The Fix is In

When it comes to making your employees feel valued and motivated, an Employee of the Month award is right up there with pizza parties and a shout-out amongst the three things management is willing to do. Winning Employee of the Month (or EoM) is a great way to honor the person who stood out from the pack or went above and beyond for the company. One department store manager, however, may have found a way to tilt the scales in his department’s favor.

John Hewitt is the manager of Kitchenware at Febler’s, a department store located near Scottsdale, AZ. Over the past year, Hewitt has become concerned that the EoM award hasn’t been going to the right people. To put it more accurately, it’s that the award wasn’t going to his people.

“Kitchenware was getting shafted while Home Decor was dominating,” says Hewitt. “It was like every month, someone in Home Decor got it. Or Bedding. Sometimes Youth Clothing or Footwear. And one month that girl from Cashlanes who stopped a robbery that one time. But never Kitchenware!”

Word around the store is that Kitchenware is “a hot mess”, “mismanaged”, or “has never once made its sales goal since John Hewitt was promoted to manager”. Hewitt, however, has another theory.

“It’s rigged!” he tells us. “The whole system, rigged! The committee has their favorites and if you aren’t part of their clique, you don’t have a chance.”

Ginger Ames, Febler’s human resources representative, explains the store’s Employee of the Month procedure.

“All employees are encouraged to nominate one person each month via SharePoint,” says Ames. “Those names are put into a spreadsheet and ranked by how many nominations each employee receives. Nominations from managers or supervisors count for double. After everything is tallied, the Employee Engagement Committee, overseen by myself and consisting of managers and supervisors from throughout the store, look at the results and award a winner accordingly. Of course, the top nominee doesn’t necessarily win, that is always up for debate at the meeting. It’s a good system and it works fine. That is, it did before Mr. Hewitt ratfucked the hell out of it.”

“Did she say I ratfucked it?” asks Hewitt. “I bet she said I ratfucked it. I was just playing her game, she just didn’t like that I played by different rules.”

“The long and short of it,” says Ames, “is that a Kitchenwares employee has won EoM every month since John Hewitt got involved in the process.”

But how exactly does one ratfucking manager stack the proverbial deck in his department’s favor?

“The first thing he did was promote his entire team to shift supervisor,” tells Ames. “I didn’t see an issue with it as it was only a title promotion, no raises, just extra responsibility. In hindsight, I guess it wouldn’t make sense that everybody be a supervisor because, you know, who would they be supervising? But he said he was trying to motivate his staff and I took him at his word. I didn't even think that it meant their nominations would now carry more weight.

“On top of that,” adds Ames, “he began restructuring his department, but that kind of thing is out of my wheelhouse.”

For information on this restructuring, we spoke to Shannon Tovey, a store planographer in whose wheelhouse this certainly was.

“Okay, first of all,” says Tovey, “the job title is Layout and Communications. Secondly, we didn’t know what Hewitt was up to when he asked us to restructure his department. Basically, he wanted Dining Rooms to no longer be a part of Kitchenware, saying it should be part of Living Rooms. Also, for some reason, he felt Rugs and Carpets, formally under the purview of the Living Rooms manager, should be folded into Kitchenware.”

After a hard-fought battle, we’re told that Hewitt got what he wanted as the higher-ups felt the changes were arbitrary. It wasn’t until later that Hewitt’s motivation would be clear. And even then the higher-ups still didn't care.

“As it turns out,” says Tovey, “he had an issue with Rachel, a sales supervisor in Dining Rooms. Apparently, she’s a firm believer in treating employees equitably and therefore would always push for her team to nominate people for Employee of the Month who actually deserved it and not based on departmental loyalties. The Rugs and Carpet guys agreed to play ball though, as the award tended to go to the hard sales people and not the heavy lifters.”

So Hewitt had himself a strange hodgepodge of a department, but one that would suit his needs.

“Yeah, it was all about separating Rachel and her direct reports from his own,” adds Ames, “and since the Living Rooms manager won’t give out meaningless promotions, their team’s votes now count for less than Hewitt’s. So by restructuring along Rachel lines, he effectively made Living Rooms nominations null and void.”

With his area’s sales departments now Rachelly divided, Hewitt only had one obstacle left to tackle: The Employee Engagement Board, who verified the EoM winner.

“Everything before this was just to get our people’s names on the ballot,” says Hewitt, “but it’s the board who ultimately decides. I already had one supervisor on the board and from the restructure we inherited Derek from Rugs who was already in on there, but we still didn’t have a majority.”

As it turns out, gaining a majority on the Employee Engagement Board was as simple as offering up a few scrumptious backdoor deals.

“Javier at Returns was an easy sell,” says Hewitt. “He offered to vote along with us for just a nomination and win once a year for a Returns employee of his choosing since they've historically been overlooked at EoM. Gretchen from Stock Flow agreed to vote with us for a 10% reduction in our department’s stock space assignments, which is honestly less work for everyone so win-win.”

These deals gave the Kitchenware bloc four guaranteed votes, with five needed for a simple majority.

“That last vote was a hard nut to crack,” says Hewitt. “But I looked into everyone on the board. Rachel was always a no-go, obviously, and Stephen from Home Decor had everything to lose by voting with us. So that just left Sheryl from Cashlanes….”

While Hewitt refuses to say what he did to sway Sheryl’s vote, a quick survey of sales to employees shows that Sheryl, who is in the process of upgrading her kitchen, has bought a big-ticket item from Hewitt’s department once a month since Hewitt's scheme began and each item purchased had been recently marked down by Hewitt himself. Regardless if that’s actually why Sheryl joined Hewitt’s voting bloc (we’re being unsure for legal reasons), Hewitt now had an unbeatable majority and the ability to handpick Febler’s employee of the month as he saw fit.

But why did he do it? What was the motivation?

“Oh, you get plenty of perks for winning EoM,” says Ames of Human Resources. “Hewitt probably did it for the prestige and bragging rights, but the employee also gets their picture up by the time clock and a special gold name tag to wear. Also, a free lunch in the staff cafeteria as well as a special, exclusive parking space right by the door that you get to use all month long!”

“You also get a hundred bucks,” says Rugs and Carpets employee Patrick Hofmann, who has recently won the award. “It’s mainly about getting the hundred bucks for us.”

Well, whatever the reason, Kitchenware now has an iron grip on the title of Employee of the Month and, with a majority vote from The Employee Engagement Committee needed to reconfigure the system, it looks to be staying that way.

Update:

About a month after these interviews were conducted, we were contacted by Ginger Ames, Febler’s Human Resources representative, to inform us that there has indeed been changes to the Employee of the Month process. We were surprised by these revelations and decided to return to Febler’s department store to find out what had happened.

“Basically,” says Ames, “Patrick from Rugs and Carpets, refused to acknowledge that he was no longer EoM when his month was up. He had somehow convinced the teams in Kitchenware and Rugs as well as some others from around the store that him being Employee of the Month was in their best interest, and got them all to storm the committee meeting to stop them from verifying the next month’s winner.”

“Yo, that parking spot is cherry!” says previous EoM Patrick Hofmann. “Do you have any idea what it’s like walking through this parking lot during the weekend? This plaza’s got like three Applebees and one of those goddamn places you bring your kids to jump on trampolines and shit. And don’t even get me started on the lines at the trendy, little bakery and the make-your-own-pizza place!”

Because of Hofmann’s attempt to overthrow the EoM verification process and possibly his penchant for calling all chain restaurants “Applebees”, the Employee Engagement Board decided in a 7-2 vote to change the process in order to keep something like this from ever happening again, with only the delegates from Kitchenware and Rugs dissenting.

Ames and store management hope that the new system will be fairer and free from potential tampering.

“Oh, we’re done with all that ratfucking,” says Ames [Editor’s note: Oh my god, I totally forgot she called it that!]. “No, now we just put all the nominee’s names in this flowerpot and pick one at random. If we have to make up accolades later, so be it, it is what it is.”

As for John Hewitt, he’s still an outspoken advocate of what he describes as “keeping Employee of the Month honest”.

“It’s so obviously rigged now,” says Hewitt. “That flowerpot thing? What department did you think that flowerpot came from? That’s right, Home Decor! Don’t think for a second I don’t see what their game is. Now, if I can get them to change the flowerpot to one of the mixing bowls from my department…”

Well, no matter if they’re pulling names from a flowerpot, mixing bowl, or Ginger Ames’s sweaty ball cap, we can confidently say that John Hewitt’s days of fixing the Employee of the Month vote is over. Unless he decides to try to fix the process again, which he most certainly will. But that’ll be fine as long as the higher-ups are willing to step in and stop it, which they probably won’t.

We had to ask though, after everything that happened, why Hewitt thought it was a good idea to fix the EoM in his department's favor instead of trying to win the prize fairly?

“Because,” says Hewitt, “if the system was fair we'd never win.”