Spring Training
March 29th, 2006 | by jg3 |What if your job had Spring training? What if every year you came back from the holidays and cleaned out your desk and re-organized your to-do list and then went to a month of training and problem solving to hone your skills and audition for your job. At the end of the month you could potentially get your job back and your desk in an office with a window and your full salary or be sent out to the cube farms to wear a headset and work tickets and answer calls. Over the course of the year you would be measured on each day’s performance much like you are now, but if you were really in a slump you could be sent “down” the org chart to recuperate and get your “swing” back.
Wow, that would be really stressful. I would be a lot more inclined to toot my own horn and I know it would really change the way my coworkers performed. The interesting thing is that you’re not really competing against each other directly, it is more like a college class that is graded on a curve. There are a fixed number of positions to fill and a few people are expected to be placed there and a few people are not expected to, but they are given the outside chance. A lot of people fall somewhere in between, and they have to show up every day of spring training to fight for their job.
The funny part about this is that the real winner here is the business that we all work for. At the end, they have a more trained and energized workforce and they’ve put their best team of people forward to compete. So, unless you thrive on stress and competition don’t tell the guys in suits about this idea because I’m sure they’d love to find a way to make this work (I’m sure labor groups would stand in the way though).
Filed under: baseball, Musings
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