Love the advantages of a distributed workforce, but concerned about
loss of control?
Machiavelli Management Solutions can put your mind at rest.
Information technology now makes it possible for many employees to work from home, enabling firms to run a more cost effective operation. But bosses are understandably worried about how this impacts workforce management. After all, workers shouldn't be encouraged to take responsibility for themselves.
So, how can staff be monitored, and what can be done to ensure they remain docile and effective workshifters? Machiavelli Management Solutions has the answer.
Workspace Refurbishment
For the employee, working from home means that they can benefit from pleasant, comfortable and familiar surroundings.
This is obviously a problem.
Modern offices are disagreeable, noisy and smelly environments, and there are a number of steps we can take to recreate this atmosphere in the home:
Regulation
A key ingredient in creating a businesslike atmosphere is through the arbitrary restriction of freedom. We do this by enforcing a rigid dress code and by insisting that employees wear name badges at all times when they are in their own homes.
Additionally, we will draw up strict rules concerning the employee's use of his own furniture and, purely for our own amusement, dispense harsh penalties for employees caught pilfering their own stationery.
Environment
We all appreciate pleasant surroundings. Perhaps many of your homeworkers enjoy majestic views of rolling countryside, babbling brooks or similar inhibitors of productivity.
An atmosphere more conducive to labour can be achieved with a little know-how, a lot of imagination and a generous supply of plywood. By erecting a facsimile of a semi-derelict business park outside the employee's window, we effectively eliminate such distractions.
Pumping a pungent mixture of odours into the property - suggestive of decaying meat, hot fat and various noxious industrial chemicals - completes the illusion of conventional day-to-day workplace oppression.
Safety
The workplace can become a dangerous environment in the right hands. It certainly has little in common with most domestic surroundings, as this diagram illustrates:
It is now reasonably well established that the threat of imminent peril increases efficiency. To this end it is possible to create acceptable levels of neglect, consistent with your company's health and safety policy.
Simple measures such as baring electrical cables and tampering with furniture can - when combined with more traditional methods such as mantraps and concealed spikes - prove pleasingly effective.
As an added option, acid baths can provide a further source of amusement.
Discipline Over Distance
Central to any successful model of workforce control is the principal of discipline. Picture your business as a Roman galley with all the slaves rowing at different rates. Without the effective administration of regular punishment, your boat will end up going round in circles and your enterprise will be dead in the water.
Sadly the glory days of the lash are no longer with us and today's modern employment ethic calls for a 'carrot and stick' approach - in which the carrot is usually something hard and pointy which can be jammed into a medically approved orifice, and the stick is a cricket bat.
However these approaches require a management-employee interface opportunity which is not practicable over distance. Step forward Machiavelli's patented Convulso-Tag™ scheme, which can remotely deliver a debilitating electric shock to the wayward employee at the touch of a button.
The Convulso-Tag® system offers the ultimate peace of mind to employee and management alike, replacing the regular one-on-one contact of everyday office violence.
Convulso-Tag technology means that the employee can be confident that he will receive the necessary feedback to ensure acceptable standards are maintained. The management, meanwhile, know that no one will forget who's boss.
About our founder
Machiavelli Management Solutions was founded in 2002 by Harvey Niblick, after he quit his job for the Samaritans in order to rediscover his inner bastard.
With a diploma in Backhanders from the Nigerian School of Harsh Economics, Niblick was more than familiar with the distributed agent problem manifest in the Scope-Resources-Time triangle.
He realised that the key to effectively incentivising telecommuters lay in being explicit about when synchronous vs. asynchronous communications are needed, and creating a framework for predictable status updates and check-in times.
Niblick successfully formulised a regime of disincentivisation structured around traditional methods of contentment modulation. However, he attained his most important accomplishment plateau when he devised a reliable model for selling his services to managers through a combination of meaningless jargon and pretty pictures.
Today, Machiavelli Management Solutions is an industry leader, and Niblick doesn't take any shit from anybody.
Why not call us today to find out how we can put the fear of God into your employees?
Socialisation Disincentives
One of the biggest concerns is that workers will be subjected to the regular distractions of home life.
Distractions such as:
By utilising CCTV, thermal imaging cameras and pressure sensitive underwear, we can constantly monitor and log such contacts so that the appropriate disincentives can be applied.
Disincentives such as: