Wednesday, April 14, 2010
IT'S A PLANE SHAME WHAT SOME COMPANY BOSSES HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THESE DAYS
Reading the story about the boss of Abercrombie & Fitch, who has been paid $4 million not to use the company's private jet quite so much, reminds me of the owner of the last company I worked for before jumping ship, with great relief, back into self-employment.
This company, which cleaned the dirty bits of industrial plant and took on other tough jobs that often defeated the competition, was owned and run by a volatile, eccentric, somewhat paranoid and deeply selfish man with a spectacularly inflated sense of his own importance and intelligence.
Despite the fact that the company only had a £1.5 million turnover, the MD/owner thought nothing of chartering private jets, normally the preserve of large multi-national corporations and pop and film stars, to fly him and his sidekick around Europe. He justified this by making out that his time was valuable and it was critical for him to be able to get to customers' facilities at the drop of a hat, something he claimed wasn't possible with scheduled airlines. I glimpsed an invoice from the private jet company once - for £25,000 - before the book keeper hurriedly squirelled it away! Of course, he used to take his partner with him on these jollies sometimes, which just might happen to take in a stopover in Venice, for instance.
'OK, so what?', you might say - 'It's his company'. But for a business with a relatively small turnover, the use of private jets can hardly be justified, can it? And here's the killer: this man also told me, when I asked why the company didn't make contributions to employees' pensions or give them any other in-service benefits, that his accountants had told him it "wasn't cost effective." There were people working loyally at this company who had been there many years, putting up with the personal whims, foibles and outright unpredictability of this man, who had absolutely nothing to look forward to in terms of pension rights. Oh yes, and he also had full private healthcare insurance for himself and his sidekick and co-owner - the operations director and apparently a former car dealer - who really should not have been in a role 'managing' people. The only other person to benefit from this arrangement was the long-serving but part-time employee who set up the healthcare policies in the first place!
To cap it all, the owner was a keen collector of art for investment and although I never saw any of his pictures, he was quite happy for them to be delivered to the company's premises under the noses of his staff, so that he could take them home in his AMG Mercedes. You'll like this: he drove everywhere like a madman in that souped-up Merc, by all accounts, often checking his email with his laptop perched on the passenger seat as he did so. Allegedly he had only managed to hang on to his driving licence by ensuring all his extra speeding points got added onto the licence of his elderly, non-driving mother, by claiming she was driving his car, not him!
Working at this company could at times be a bizarre experience - well, most of the time, actually. He had two school-age daughters by his first marriage and boy did he spoil them rotten - to the extent of taking staff off their proper duties to indulge the little darlings' whims. The IT manager and a creative bod had to spend many hours preparing a music video for the eldest daughter, as daddy had bought her some recording studio time to make a single, X-Factor style.
Talking of IT and being somewhat more PC literate than most, I was trawling through the bits and pieces installed on my company laptop one day, when I found a rather sinister-looking bit of software running almost invisibly in the background. A quick bit of Googling revealed it to be something called Net Monitor for Employees. The developer's website disclosed that the program allows 'someone' to visit any computer on a network without the user being aware, and see what they are doing and what's on their screen!
I was pretty sure that this was completely illegal in the UK without the user at least being aware that the program was present and that monitoring was included in the company's IT policy (which this company didn't have), but even then I had a feeling that it might contravene users' Human Rights. Net Monitor for Employees proved to be dug in like a tick, but I managed to find a bit of software on the internet that removed it. The MD sat in the same office as everyone else, but liked the desks arranged so he could see almost everyone's monitors. I re-arranged mine so he couldn't see it from his desk, but since he was always leaping up and striding around the room firing off random questions and (often self-contradictory and demonstrably pointless) orders, it didn't help much!
Without a word of explanation, one day I got an email out of the blue from the MD's partner who, not even bothering to introduce herself (we had never met), asked me to sort out the copy for a brochure she wanted produced for her own business, which was some kind of health and beauty 'spa'. It made a change from writing about cleaning heat exchangers in oil refineries, so I didn't mind, but I never got thanked for it.
You can probably see why I got to the point, in less than a year, when I felt I needed to get out of this weird company asap, so after a particularly bad day I resigned. Fortunately they let me go the next day, although they disabled my network logon before I even knew that was going to happen. I had to threaten to take the company to an industrial tribunal to get my last month's salary, however. I was almost sorry the owners settled before the tribunal - I would have loved to have had the opportunity to expose the two wide boys who ran the business as their own personal piggy bank, while taking their staff so completely for granted.
The women who booked accommodation all over the country for the poor sods who did the (very) dirty work were under orders not to book anything costing more than £40 per head per night, which meant the lads ended up staying in some real dives on a regular basis. It also meant they might be billeted some distance from where they were working, too, so had to get up extra-early to be on site on time. This could be particularly tough when they might have been up to their necks in filth until midnight the previous day and got back to their digs too late for supper. They were poorly paid to boot and basically treated as expendably as any cannon-fodder. The clients were billed at the rate of £80 per night, however, with something like another 15% on top for a 'profit' margin. I was told that some of the clients knew this was going on but reluctantly accepted it as a cost of doing business with a company that at least knew how to fix their problems, which were often severe, resulting in downtime that could be costing millions of dollars a day in lost production.
As I write this, in the run-up to the UK's General Election on May 6th 2010, I am also reminded of an article in the Sunday Times last weekend, which was suggesting that that the electorate is getting concerned about how increasingly out of touch with their workforces the ultra-highly paid bosses of some leading companies have become. Well, in my experience, the same applies to the bosses of some quite small companies, too.
Reading the story about the boss of Abercrombie & Fitch, who has been paid $4 million not to use the company's private jet quite so much, reminds me of the owner of the last company I worked for before jumping ship, with great relief, back into self-employment.
This company, which cleaned the dirty bits of industrial plant and took on other tough jobs that often defeated the competition, was owned and run by a volatile, eccentric, somewhat paranoid and deeply selfish man with a spectacularly inflated sense of his own importance and intelligence.
Despite the fact that the company only had a £1.5 million turnover, the MD/owner thought nothing of chartering private jets, normally the preserve of large multi-national corporations and pop and film stars, to fly him and his sidekick around Europe. He justified this by making out that his time was valuable and it was critical for him to be able to get to customers' facilities at the drop of a hat, something he claimed wasn't possible with scheduled airlines. I glimpsed an invoice from the private jet company once - for £25,000 - before the book keeper hurriedly squirelled it away! Of course, he used to take his partner with him on these jollies sometimes, which just might happen to take in a stopover in Venice, for instance.
'OK, so what?', you might say - 'It's his company'. But for a business with a relatively small turnover, the use of private jets can hardly be justified, can it? And here's the killer: this man also told me, when I asked why the company didn't make contributions to employees' pensions or give them any other in-service benefits, that his accountants had told him it "wasn't cost effective." There were people working loyally at this company who had been there many years, putting up with the personal whims, foibles and outright unpredictability of this man, who had absolutely nothing to look forward to in terms of pension rights. Oh yes, and he also had full private healthcare insurance for himself and his sidekick and co-owner - the operations director and apparently a former car dealer - who really should not have been in a role 'managing' people. The only other person to benefit from this arrangement was the long-serving but part-time employee who set up the healthcare policies in the first place!
To cap it all, the owner was a keen collector of art for investment and although I never saw any of his pictures, he was quite happy for them to be delivered to the company's premises under the noses of his staff, so that he could take them home in his AMG Mercedes. You'll like this: he drove everywhere like a madman in that souped-up Merc, by all accounts, often checking his email with his laptop perched on the passenger seat as he did so. Allegedly he had only managed to hang on to his driving licence by ensuring all his extra speeding points got added onto the licence of his elderly, non-driving mother, by claiming she was driving his car, not him!
Working at this company could at times be a bizarre experience - well, most of the time, actually. He had two school-age daughters by his first marriage and boy did he spoil them rotten - to the extent of taking staff off their proper duties to indulge the little darlings' whims. The IT manager and a creative bod had to spend many hours preparing a music video for the eldest daughter, as daddy had bought her some recording studio time to make a single, X-Factor style.
Talking of IT and being somewhat more PC literate than most, I was trawling through the bits and pieces installed on my company laptop one day, when I found a rather sinister-looking bit of software running almost invisibly in the background. A quick bit of Googling revealed it to be something called Net Monitor for Employees. The developer's website disclosed that the program allows 'someone' to visit any computer on a network without the user being aware, and see what they are doing and what's on their screen!
I was pretty sure that this was completely illegal in the UK without the user at least being aware that the program was present and that monitoring was included in the company's IT policy (which this company didn't have), but even then I had a feeling that it might contravene users' Human Rights. Net Monitor for Employees proved to be dug in like a tick, but I managed to find a bit of software on the internet that removed it. The MD sat in the same office as everyone else, but liked the desks arranged so he could see almost everyone's monitors. I re-arranged mine so he couldn't see it from his desk, but since he was always leaping up and striding around the room firing off random questions and (often self-contradictory and demonstrably pointless) orders, it didn't help much!
Without a word of explanation, one day I got an email out of the blue from the MD's partner who, not even bothering to introduce herself (we had never met), asked me to sort out the copy for a brochure she wanted produced for her own business, which was some kind of health and beauty 'spa'. It made a change from writing about cleaning heat exchangers in oil refineries, so I didn't mind, but I never got thanked for it.
You can probably see why I got to the point, in less than a year, when I felt I needed to get out of this weird company asap, so after a particularly bad day I resigned. Fortunately they let me go the next day, although they disabled my network logon before I even knew that was going to happen. I had to threaten to take the company to an industrial tribunal to get my last month's salary, however. I was almost sorry the owners settled before the tribunal - I would have loved to have had the opportunity to expose the two wide boys who ran the business as their own personal piggy bank, while taking their staff so completely for granted.
The women who booked accommodation all over the country for the poor sods who did the (very) dirty work were under orders not to book anything costing more than £40 per head per night, which meant the lads ended up staying in some real dives on a regular basis. It also meant they might be billeted some distance from where they were working, too, so had to get up extra-early to be on site on time. This could be particularly tough when they might have been up to their necks in filth until midnight the previous day and got back to their digs too late for supper. They were poorly paid to boot and basically treated as expendably as any cannon-fodder. The clients were billed at the rate of £80 per night, however, with something like another 15% on top for a 'profit' margin. I was told that some of the clients knew this was going on but reluctantly accepted it as a cost of doing business with a company that at least knew how to fix their problems, which were often severe, resulting in downtime that could be costing millions of dollars a day in lost production.
As I write this, in the run-up to the UK's General Election on May 6th 2010, I am also reminded of an article in the Sunday Times last weekend, which was suggesting that that the electorate is getting concerned about how increasingly out of touch with their workforces the ultra-highly paid bosses of some leading companies have become. Well, in my experience, the same applies to the bosses of some quite small companies, too.
Labels: abercrombie and fitch, company bosses, executive jet, net monitor for employees, private jet
