So I work in healthcare, paid by the hour, and last week my manager announces that the company we work for is rolling out a new “mastery program.” Basically there's a new checklist of things we have to do so that we don't get suspended. A bunch of it is standard stuff like updates to the yearly trainings and goals for shift meetings. While I'm not too happy that this new roll out means we have to go through a bunch of tedious checklists again, the real problem is this book. It's a self help book, I won't mention which one for anonymity sake, but suffice to say it's full length and on a topic that's only debatably related to our day-to-day work. The company literally went and bought a copy of this book for each shift and expects us to all to pass around this book and read it.
The real kicker is that even though they didn't say so explicitly, they've been hinting, not so subtly mind you, that they expect us to read this on our off time. If you work in health care you know that sometimes you get down time when you're on shift, and sometimes you're busy 24/7. For me, most often it's the latter. If we were all to read it on shift only, it would take us literal years to get through everyone. My manager has asked people “who wants to take it home first?” and when no one volunteered she ended up taking it home herself. For context, my manager is so head over heels for this company that they can literally do no wrong in her book. It's been about three weeks since the new roll out. I saw her reading it today and she's only about a quarter done. I asked her how it was going, and even she admitted that “the format wasn't her favorite.” Yeah.
The thing is, almost all of my co-workers are happy to act like little puppy dogs following around the boss man and doing whatever is requested of them. I have seen people stay at work off the clock after their shifts to help because we're understaffed. I seem to be the only one who thinks that reading an entire self help book in your off time is a stupid expectation of an hourly employee. I fully intend on not reading the book unless I'm on shift and also not attending to patients, but I expect my manager, and everyone else, to be rather unpleased with me if I say anything. I was recently promoted, and I love the work itself, so I don't want to “mess this up” for lack of a better word, but I'm really at a loss here.