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The Silent Assassin - What to Do When They Visit You?

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Introduction

There are a group of people in the community that will some time in their career visit your business; the silent assassin.

The silent assassin displays all the qualities of a serial killer as they silently wreck havoc in your business through unrest, sabotage, bullying and non-productivity.

Modus Operandi

The silent assassin is a work of art! They stalk their victim/s purposely as they maintain an outward veneer of respectability towards management and those that have authority. They often undermine your business and wreck the careers of other employees through a vicious type of ‘office politics’ and ‘sabotage’?

They love trouble and strife and seeing other colleagues disadvantaged! The feed the ‘grapevine’ with rumour gossip that is in their interests. But you wouldn’t necessarily know of course. They wear great camouflage.

Detecting the Silent Assassin

Detecting the Silent Assassin is not easy! They often go undetected for many months with employees afraid to confront them or approach management about the behaviours of these people.

Surface respectability and a pleasant demeanour often accompany these people. It is estimated that the silent assassin has a tremendous impact on productivity where productivity can decline dramatically and morale plummets and you wake up one morning and wonder what is going on.

What do they do to my business?

The silent assassin is an expert in sabotaging other peoples career and the productivity of your business.

The come to work with the outward guise of working hard for you only to engage in activities that cost you time and money. It has been said that sabotage can be defined as coming to work with the express intent of working slowly, not working, appearing to work, placing impediments in others performing and producing and making a conscious choice to undermine your business and in the extreme to damaging your business deliberately and calculatedly.

How do I know who they are? You can do your business a favour by taking time out of your routine regularly and look at the stats,

• Have you a higher employee turnover than is normal for your industry

• Have you received requests from departments’ employees in particular for employees to be transferred to another department?

• Lack of team work and working together

• Increased friction

• Increased absenteeism

• Decreased productivity

• Decreased profits despite good sales

• Excessive customer complaints

• Increased ‘grapevine’ and rumour mill traffic

• People regularly resigning from their positions

• Low levels of trust

What do I do?

Trying to smooth the waters or placating these people will not work! You must take time to carefully investigate your business and see for yourself. You need to be thorough. Your people deserve an environment that is safe and wholesome to work in. You can

• Speak to workers and managers that have worked with the suspected person and get their opinions.

• Realise that many silent assassins work on the premise that their behaviours and conduct go unnoticed. This is their Achilles’ heel.

• Have other trusted employees keep and eye open on the person and pass on examples of inappropriate behaviour to you.

• Keep thorough documentation

How do I deal with the silent assassin?

A person who engages in assassination or sabotage has no place in your business.

You must confront the silent assassin with proof of their behaviours. Make sure you have everything well documented. Call a meeting and say to the perpetrator ‘Something is not right here and it is affecting our business. I need to get to the bottom of it and have some concerns about the negative behaviours and comments that you seem to be displaying'. Give some examples.

Give the silent assassin time to put their side of the story forwards. If they start to manifest by defensive behaviour or overtly rude, loud and threatening you know you are on the right track.

This is a sign to you that you are on the right path and that the likely outcome of the situation is performance management and moving the person on from your business. The day of the silent assassin in your business must end or you face potential ruin and legal penalties.

A person who has nothing to ‘worry’ about knows their behaviours and conduct can stand up to scrutiny.

Many productivity problems in the workplace often come down to a ‘fly in the ointment’ the silent assassin, the saboteur, the bully! Do your homework and confront. In one instance where we assisted the business owner, prior to our involvement the business owner faced ruin and having to close his business so irresolvable seemed the issues. The business owner now has a thriving business. We have assisted businesses in a number of these types of events and can attest to the trauma they bring to your business if left unchecked.

A call to Arms?

Sometime your business will be confronted by a situation that is complicated and has been progressively manifesting for some time. In this situation we recommend that you take advice and get professional human resource assistance. Your business and your employees are too important to ‘stuff it up’. Don’t allow your hard work to be bought to ruins, take control, take action and take advice! There are practical actionable strategies for you.

For more information see www.biz-momentum.com and feel free to email Philip with your question if he can help.

The final support date for Windows XP is just 840 days away and while that might seem like a long time, you and I both know that April 8, 2014 will come all too soon for some companies who are still reluctant to make the move.

If you’re still on Windows XP and are planning to rollout Windows 7, here are 10 questions you’ll want to ask yourself while planning out your deployment:

1. Do we need to invest in test hardware, personnel and infrastructure? Notice it doesn’t say IF testing should be done. That’s a given. But can you set up a lab – either physical or virtual – where the deployment process and end configuration can be tried out? Who will do the testing? How will it be done?
2. What hardware do we need to replace? Make sure you know the minimum requirements are for Windows 7 and which of your computers will need to be upgraded or replaced. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is a free tool that can help you collect detailed information on your current infrastructure for an analysis of your hardware and device compatibility and give recommendations.
3. Do we need to build and maintain a desktop image? If your organization tends to get a lot of new machines coming in or computers that get handed from one person to another and this is taking up a lot of IT cycles, you probably want to look at building a desktop image if you don’t already. A well built image can reduce your deployment time substantially and advancements in imaging technology mean that it’s no longer necessary to spend hours saving user data off an old computer, cloning the hard drive of a reference computer and then restoring the data you saved. Having only one image to maintain even if your organization uses diverse hardware is more of a reality than ever.
4. Are our corporate applications going to work? The Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) is a free download that can help you evaluate and mitigate application compatibility issues. Applications that can’t be upgraded may be able to be shimmed or run in Windows XP mode.
5. How will employees’ files be moved? Knowing where employees are storing their files is critically important. How many times have you heard: “I didn’t put that file in the System32 directory – the computer did it!”. Once you know where files actually are, a plan is needed to ensure that user files and user settings are migrated. Bob won’t care if the rollout is a complete resounding success if his desktop wallpaper isn’t as he left it!
6. Will Office 2010 or IE 9 be rolled out at the same time? Often this is the perfect time to make other adjustments and upgrades to the desktop infrastructure along with Windows 7. There is all sorts of information on deploying Microsoft Office 2010 and Internet Explorer 9 that can be used in the planning. If the Microsoft Desktop Toolkit (MDT) is being used for the deployment, Office 2010 can be added to the MDT environment.
7. Is this a good time to assess and update policies and security? As in #6, deployment projects present good opportunities to revisit and revise other areas of the desktop infrastructure. What policies are in place and what can be improved? Are there group policies that we could benefit from to better manage and streamline our desktop environment? Are there security enhancements that we can take advantage of?
8. How will remote users get updated? Instead of remote employees like the sales teams shipping their notebooks in to get upgraded and incurring downtime, consider swapping out old hardware for newly configured machines or sending them a bootable USB with the Windows 7 image on it to do the upgrade themselves.
9. What’s the impact going to be to users and the helpdesk? Will there be any planned downtime and how will this be communicated to users? As with any change, there will likely be a short term increase in calls to the helpdesk. Is the helpdesk appropriately staffed and equipped to handle questions? Using tools such as the Windows Troubleshooting Platform and the Problem Steps Recorder can help resolve issues quickly and diminish ongoing helpdesk calls.
10. What’s the ongoing maintenance of the desktop infrastructure going to look like? Taking control of the desktop environment is a huge step in streamlining staff productivity, improving processes and freeing up IT time to devote to developing new ways to use technology and IT know-how to business needs. Tools like those found in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) and practical guidance found in the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) can help.

I’ve included a lot of information in the above 10 questions and each one could be a separate article on it’s own. That’s why the conversation doesn’t end here.

On the next AlignIT Manager Tech Talk, Jonathan and I will be discussing how to de-risk your Windows 7 deployment with Dave Kawula, a Senior Consultant with 1E and a guy who has more knowledge of desktop deployments in his pinkie finger than most people have in their whole heads. Join us LIVE on Thursday, January 12 from 12-12:30pm ET for De-Risking Your Windows 7 Deployment.
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