Nope, not the track from Pink Floyd's 1973 DSOM album, but a growing mentality to be found in many store based staff and managers.

This is the second of my entries given over to answering Sparkly_diamond's comments in my Mc6a.m. entry,

I know thats customer demand according to the bigwigs who sit in central office and who incidently will not be working due to their "office" hours.

The context of sparkly's comment was about the proposed opening times over the Xmas and NY period, but they have actually hit on something that is more endemic in the company.

Many of our support services (supply chain, restaurant services, marketing, HR, construction, estates, payroll, accounts, banking, customer service) etc are based in our Head Office (East Finchley) or Regional Offices (Sutton Coldfield, Oakwood, Glasgow and Salford) and our hierarchy also live out of these offices. With the exception of customer service and supply chain, the departments work ordinary office hours.

Usually store based managers get on very well with the other departments (with the exception of the jobsworths at Customer Service) but there is a growing level of general animosity from store based teams.

And, in my view, it is not at the different working cultures (as far as I'm aware, store based grades attract a premium over office based, but I could be wrong.) Instead, it is at the lack of consultation or invitation for input that store teams are given.

Twice a year I sit in some corporate suite in a hotel or stadium and listen to my senior managers and other department heads tell us what will be happening over the next few months.

I don't recall once being asked by one of my managers,

"What do you think we should be doing?" to any real business issue.

I find this to be a liitle strange: we are trusted to run a multi-million pound business yet we are never invited to offer input on its' development. There is a fledgling system in place where crew et al can offer suggestions, yet it would be insulting to think that this is the only way that the people who run the business can contribute ideas.

It is ironic that in an age where we are told that "tell and do" management is not a good business practice, that this is exactly what our Ops Hierarchy are doing to us.

This style of management is making managers increasingly hostile toward both their hierarchy and to the support departments whom they hold guilty by association.

Sparkly_diamond makes another very valid point as well: the perception is that Office based staff and the hierarchy in general sit in their ivory towers (or weird octagon as East Finchley could be described) whilst the rest of us act as cannon fodder.

I would suggest to these teams that every office based worker should spend at least one week spread out over a year working crew shifts to remind them of what they are working for (and by shifts I mean outside of normal office hours getting their hands dirty.)


Of course it could be suggested that store managers should do the opposite, but our jobs already involve doing many of the things that individual departments follow up for us anyway.