Rants on Corporate Culture - Treatment of Rule Breakers

Let's face it...unless I strike out on my own and start my own business, I'll probably always be a corporate employee. It's just the nature of my job. What I do isn't cheap, and lots of resources are required to attract and keep people like me. So, the best pay, benefits, and growth opportunity for DBAs can generally be had only in a larger corporate environment. I accept this willingly, particularly since my understanding of economics and free exchange provide me with the appropriate perspective to be able to appreciate the benefits that working for larger corporations provides. This is my bed, and I'm happy to lie in it.

Every now and then, though, some things about corporate life get under my skin. The one recent example is something I'll call "Group Remediation". It occurs when one person makes a mistake or abuses some privilege, but rather than discipline that particular person for his or her infraction, the corporate mindset inevitably requires that EVERYONE be trained, counseled, or otherwise made to suffer for it. It's as if, unless something is done quickly, the irresponsible person will infect everyone around him or her with some vile disease, and so we must ALL be inoculated immediately with mandatory group training sessions, policy awareness surveys, and other such corporate vaccines.

It would be one thing if we were talking about a new policy, in which case it makes sense that human resources (HR) would want to make everyone aware of it. Too often, though, it is a knee-jerk reaction to the violation of an existing policy. They call it "proactive prevention", but it's really just a spreading around of punishment, although any HR department member will deny that this is the case even unto their deathbed.

So whence does this mindset originate, and what are the effects thereof? I suspect that the origin of the mindset has something to do with the general tendency to ignore individual responsibility, for which bureaucracy is well-known. Rather than view a policy infraction as a lapse in individual judgment, it is seen as some sort of systemic problem, and must be treated as such. That is not to say systemic problems don't exist, but these are typically a case of twisted incentives directing individual behavior, such as the way a system of government inevitably rewards departmental failure.

The effect of Group Remediation is to alert individuals in no way associated with the infraction that someone in their midst is a rule-breaker. The identity of the irresponsible person is almost never revealed, leaving the responsible individuals to wonder who has caused them all to suffer through this particular instance of corporate hell. The rule-breaker, however, has the pleasure of knowing he or she has cost coworkers time that could have otherwise been spent productively, and wondering who knows it was them. Perhaps this is exactly the point...to drive home the consequences of individual actions by dragging everyone around the individual through the mud, hoping that doing so will spur responsible individuals to "police their own". What a shitty way to treat people.