RadioShack – “Telecom distributor failing to learn from having it's stock dumped.”

Pros

Those seeking to transition from a service industry to a corporate or office setting might find it useful as RadioShack's work environment is a bastardization of these categories - it includes typical vendor and retailer services mixed with enough corporate paperwork and faux professionalism in minor categories like attire to help one steel oneself for work in the most acerbic office environments.

Cons

The crippling illusion of schedule flexibility (looks good at first, until you ask for a schedule change), inefficient response to worker feedback, and disappointing at best supply management will be in constant struggle with the preposterous amount of regulatory and tracking paperwork for your attention. As you wonder why a technology company is having such difficulty automating these unnecessary obstacles to accomplishing daily goals (let alone hourly ones - they have seldom met hourly performance targets, ridiculous as it sounds), someone will come by and inform you that the whole of your workspace must begin on another weekly reorganization, right down to the placement of walls, and that pinstripes do not reflect professional dress standards. Asking why you must look like a cheaply dressed interview candidate for an exceptionally boring job from the nineteen fifties sans fedora hat will get you about as far as asking why your time at work need be evenly split between what you read in the job description and what upper management weakly explained to the shareholders as a new performance-tracking standard that would require no major reorganization of resources (they make you do it all by hand).

Oh. And here, as nowhere else, the mission statement of 'demystifying technology in every neighborhood in America' will ring hollow - the training materials are far from sufficient to explain technology to the inexperienced new hires, let alone the customer; the IT staff have failed to make support systems and proprietary software that shows a grasp of said technology, and the security systems are a laughable failure that is passed on to the employee.

This company needs fast, revolutionary, foundation-shaking, and lasting change. Either that, or it's stock dumped yet again. And don't bother reminding management of this - they already know, especially the ones working in the same building as you. It's why they quit left and right - nowhere else have I gone through four management changes at the local and state level in three months at my workplace; nowhere else has there been a district turnover count among what we might term as 'leadership staff' reminiscent of sand in a sieve.

Advice to Senior Management

Going from the top down, RadioShack has typical problems of American companies - its CEO is extraordinarily out of touch with its breadwinners, and introduces himself to them in a series of pieces of paperwork and videos which communicate two things - he got lucky at another firm, and he is importing his lucky break managerial strategy wholesale into a fundamentally different business and changing minor portions of it to suit what he seems to see as skin-deep differences. That has to go. Even if it is only a perception, it needs to be made to leave the building in a way that does not further worsen the perception of upper management.

Going a bit down the line...regional managers - or at least the one responsible for the New Mexico state region among others, need to start respecting what works at least as much as what's written in the book. Telling someone who has succeeded for twenty years that their methods aren't approved of and must be immediately shelved - and then citing no reason for such changes - is a great way to emulate the Kamikaze airmen of the second world war, but it is not a decent way to build grass roots confidence. Being rude to the party afterwards, in public view of others, because they were temeritous enough to ask questions further compounds this problem; it should be a firing offense.

District managers need to stop respecting lofty concepts of business standards and start respecting people. The set of district managers I have encountered certainly covered the requirements for the illusion of respecting others, and were eager to remind you of this fact, but they certainly weren't very adept at snapping to the idea that not everyone is driven by similar things. Their managerial strategy is, it seems, to drive productivity by some mess of Pavlovian feedback rewarding specific employee actions, which is hard to defend (this is a bit like explaining to your shareholders that low-tier employees are in essence slavering beasts and should be treated as such because you can't hire anyone better). Putting in place a system that creates a 'path of least resistance' to guide the worker through everything the company desires of him or her and making any other behavior lead to drudgery and frustration is in essence a strategy of making existence at work undesirable unless it centers on constant success at reaching company ideals, which is an intentional contradiction in terms on the reviewer's part. This leads to worker burnout, poor performance, and the forced reliance on miserable dependencies on statistics to show success, which begs the question of why it is that European telecom retailers, for example, are doing better in a far more stringently regulated environment - so much so that they have far less need of monthly district-wide conferences and daily report to drive home the point of how much better they're doing EVERY DAY to their own employees.

Individual store managers and 'lower' management personnel merely need to stand up as a unit and demand adherence to at least the written company policies of their bosses as well as their underlings.