Speculation: RBAs next contract

[Boom Boom Apathy]

The one thing I saw in that interview that worried me is the comment about how they’re a “lean front office, and everybody has a lot to do and has a lot of responsibility. And when we lost somebody, now it’s even leaner. And that means everybody needs to help and everybody gets leaned on a little bit more.”

I don't worry about stuff like that. The larger body of work, which is sustained success and one of the top teams in the NHL the last 6 seasons, is more important to me than the details underneath. While it's fair to say they haven't made it over the hump and won a cup, the sustained success has earned them the benefit of the doubt vs. worrying about what "might" happen.

 

[bleedgreen]

The one thing I saw in that interview that worried me is the comment about how they’re a “lean front office, and everybody has a lot to do and has a lot of responsibility. And when we lost somebody, now it’s even leaner. And that means everybody needs to help and everybody gets leaned on a little bit more.”

I’ve worked retail before. I know that song and dance. Somebody quits suddenly, everyone takes on additional work, the higher ups say they’ll hire someone to replace the one who quit. Months go by, no replacement comes and those remaining feel the burnout from the additional work, leading to more quitting.

I still stop by the Harris Teeter I worked at. When I worked there, they had myself and 3 other stockers working Grocery and 3 stockers working Frozen. Today, there’s 3 stockers total, working both Grocery and Frozen. And the only one remaining from my time there is only there because he’s been told he’s up for a managerial position, something that they keep pushing back the timeline for. I hope it works out for him, but he’s been “up for that position” for a while now.

He certainly mentioned it enough that they’re light. I think the way this all went down looks more and more like a circus with your comments about DW leaving because TD went over his head, but just like every off season I’ll wait until the smoke clears before I have a real opinion. Even if we got here in curious fashion it could still end up being a good thing.

 

[A Star is Burns]

It's not easy to replace someone like Waddell that was filling some big roles but I'm not particularly worried about a scenario where we stay too lean in the front office. I think they'll bring in (at least) another person whether it ends up being an assistant GM type, a GM type, or a POHO type. And they'll probably do as Cory L mentioned and promote someone from within on the business side. Most of this feels fairly standard so far.

 

[Joe McGrath]

The one thing I saw in that interview that worried me is the comment about how they’re a “lean front office, and everybody has a lot to do and has a lot of responsibility. And when we lost somebody, now it’s even leaner. And that means everybody needs to help and everybody gets leaned on a little bit more.”

I’ve worked retail before. I know that song and dance. Somebody quits suddenly, everyone takes on additional work, the higher ups say they’ll hire someone to replace the one who quit. Months go by, no replacement comes and those remaining feel the burnout from the additional work, leading to more quitting.

I still stop by the Harris Teeter I worked at. When I worked there, they had myself and 3 other stockers working Grocery and 3 stockers working Frozen. Today, there’s 3 stockers total, working both Grocery and Frozen. And the only one remaining from my time there is only there because he’s been told he’s up for a managerial position, something that they keep pushing back the timeline for. I hope it works out for him, but he’s been “up for that position” for a while now.

Comparing the plight of the Canes front office to that of grocery store workers is not something i had on todays bingo card.

It must be the offseason.

 

[Blueline Bomber]

Comparing the plight of the Canes front office to that of grocery store workers is not something i had on todays bingo card.

It must be the offseason.

Cheap bosses are cheap bosses, regardless of where they reign.

 

[htdoc]

Welcome to the employment world in the last 20 years. Efficiency can be a positive and negative word depending on the context. Every business is always trying to squeeze every penny out of areas to make x or y person look good, earn a bonus for hitting revenue targets, profit percentages, etc etc etc. Very very very veeeeery few businesses or organizations focus towards fully staffing out and not overloading people and giving employees everything they need/want.

I am at an organization that provides a product/service to a little over a million members. There are many of the same type of companies or groups that offer the same offering to their members across the country and the rest of the world. Every two years, there is a well respected company that surveys us all and publishes a report about the costs to provide our offerings to the members and how we compare to the others across the country and world.

We consistently break the survey. We are standard deviations off everyone else. It's not even close. So you would assume that our customer service quality ratings for members is absolutely awful... its not. We rank in the top third of all companies. So we are almost 4 TIMES cheaper than the *average* cost per member of all the other companies offerings, but still have some of the best customer satisfaction and quality scores.

We literally could almost quadruple the size of our staff and still be well under the average cost to provide our offerings of every other comparable company in the world. We have lived on such a shoestring budget and on the bleeding edge of bare bones stafffing and cost cutting for more than 2 decades now and yet still deliver because we have a lot of employees that care a great deal and put up with the insanity. Been plenty of turnover as well burning folks out that can't keep up and leave to take jobs working half as much for 2 or times as much salary. If they can work for us they can work anywhere and be a rock star seems to be a common theme/trend.

So you would think this is a slam dunk justification result to take to management to request raises or to request some more help.. don't have to quadruple the staff.. just need maybe a few extra people to help give more coverage and backups for folks, ease the burden a bit. We still would be orders of magnitude cheaper than anyone else, right?

Management looks at the report and the satisfaction results and says we should be able to cut some more staff and still keep customers about average for happiness... we could increase profits even more if we cut out a few more staff and reduced the cost per member a bit more.....

Welcome to how extreme it is out there today... there is sooo much literature and business strategy info out there saying leaders need to be chaos agents and burn out everyone that works for you. Get as much as you can't out of people until they quit on you and go elsewhere. About 20% of the staff will buy into the challenge and be evangelical about your vision and be all in a d on board with you as a survivor and keep the unrealistic pace you demand, the other 80% you just keep spinning through them and frying them over time to get more performance than you would if you made it nice for the staff. Forget about retention. Don't make it easy for the staff. They won't reward you with loyalty if something better comes along. So be extreme and get 20% loyalty even with the extreme demands and the rest you get everything you can until they go faster than maybe they would if you were easy on them. The public will put up with it in the quality of the products you sell or they won't and you find other customers ...

Read up on how Jobs and Musk have run companies. Not commenting on the quality of the person, but rightly or wrongly, they are not alone in how they have run companies. A lot of professional sports franchises were owned and run by rich folks that were fans and treated the franchise like vanity projects or went along with the history of how things done to get success. And they have put up with losses in the short term because the value of the franchise has grown exponentially over time so they make it up selling later on.... But that's changing in many sports and the extreme method of squeezing dollars from everywhere and finding the balance of providing the amenities that ensure success and return more revenue are scrutinized.. finding the balance of where you squeeze and go extreme is an evolving process over time. Not always going to get it right. That owner in Phoenix sure walks away with a big fat check of profits for only a few years of consciously not paying the bills to anyone and being an awful owner. But he sold for a billion after buying a few years earlier for half that... we are doing something unique in trying to optimize and not just go along with the status quo of how everyone else does things. It sounds like that isn't just in player contract negotiations but also everywhere in the org to find those efficiencies and squeeze where they can. So not at all shocked it is a super lean group and they are testing now if they can make it even more lean....

 

[Blueline Bomber]

 

[SlavinAway]

Welcome to the employment world in the last 20 years. Efficiency can be a positive and negative word depending on the context. Every business is always trying to squeeze every penny out of areas to make x or y person look good, earn a bonus for hitting revenue targets, profit percentages, etc etc etc. Very very very veeeeery few businesses or organizations focus towards fully staffing out and not overloading people and giving employees everything they need/want.

I am at an organization that provides a product/service to a little over a million members. There are many of the same type of companies or groups that offer the same offering to their members across the country and the rest of the world. Every two years, there is a well respected company that surveys us all and publishes a report about the costs to provide our offerings to the members and how we compare to the others across the country and world.

We consistently break the survey. We are standard deviations off everyone else. It's not even close. So you would assume that our customer service quality ratings for members is absolutely awful... its not. We rank in the top third of all companies. So we are almost 4 TIMES cheaper than the *average* cost per member of all the other companies offerings, but still have some of the best customer satisfaction and quality scores.

We literally could almost quadruple the size of our staff and still be well under the average cost to provide our offerings of every other comparable company in the world. We have lived on such a shoestring budget and on the bleeding edge of bare bones stafffing and cost cutting for more than 2 decades now and yet still deliver because we have a lot of employees that care a great deal and put up with the insanity. Been plenty of turnover as well burning folks out that can't keep up and leave to take jobs working half as much for 2 or times as much salary. If they can work for us they can work anywhere and be a rock star seems to be a common theme/trend.

So you would think this is a slam dunk justification result to take to management to request raises or to request some more help.. don't have to quadruple the staff.. just need maybe a few extra people to help give more coverage and backups for folks, ease the burden a bit. We still would be orders of magnitude cheaper than anyone else, right?

Management looks at the report and the satisfaction results and says we should be able to cut some more staff and still keep customers about average for happiness... we could increase profits even more if we cut out a few more staff and reduced the cost per member a bit more.....

Welcome to how extreme it is out there today... there is sooo much literature and business strategy info out there saying leaders need to be chaos agents and burn out everyone that works for you. Get as much as you can't out of people until they quit on you and go elsewhere. About 20% of the staff will buy into the challenge and be evangelical about your vision and be all in a d on board with you as a survivor and keep the unrealistic pace you demand, the other 80% you just keep spinning through them and frying them over time to get more performance than you would if you made it nice for the staff. Forget about retention. Don't make it easy for the staff. They won't reward you with loyalty if something better comes along. So be extreme and get 20% loyalty even with the extreme demands and the rest you get everything you can until they go faster than maybe they would if you were easy on them. The public will put up with it in the quality of the products you sell or they won't and you find other customers ...

Read up on how Jobs and Musk have run companies. Not commenting on the quality of the person, but rightly or wrongly, they are not alone in how they have run companies. A lot of professional sports franchises were owned and run by rich folks that were fans and treated the franchise like vanity projects or went along with the history of how things done to get success. And they have put up with losses in the short term because the value of the franchise has grown exponentially over time so they make it up selling later on.... But that's changing in many sports and the extreme method of squeezing dollars from everywhere and finding the balance of providing the amenities that ensure success and return more revenue are scrutinized.. finding the balance of where you squeeze and go extreme is an evolving process over time. Not always going to get it right. That owner in Phoenix sure walks away with a big fat check of profits for only a few years of consciously not paying the bills to anyone and being an awful owner. But he sold for a billion after buying a few years earlier for half that... we are doing something unique in trying to optimize and not just go along with the status quo of how everyone else does things. It sounds like that isn't just in player contract negotiations but also everywhere in the org to find those efficiencies and squeeze where they can. So not at all shocked it is a super lean group and they are testing now if they can make it even more lean....

The news about Sheriff Bart is the only thing sadder than this I've read this week...