Necessary Roughness

If you are fortunate enough to be able to show how your work directly increases revenue to the company, you are a direct expense. Accountants and economists like direct expenses, because they’re scalable and show an immediate return on investment.

If you don’t have that fortune, then you’re an indirect expense. You might be a payroll clerk, an instructor, a janitor, a scheduler, an executive, et cetera. If you get into that situation where something you did saves the company a fistful of dollars or causes the company to gain work, it’s a real treat.

It is usually difficult to document the return on investment for indirect expenses. Managers know they need them, but they can’t predictably scale their indirect employees depending on how much revenue they want to pull in. They are a lagging economic indicator, reacting to demand from what is going on.

Unfortunately for a large company, many indirect employees are insulated from knowledge about their positive and negative contributions to the bottom line. They don’t see the point of their labor. I think managers can see the resulting attitude pretty easily, but they may misdiagnose the cause. Instead of giving personnel tools to maximize their profitability, they insist on pieces of flair or in our case, a corporate campaign.

The first part of this campaign consisted of an email with an interactive animation. The user could click on a Sharpie, a can of spray paint, or a megaphone. Each started an animation that told the user something was coming, and we were to stay tuned. We weren’t actually told what was coming.

This motivation so far is actually a downer, given that our department recently let go seven talented individuals in April. I don’t know how much this campaign costs, but we went through a rebranding campaign several years ago where consultants got a nice chuck of change. Maybe we could have kept some assets on the payroll.

Real morale is boosted by good results. When KBR was part of Halliburton, they entered into a contract to provide logistics to 15,000 people, and they ended up serving 153,000. Knowing that the software I teach reduces Days Sales Outstanding, and each DSO is millions of dollars for North America, is a good thing. Camps reporting millions in revenue for the previous quarter is an excellent thing. Indirects knowing how they contribute to the bottom line and how that bottom line rewards them is the best thing one can do for morale.