

This week, Rick Arquilla, President and COO of Roto Rooter met several employees who later received fabulous cash and prizes. Just like any daytime talkshow host would. Later, the boss summons the employees to the corporate office, reveals he is the big cheese, and awards many of them fabulous cash and prizes to deal with their hardships. He inevitably discovers that several of them are facing quite a few obstacles and hardships in their personal lives. Go ahead, watch the latest episode here first if you want.ĭuring the show, the undercover boss spends a day with five different employees. Undercover Boss has good drama, but it's more the daytime talkshow variety than the business variety. If the formula yields predictable results, it better have good drama (see Law & Order). Generally, a formulaic approach yields predictable results. I regularly watch the CBS show, Undercover Boss, where top executives go 'undercover' in their own companies to find out what's really going on. How else could bank executives ask their employees to enforce unpopular fees in the name of profitability while giving themselves outsized bonuses? Why do we spend 10 minutes arguing with a frontline employee who says they are only following policy and then the supervisor overrides the policy to give us what we want immediately? He quickly realizes how these employees are put in impossible situations where they don't have the training or authority to provide appropriate solutions to customer problems. ( See my previous post about the show.) One episode featured the owner of a fulfillment company taking calls in a call center. In each episode, a senior executive goes 'undercover' to work frontline positions in his or her company. The CBS show Undercover Boss is another great illustration of this phenomenon. If you are a nerd like me, you can read the whole study here.) (Ok, that was a very superficial summary. The implication is it is easier to do something unfavorable to another person if we do it through an employee. On average, participants shared $1 less when using an intermediary than when they shared the money directly.
'employee') to share the money on their behalf. Next, they were asked to repeat the experiment, but this time they used an itermediary (i.e. They conducted an experiment where participants were given $10 and instructed to share as much as they'd like with another participant. Social scientists at Carnegie Mellon University discovered a possible explanation. Why are bosses and business owners so willing to put their employees in the line of fire rather than handling their own mess? This situation raises an interesting question.
Best undercover boss episodes update#
Our installer ran out of materials - twice. Worse, our installer had to share the bad news with us personally rather than the owner of the company (who was our salesperson) picking up the phone to apologize and give us the update herself. It looks beautiful and the workmanship is outstanding, but the job was not without adventure.


My wife, Sally, and I just had hardwood floors installed in our home, finally replacing carpeting that looked old and outdated when we moved in nine years ago.
