Rebranding at work

Management consultants are the source of most evils at work.

At work, we are currently suffering a rebranding implementation. And bullshit level has gone through the roof. Luckily, my line manager, despite his faults, is good at dealing with his – he constantly takes the piss out of it. We have a lot of laughs in our office. We are the Finance and we see the real truth – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Sales are down for some time which leads to not so good bank balance. The managers/directors are mainly doing this rebranding to divert the attention from the problem so that they don’t have to deal with it.

Our company is divided into two sorts of employees, the real staff and then the rest. The real staff went on a conference abroad to go through the rebranding; apparently it is more then just changing the stationery and letterheads. Sadly they filmed the conference and tomorrow we are all going to have to sit through that bloody film.

This afternoon a memo was sent out from one director, which sales figures are non-existent this month, and after my line manager had stopped laughing at it, he let us read it too.

Here are some points from it:

* Every month, the person that has “adjusted” best to the new values of rebranding gets a price. The company is not a fast food joint, we are suppose to be a professional company. I would like to nominate our CEO every month – maybe then I would get a decent pay raise.

* There is now a standard way to answer the phone, both internal and external calls.

* All desks have to be cleaned and tidied before you leave work, only think to be left on your is a print out of tomorrows tasks. Not too bad after 3^rd thought, I get paid to tidy my desk. But problem with the to do list – I don’t use them. I use Outlooks Task & Calendar function to remind me. Oh dear – I am in trouble now.

* Standard font to be used on the email. NOOO and it is not my beloved courier so I will definitive ignore that one. The ironic thing is they have decided to use another font for letters. This other font is ok when you have printed it on paper but on the flat screen is looks shite and unreadable.

* We are a “Good news company” so only wins etc will be communicated to the organisation. So when we loose a client, there is absolutely no discussion why this happened.

Here comes the killer punch line, considering the above is restrictive, the company is using a smart causal dress policy which will demonstrate that we are smart and innovative.

Only company branded pens, papers and litterateur is to be used in client meetings. And what are all those directors/managers using their Mont Blanc pens going to do?? When they loose the pens, all staff emails are being sent around to ask if anyone has seen their pen. Oh by the way, all staff email is to be kept as minimum since emails takes up a lot of resource in IT.

I am so not looking forward to tomorrow’s bullshit session.