Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Walgreens pulls an “Undercover Boss” for the employee publication

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Lately I've ripped "Undercover Boss" as "a despicable show," and I've tweaked Walgreens' great old employee publication Walgreen World for putting out a less-than-satisfying employee annual report.

So Walgreens editors go and put an "Undercover Boss"-type article in Walgreen World.

And, of course, it works well.

The bosses weren't actually undercover. "Nearly all corporate directors and vice presidents worked in a store for a day between Thanksgiving and Christmas," writes Walgreens' editor Iris Iglarsh to introduce the piece, which consists of first-person testimonies from three of those execs.

"It took me three hours to do an inventory check on half the store. I
felt pretty good about that until I learned that other team members
usually do the entire store in two hours," writes Rich Lesperance, director of online marketing in E-commerce. "Working in a store requires tons of concentration, even though there
are a number of interruptions like truck deliveries or the arrival of
the Coke rep."

One of his discoveries, a thing far too un-sexy for TV but just the kind of insight that helps make organizations work better, was that Corporate's demand that store employees gather e-mail addresses from customers is no small favor.

"My store visit made me realize that … we have to make [gathering e-mails] easy for store team members who are constantly juggling tasks. But now that I know [store manager] Alpash, I suspect he'll be a big help in figuring out how we can work together. After all, his store is right in my neighborhood."

Every company ought to do a thing like this—in fact, why not make it a regular feature? One executive visits one front-line location every month, with the communicator in tow to record the event, on video and in prose.

In the process, the exec gets down with the peeps, the communicator gets down with the peeps, the communicator and the exec spend time together, and everybody in the organization benefits from the interaction.

I know: It's not realistic, Dave.

Screw it: The first communicator who pulls it off three months in a row gets a free Hard-Ass Communication Vehicle Analysis® from Writing Boots.

“Undercover Boss”: a despicable show, but what are we going to do about it?

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Have you seen "Undercover Boss," the new reality show where CEOs take off their suits and don coveralls for a week, to find out what really goes on in their companies?

I read some reviews of the first episode, about Waste Management, and Sunday night I saw the second show, about the Hooters restaurant chain.

It's taken me until today to quite believe what I saw.

Let me sum up Sunday's show in case you didn't see: Coby Brooks, the ineffectual son of the charismatic late founder of the Hooters, shaves his cheesy goatee and poses as a new employee in several stores and a sauce factory. During the week, "discovers"—at times, to his genuine surprise—that some people think Hooters is degrading to women, that "Hooters girls" are actually real people with real problems and that employees at the sauce factory don't think much of him, since he hasn't visited the facility since he was in sixth grade.

At several points in the show, Brooks finds himself so newly awash in the meaning and consequence of his job as the CEO of Hooters, that he begins to cry. It turns out that the head of Hooters is no more a hedonistic nihilist than you or me. He wants nothing more than to make his dead daddy proud.

At the end of the show—and this appears to be the formula for the series—Brooks donates $50K to a charity of a manager he liked, gives a fun marketing assignment to two Hooters girls he also liked and sends a stressed-out single-mom store manager into sobs of gratitude and relief by sending her and her children on a two-week expenses-paid vacation.

And then there's "Jimbo," a sociopathic mysogenist manager Brooks should have fired (or shot). We watched this guy force his staff of Hooters girls to compete in what he called "reindeer games" to get off work early. The game we watched, they ate baked beans off a plate with no hands. At the end of the show, Brooks simply orders to apologize to the women and change his management style. Uh-huh.

Even less convincing were the promises Brooks made to change the Hooters culture to make it more attractive to customers and a better workplace for employees.

I've read reviews of Undercover Boss from some communicators, who boldly declare they wouldn't recommend that their client or company participate in it, because good TV doesn't equal good management. And yes, someone should contact the PR people, employee communicators and HR execs at the participating companies and ask them what (in God's name) they were thinking.

But the show does reveal truth:

The CEO is genuinely startled by a lot of what he sees, he is gobsmacked by some basic realities of the company he runs … and rather than become engage in a farcical effort to introduce dignity to the Hooters culture, he will undoubtedly return to his less spiritually rich but more psychologically sustainable world of spread sheets and earnings reports.

And Jimbo, meanwhile, will go on being Jimbo.

Honestly, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

But it seems that I, and others who care about the relationship between employees and management, ought to do something.