American View: Your People Might Not Be Leaving You for Pay, Titles, or Remote Work

Despite his blistering screeds, Colonel Bob didn’t actually want us to succeed. What fun was that? To ensure that we’d never meet our goals, Colonel Bob changed the official USAF rules when it came to inventories: instead of following the global Air Force standard of one massive inventory of all IT assets every year, our wing would hold a complete inventory every fiscal quarter.

Yeah … Colonel Bob quadrupled our workload, claiming that this would “guarantee” accuracy. Except it didn’t. It hindered more than it helped, since the property management team spent all their time generating and processing unit inventory paperwork rather than getting new equipment ready to issue or clearing out obsolete gear that really needed to vamoose.

Then, because Colonel Bob was a gifted sadist, he added another unique complication: after every unit IT inventory person completed their quarterly inventory, one of my Airmen was required to go in behind the unit rep and repeat the inventory to “validate” their findings.

This “improvement” did nothing for accuracy; it only served to punish my people through extra labour. The mandate crippled our unit’s operating efficiency. We spent nearly all our time chasing down the same collection of old Dell PCs Viewsonic monitors, and Lexmark printers month after month. We generated reams of reports, all of which had to be cross-referenced and signed by the inventory tech, the property management sergeant, by me … and by Colonel Bob. No quarterly inventory was ever “finished” until he signed it … which he would deliberately delay until they were “late,” thereby justifying why he felt “required” to extend his burdensome programme for another year. Just one more trip up the mountain, Major Sisyphus! 

I said at the beginning that I intended to write about “corruption” and “process integrity.” I’m using the Wikipedia functional definition here because it’s more nuanced than the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary:

“Corruption is a form of dishonesty or a criminal offense which is undertaken by a person or an organization which is entrusted in a position of authority, in order to acquire illicit benefits or abuse power for one’s personal gain” [2]

To be clear, Colonel Bob’s actions were blatantly dishonest. While he claimed that his changes were necessary to “improve accuracy” in property control, he knew that we knew he was lying. His scheme was harassment, pure and simple. He did have the authority to make us do it; we couldn’t lawfully refuse his orders. As for “personal gain,” he wasn’t making money off us. His abuse was meant to satisfy his pathological need to dominate and inflict misery on people who couldn’t fight back. The man was a bully, plain and simple.

And as to the effect of Bob’s “inventory octupling” scheme on the property control process, it did exactly what you’d expect it to do: it exhausted us all, generated massive discontent, and caused many Airmen – good ones and bad alike – to transfer out or quit the military entirely. My people were demoralized. Far too many necessary service and capability improvements were delayed or scrapped altogether because we couldn’t spare the time to implement them. Colonel Bob achieved his desired effect: he made us miserable, and that sated his need to harm others.

One of the most important elements of this years-long misadventure wasn’t the gruelling, unnecessary work itself; we were military folks. Pointless, unnecessary work was part and parcel of our trade. Think “painting the grass” for “area beautification.” No, the most demoralizing aspect of this experience came fro knowing that there were multiple people and groups empowered to prevent abuses of authority like this from occurring … all of whom did nothing. They turned a blind eye to Colonel Bob’s abuse of his authority for years. That was what broke so many of my people’s will to carry on. The people who were supposed to protect us … didn’t.

That’s the inherent flaw in all behaviour oversight programmes: the people empowered and trusted to rein in misconduct often refuse to act, because admitting that misconduct happened under their watch exposes the supervisor to accusations of incompetence for allowing the misconduct to happen under their watch. They’re incentivized to turn a blind eye.

But surely, you might think, this story – while kinda schadenfreude-y – reflects something unique to the military, and therefore has no bearing my life as a businessperson. I understand that position and submit that it’s incorrect. Consider: the military has regulations, not processes. Rules that cannot be broken on pain of termination, discharge, or imprisonment. Further, there are entire suborganizations in the military devoted to overseeing compliance with our regulations, investigating misconduct, and removing bad personnel.

The corporate world doesn’t have any such thing. Their policies and “rules” are arbitrary and subject to change at any time. Enforcement is done on a whim if it’s done at all. As for oversight, an organisation might have a pseudo-anonymous “complaint” hotline that they probably ignore. The only commandment in business is “make money.” Every other “principle” is optional and will be jettisoned as soon as it becomes inconvenient. Thus, nearly any abuse of authority will be tolerated in the corporate world so long as the abuser is delivering on the One True Goal™.

So, what’s the main takeaway here? That military life sucks? No; I wanted to share the story of Colonel Bob’s “inventory death march” game to point out that employee morale and retention isn’t soured nearly as much as you’d think by hard work, long hours, or a dearth of branded merch. People in the military and in corp space alike feel proud when they do important work. They relish a challenge and celebrate their victories. People’s morale tanks when they perceive their work to be pointless. Retention tanks when workers realize that their pointless work is being inflicted on them deliberately rather than operational necessity.

I recommend that you take a hard look at your organisation and tell me if there are mandatory work processes in-play that are inefficient or actively detrimental to your team’s efficiency, effectiveness, morale, or esprit de corps. Work that drains your people’s fidelity and motivation. Work that feels like petty abuse than rather than necessary activity. Work that inexplicably could be performed more easily but is instead required by someone in your organisation to be conducted as inefficient as possible. Work that seems designed for you to fail it. Those are the activities that are going to drive your people away.  

I argue that such work might be the natural product of good intentions married to poor process design, but probably isn’t. More often than not, I’d wager it’s the deliberate action of some petty, sour-minded, jack-wagon who’s deliberately abusing their power to cause misery solely for their own satisfaction. The question to ask, in such a case, is “what will my organisation do about this? Is there anyone we can turn to that can and will make this stop? Or is my only recourse to resign and try my luck somewhere else?”

If you find one of these problems, you can either fit it at the root – remove the offender(s) – or you can rebuild from scratch after all your critical personnel have left you for somewhere that doesn’t treat them like a spoiled godling’s playthings.

[1] “In Accordance With Standard Operating Procedure.” Universal military jargon.

[2] Emphasis added.