Friday, February 24, 2012

More Nausea - Special High Intensity Training edition.

This little nugget of nausea appeared in faculty inboxes the other day.

From: Human Resources: Where "people"'s just another word for something we can use.
Subject: Upcoming workshop - Creating Customer Experience

Everyone working at the University of Tuktoyaktuk is a representative of the university and helps to promote Tuk U.  Every interaction reflects on both the individual and the values of Tuk U.  In this way, we can "make or break" a customer's experience.  Help ensure your influence on others makes a positive difference by attending this day of exploration and action planning.

In this program, you will learn:

-       The 5 steps to creating a positive client experience;
-       How to personalize the client experience;
-       Ways to customize the concepts for implementation in your department; and
-       Ways to energize your work to be more client-focused.

Instructor: Some Assistant Supervisory Staff, Helping Our Loyal Employees

Date : Coming soon
Register online: or we'll find you.

15 comments:

  1. I already don't like the client experience I get from HR, why would I apply their garbage to my students?

    ReplyDelete
  2. That looks like Gay Pride vomit coming out of a cartoonish Giacometti.

    Is CM becoming progressive and artsy?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Just the orange would have sufficed for vomit. Red, and this person has serious problems. Any other color, and this person may have worse problems.

      Delete
    2. Rainbow vomit; just another semi-famous internet meme:
      http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/puking-rainbows
      Evidently it's all the rage (comics) amongst the yoof.

      Delete
  3. If "people" is just another word for something you can use, don't count on having any loyal employees. See, this is what happens when students are allowed to graduate from college without ever learning to think. They spout platitudes infested with buzzwords, the notion never even occurring to them that students are neither "clients," nor "customers." If anyone in education is, they're either the parents who actually pay the bills, or the employers who consume our product, the students, and even then it's a loose analogy.

    ReplyDelete
  4. We've been getting exhortations to participate in "branding" our uni. Not quite as bad as this, but close, especially since, though the word "excellence" comes up often, especially in relation to teaching, we're clearly supposed to be operating in excellence without money mode.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh, Cassandra, sometimes I wonder if you and I are at the same institution. I think if we were, though, we'd end up burning the place to the ground and laughing while it burns...it burns.

      This "client-speak" is just another nail in the coffin. We're on an inexorable downward slide: unis went the way of the business model (cheap, interchangeable labor force, high-paid admins); anti-intellectualism is rampant in the political sector (which is where the money comes from, for public uni systems, anyway); the curriculum is slowly (or not-so-slowly) being dumbed down into insignificance because so many of the little darlings are underprepared for college but their parents don't want to pay for the non-credit classes they will need to get prepared...and so it goes.

      "The ship is sinking. The ship is sinking..."-Tom Waits

      Delete
    2. Ya, we had a branding exercise here at Tuk U a while back. "New Frontier of Achievement in Excellence" or something. I say branding is something they do to cows.

      Delete
    3. This email actually used the word "client" in the place of "student"?

      R and/or G, are we at the same university?

      Delete
  5. We've gotten some shit like this lately too. We have no money in the department for fucking xerox paper or pens, but the president's office has money for image management seminars and weekly full-color newsletters that no one reads. But just hit the delete key. What the fuck else can we do?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. On my campus, the faculty are organizing. This is separate from our union, which is concerned mainly with pay. Our university president and his wife have recently really become too blatantly corrupt, even for an institution that's been looking the other way for years, and far too much of it gets channeled into silly admin-games, at the expense of teaching.

      Delete
  6. My college offers customer service certification for all its employees. Although at least for now, my president says students aren't customers when they're in the classroom, he says they are everywhere else on campus, including the administrators' offices! I have become known as That Grumpy Proffie at administrative meetings because I refuse to use the words "clients" and "customers" when referring to students or my colleagues, I don't see myself as "an asset" to be "managed" by the system, and I openly ask why the word education appears nowhere in our oh-so-corporate mission statement, vision statement, and values statement.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Wait till all these clients graduate to become WalMart associates, ahem, I mean cough*greeters*cough.

    ReplyDelete

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