Consequences

EvilHRLady has a great follow up post to comments on 8 hours &lunch and HR Capitalist about overly family friendly workplaces.

She touches on one of my favorite topics---Choices and consequences. Every choice has some sort of consequence even if it is simply the "loss" of the road not taken. (Opportunity cost in economic jargon?)

Every day I say to the young offspring. "You are making your choice right now!"

They are beginning to get it---they choose to keep doing what they are doing at the moment (tormenting a sibling, jumping on the bed) and they will suffer the consequences. (cue evil laughter) It is usually enough to deter them.

Now I only wish that I could imbue the same conditioning in some decision makers who decide that simply choosing to change a policy or process in a vacuum can have some interesting consequences on an existing system.

"Ive decided to change the sick policy, we are changing the policy from an hours per hour accrual to an accrual that will accrue based on the lunar cycle and display in roman numerals!"

"You realize that it will take a wee bit of customization to do that, and since you chose to outsource all your system hosting and development it will probably take a few months to implement, test and put into production. Not to mention it will cost about 100K."

"Well, we've already published the policy"

"Good luck with that"

I wonder if a wooden spoon would work for them too?

Here's a bad choice in progress---I suppose overconfidence can lead to all sorts of interesting consequences.