Adventures in Supervision

One of the questions we can discuss endlessly – but never actually solve – is the issue of how closely employees should be supervised while on the job, and whether the resulting layers of management are really worth the cost. On the one hand, span of control research is reasonably conclusive that the largest number of subordinates (or subordinate units, when you get to higher levels) any given manager can handle is 5. Or, at least, it’s as conclusive as you can get in a soft science. On the other hand, there’s good evidence that over-supervision, or micro-management, is just as harmful to the company’s successful operations as too little. Personally, I believe that a universal rule isn’t possible, and that the exact amount and degree of supervision will vary enough from one team to another, or even one shift to another, that the only reasonable approach is to hire good managers, train them well, and let them decide case-by-case from then on. But however you do it, there’s a wealth of evidence that supports the contention that someone needs to be watching…

Take, for example, a story that popped up on the DetroitFree Press website this week, about a Muslim customer who is claiming that servers at a TGI Friday’s in Garland, Texas, tricked her into eating bacon. The story goes that the customer requested the bacon be left off of a Cobb salad, and this for some reason offended the wait staff. So one of them decided to stuff a plastic drinking straw full of bacon and serve it to this customer in a glass of tea. When presented with this lapse in judgment, the restaurant’s manager refused to believe the customer, which could only have made matters worse. The company is declining to comment, pending an internal investigation, while the story goes viral and millions of scruffy bloggers repeat it around the world, embellishing just a bit in each telling…

Neither of us were present when these events took place – unless someone who works in that TGIF location is reading this post, in which case please leave me your perspective on the story in the comments. Based on what I’ve heard so far, however, there are only two possibilities in this case: either the customer is telling the truth, or she is not. If not, we should probably ask the obvious questions of how she managed to obtain one of the company’s drinking straws, fill it with bacon, and smuggle it into the restaurant undetected – and what she expects to gain by doing so. Feeding pork to a Muslim is a vicious cultural insult, but no actual physical harm seems to have come to the customer as a result of this “prank,” and I’m dubious about her chances of suing successfully over this, especially in Texas. On the other hand, if she’s telling the truth we have to ask why the TGIF employees thought they would get away with such an insult, or if they are really stupid enough to risk their jobs and a possible lawsuit over a minor practical joke. In either case, however, we need to ask where the line supervisors were when all of this was going on…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that it would be desirable to observe every member of a busy restaurant’s serving team every minute of every shift, even if that was possible. But a properly-trained, properly-managed employee would know better than to do any such thing, and much more to the point, any good employee would not want to risk damaging his or her own company for a joke. If TGI Friday’s is employing wait staff who are so poorly trained, limited in experience, devoid of people skills, or hostile to the company and desirous of its destruction that they would actually do something like this, both their Human Resources personnel and whoever was supposed to be supervising the staff at this particular store need to be reprimanded, and quite possibly moved to less sensitive duties. And if the manager and/or supervisors of this location are too over-worked or too oblivious to look out for scammers (at least those dedicated enough to bother stuffing drinking straws with bacon) then the company needs to send them more help, as soon as possible…

Because unless the person or persons responsible are identified and dealt with appropriately, I can almost guarantee that the company will have to deal with similar human resources failures and/or scams just like this one again in the very near future…