The customer culture
I want to let you in on a secret about the modern western
management culture – we’re all customers. Is this new to you?
Probably not.
We are all told that we need to see each other as customers.
I’m providing a service to you and you’re receiving it in the spirit
of a marketplace. Everyone has to be performing in this marketplace to enable
better services and provide a customer-focus approach.
The ideology of this comes from Thatcher’s Britain of the
1980s. SAPOL is one of its recipients. You really can’t blame us because
the avalanche of “positiveness” towards this is overwhelming.
Governments and western societies are bathing in this and it has made a lot of
management consultants very wealthy.
For those who have to survive in the customer culture,
it’s about whether you’re on the band wagon or not – very
similar to the currency language I wrote of last month. You’re trading in
it or you’re out.
The method used to instil the culture of the customer is to
isolate areas of production and make them compete with each other and treat
each other as separate enterprises and customers. This is present in SAPOL,
with the implementation of the LSA structure. If you don’t believe me,
what is the POR all about? Line managers have to sit in a room together and
bear their faults and failures to the scorn of all around them. It’s like
some macabre sacrificial ceremony in which the weak are offered up for a good
bottom-thwacking and shamed by the tribal elders. All that’s missing are a
few aprons, wrist cuffs, touches on the second knuckle and some goats.
Upon their return from the ceremony, we are sent messages
telling us we performed better than Holden Hill or Elizabeth or that we need to
pull up our socks, and please just do something to make us look better
– my bottom hurts. We are told that the Adelaide team is achieving its
results and those other LSAs aren’t. They aren’t performing in
the cutthroat world of performance policing.
South Australia has been divided into mini police marketplaces
that are judged against each other’s performance. This in turn is supposed
to make us get angry and want to reach the top of the ladder.
This type of marketplace performance is all over the public
and private sectors. Public and private schools are ranked like a league table
to highlight their proficiencies or deficiencies. Mitsubishi uses
“cell” production and encourages competition between production cells
to highlight how some cells are letting down the others.
SAPOL uses the language of “LSA” and “POR”
at the macro level and “TCG” at the micro. It’s the same
ideology in practice, just different buzz words and workplaces.
All this surrounds isolating the individual worker or
workgroup, pointing the finger at them and making them feel responsible for,
generally, issues which are out of their control. This leads to disempowering
the individual and creating barriers between those in power and those who
aren’t. It is no surprise that, when the call is made to the troops to
rally and behold the “spirit of competition” as the drive for our
working existence, it is met with muffled scorn and healthy scepticism. My
money is on the goat!
Unpaid, unrecognized overtime
As the public campaign on staffing and the management of SAPOL
personnel continues, some members are clearly working unpaid and/or
unrecognized overtime.
Overtime payments are an entitlement. By working unpaid
overtime or, at the very least, not accepting TOIL, a number of negative
outcomes result.
First and foremost is the detriment to members’
wellbeing. The 36-and-a-half-hour working week has been calculated to enable
workers to balance their work requirements with family, sporting and other
social commitments.
Some opt to work overtime without recognition out of a sense
of loyalty to the public and SAPOL. They know that to work seemingly endless
extra hours will prop up an organization buckling under the weight of
insufficient staffing.
Others strain to cope with impossibly heavy workloads and, so
as not to highlight system inefficiencies, work long, punishing hours.
These practices come with an extraordinarily negative impact
on officers’ health and general wellbeing.
By their commitment to such unrealistic work regimes, officers
do themselves, their families, SAPOL and the community a disservice.
Unpaid and/or unrecognized overtime does not allow SAPOL to
monitor accurately workloads that impact on staffing allocation and
budgets.
Consider a police officer who takes up a new position with no
knowledge of the excessive hours of unpaid overtime his or her predecessor had
worked. This, for the new office-holder, results in confusion and lost
confidence.
Officers have, at times, falsely believed that, in the pursuit
of promotion – or when facing discipline – management would consider
past unpaid overtime.
Clauses 10 and 12 of the Police Officers Award relate to hours
of work and overtime entitlements. It is in everyone’s best interests to
claim overtime.
thomasscheffler@pasa.asn.au
