this - why is it, when it comes to top-secret evildoers in films, TV or even real life, nobody ever thinks to bug the water coolers in their base? Go with me here, this is going to be a strange one.
Let's go back a few steps: I manage an advertising firm, and I sometimes feel that I'm a bit of an ogre when it comes to keeping the creatives in line. In my defence, if I'm not hard with them, nothing will get done; everyone will be turning up looking like they slept in their clothes and there'll be far too much peace and love and not enough work done on selling people things they don't need.
The downside to being a bit of a hardliner with my staff is that I sometimes feel that I'm not getting their best ideas for campaigns because they may feel that I'm going to hit the roof if they try to sell me something that's a little leftfield. This isn't the case - with the credit crunch, I want the best they have to offer, and I tell them that regularly, but I still feel like they're holding out on me. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.
That's where the idea for bugging the office came from: the water coolers are where my staff congregate, and there's a lot of chatter that goes on there. It can't all be about last night's reality TV episode, there's got to be some work discussed there too. Obviously due to the way I'm perceived in the workplace, I can't just walk up to my employees and join in the conversation, so I had to be a little bit sneaky and potentially violate their human rights.
All it took was a couple of small wireless microphones and a bit of software installed on my office computer, and the water coolers were wired for sound. Within an hour, I'd discovered that I had a number of nicknames - some of which were words I'd never even heard before - but I'd also heard a few ideas which the staff didn't want to present to me because they thought I wouldn't go for them. How wrong they were - they were genius.
Of course, now I had to think about how best to present these ideas back to the creatives that had had them in the first place. I couldn't say that I'd bugged the office and ripped them off, so instead, I waited until we had a meeting about one of the campaigns where one of these ideas had come from, and presented it as my own idea. Obviously there was a bit of fallout on the bugs with people wondering if I had psychic powers, but the main thing was that it worked. It opened people up to telling me their weirder ideas, and now I really am getting the best out of my staff.
Obviously, some of these touchy-feely managers would say that there are better ways to get the best out of their employees than bugging the water coolers in the office, but this way worked for me, and it also endowed me some very valuable material on most of my staff for the next time I need to fire someone. The FBI and the police could well stand to learn from me.
About the Author Anna Stenning is a comedy writer who specialises in pieces about surveillance in the workplace. Find out more about water coolers at http://www.pure-watercoolers.co.uk/
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