Undercover Boss – The future of managing or of self-promotion?

Unlike most other sports broadcasting rights, the Super Bowl seems to live a very carefree, year-to-year kind of existence. While this year’s game belonged to CBS, last year’s aired on NBC, and the year before on FOX. All very “float like a butterfly.”

As a result, there is no consistency to the level of programming that follows the most watched television event of the year. Sometimes it’s reality shows (see CBS’ Survivor choices in 2001 and 2004), and others it’s super-sized episodes of our favorite sitcoms (NBC’s Friends in 1996, The Office in 2009).

This year CBS went with the premiere of its new reality show, Undercover Boss. The series follows senior executives at various different corporations as they spend a week working undercover in their own companies. The goal? To improve their companies and better relate to their employees. But is it all just a set-up?

Last night’s premiere featured Larry O’Donnell, President & COO of Waste Management, Inc, as he spent a week working in his company’s recycling facility, picking up trash outside of a landfill, weighing trucks in at a dump site, cleaning portable toilets at a carnival, and riding shotgun on a trash collection route.

The first hurdle Larry faced was the cameras following him around. In order to explain them away, the back story created was that he was a making a documentary about being a new hire in different positions around the company. Already a flag must have been raised, because how many of us can act authentically while being filmed?

Assuming, however, that Larry’s experience was genuine, and that he really took something away from it, the next question is this: what is he going to do about what he’s learned? Take, for instance, his experience on the garbage route, where he discovered that female drivers must use a tin can as a bathroom. The text-based update at the end of the episode said that Larry was working with Janice, his driver that day, to improve the experience at the company for female employees. Leaves you feeling good inside, right?

But how hard would it have been to simply institute a policy on the trash routes that each employee must be allowed “X” number of “Y” minute-long bathroom breaks per shift? Or what about some mention of how drivers’ output could be metered so as to allow “the face of the company” to better enhance the corporate brand through relationships? That wasn’t even mentioned!

I know I sound like a cynic. But as heartwarming as it was to see Larry really feel for Jaclyn, the overworked and underpaid employee from the landfill, when you really look at what the show accomplished, how can you not see the entire exercise as little more than free advertising?

I’m reminded that Fortune Magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list just came out — who better to work for than a corporate parent whose own executives get down in the trenches and suffer right alongside you?

But who cares, if the employees don’t get anything out of it? Waste Management has 50,000 employees … if Larry helped five directly, plus all of the time-card swipers indirectly by fixing the docking policy, and all of the female drivers by solving their bathroom problems (still unclear if he has), how many workers did this experiment help? 1,000? 3,000?

On the other hand, how many people just saw Waste Management do something extraordinary? 50 million? More?

Again the cynic in me, but Larry’s executive team didn’t even seem to really buy what he was saying in that meeting. Hell, where was David Steiner, CEO of Waste Management and Larry’s boss, in all of this? Or the non-executive board chairman, or the company’s mostly independent board members? In fact, do we even know if those were decision makers sitting in that room with him, looking like, you’ll forgive me, he’d just called the kettle black?

I’ll acknowledge that it would be tough for any company to really translate its experience on Undercover Boss rapidly, in order to show the rest of us the difference it made. But if you’re going to get CBS to do an hour-long infomercial for your company, make some effort to show the public that you really deserve it.

Or at least prove that to your employees.

Clacked by Aryeh S.
on Feb 08, 2010 @ 13:00 EST5EDT