Micromanaging Boss Left 'Seething' After Installing Cameras & Hearing Employees' Opinions Of Him
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, as the saying goes!
voronaman | Shutterstock There's perhaps no better way to start off on the wrong foot with your employees than coming in as a new boss and immediately going down a micromanaging rabbit hole. But one such boss seems to have gotten more than he bargained for when he started surveilling his employees 24/7.
The boss is 'seething' after hearing his employees' true opinions of him from cameras he installed.
One of the boss's employees posted on Reddit about this very silly situation. He works for a parking garage, one of a series owned by a very wealthy family in his city, the patriarch of which just passed the company on to his sons.
One of those sons is now the Redditor's new boss, and he described him as a man who has lots of good ideas but… well, frankly, terrible business skills, only worsened by the fact that he enjoys A LOT of "herbal refreshments" on the job, if you will.
The new boss decided to install hidden cameras to micromanage his employees.
One of the new boss's "good ideas" was to install a new entry and exit system for the garage that streamlines the payment experience. The system includes cameras that run 24 hours a day, monitoring his employees.
So, he decided to install cameras in the office as well, which is where things started going awry. After blanketing the break room in cameras, he started complaining about minutiae like where the office air fryer is placed, why the office supply area is so messy, and other "really dumb self-inflicted, self-generated problems that he arbitrarily comes up with," in the Redditor's words.
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On top of that, the new system out in the garage basically replaces all the employees, and given the state of the current economy, it's hard for the workers not to notice that this threatens their livelihoods. That makes the micromanagement of it all even more infuriating.
The cameras have picked up the workers complaining about their boss, and he's furious.
The worker stressed that his new boss isn't a bad person; he's just kind of… well ... dumb, and makes really bad decisions that not only make his workers' jobs harder but have also become very costly to the company as a whole.
So, understandably, his employees have a lot to say about him, as the boss found out the hard way when his micromanagement instincts got the best of him and he started reviewing the footage from the cameras — and got quite an earful.
"We've just been blasting him nonstop over his stupid decisions when talking to each other, because he's become the main source of our stress," the worker wrote. "He's very pissed that we keep talking about him honestly." Oops!
Surveillance of workers is increasing, and most experts say it backfires every time.
Who'd have thought that blanketing the workplace with cameras to spy on your employees would have blowback, other than anyone who's ever worked a job in their lives, of course! But experts say it almost always blows up in employers' faces in one way or another.
According to IT management firm Gartner, surveillance of employees has more than doubled since the pandemic, including everything from software that monitors workers' computer keystrokes to ubiquitous cameras like this Redditor's workplace and everywhere in between.
And workers are definitely feeling all those eyes boring into them — and they don't like it. One survey of tech workers found that more than half would rather quit than be kept tabs on. Analyses have also found that micromanaging workers this way actually lowers productivity, in part because it ticks off employees so much.
In this Redditor's case, his boss's bumbling into this situation has at least kept his job unexpectedly secure: The customer service system that the cameras are part of is so bad that it REQUIRES on-site staff to manage all the ways it messes up. So, bad economy or no, his job is safe. Even terrible bosses are not without their silver linings!
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
