Dear CVS-
So you thought you needed a culture change? Good for you for having such self-awareness. So you thought the best way was to hire Senn Delaney at a cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to cheerlead and do their corporate motivation bullshit? So much for your self-awareness.
To put it bluntly, fuck you and fuck Senn Delaney and all their fucking "accountability ladders," and their fucking "mood elevators," and their motivational-poster-style catch phrases ("Be Here Now"?). You want to elevate my mood? How about giving your employees a raise that's not an insult. I just got my annual report in the mail. CVS Caremark had an increase in sales of nearly $12 billion last year compared to 2010. According to The Motley Fool investing website CVS is in prime position to take over RiteAid due to CVS having $700 million in free cash. Then you're going to tell me you can only afford a 1% raise? You've already raised expectations for your retail-level managers so high that there's no way they're going to bonus, so you're saving millions in that area too.
Want to elevate my mood? How about properly staffing your stores so we actually have time- between calling customers to tell them their meds are ready to calling customers if they'd like us to have their meds ready, to calling to see if they'd like us to get their doctors to refill those meds that they haven't refilled in 6 months to having to beg customers to "give us all 5s" on your bullshit Triple S surveys- to actually do patient care. We spend more time doing sales building in the guise of patient care that we do actually giving patient care. If you're going to insist that we pester these people relentlessly to refill their scripts you could at least give us the man-hours to make the fucking phone calls. And while you're at it how about putting pharmacy managers in place who actually know how to manage. Simply having a brand new pharmacist's license and the inability to say "no" to the district manager does not qualify someone to run a fucking pharmacy!
The whole problem with this current approach to corporate culture change is that culture change has to start from the top down, not from the bottom up. It's a bit like a psychiatrist treating a severely mentally ill patient by making sure his shoes are shined. Once again the powers that be in the Ivory Tower are going to put even more responsibility on the stores to improve on things over which the stores have little control (anyone seen the new Stores Own Sales?) and then getting all the managers to buy in by bringing on the Senn Delaneys of the world to "empower" them. It's a bunch of bullshit rah-rah that is intended to convince weak-minded managers that they are all able to impact their metrics.
So spare me the shit about how the stores are the ones who control everything, and if we fail it's because we weren't good enough. If the culture isn't going to change at upper corporate level then all the fancy little plaques with all the little catch phrases aren't going to mean shit. The company has more money than ever before, and the stores are getting shit upon more than ever. Wonder what Senn Delaney has to say about that.
