The past two summers I have worked for a camp in Northern California as a summer volunteer along with 149 other college students. Throughout the summer we perform various tasks such as working in the kitchen, managing ropes course, answering phones for guest inquiries, and much more. Most of the areas are led by one older crew member with other crew members working under them. In my two summers, I have listened to constant complaints by these area leads about their crew “employees” failing to show up to their work area or coming and perform at a level far below what they are capable of. This is an example of shirking which we have been discussing in our class. Shirking occurs when an agent isn’t doing to the best of their ability what they were hired to do. This article has an interesting quote by Fredrick Taylor about the inevitability of shirking that says, “Hardly a competent workman can be found who does not devote a considerable amount of time to studying just how slowly he can work and convince his employer that he is going at a good pace”.
It is clear to me now that although this problem was annoying, it was bound to happen, as our work environment at camp is a shirking breeding ground that lacks all 4 of the shirking controls we discussed in class. First, there is not a super well defined output. Each crew member is not given a certain number of tasks to complete, orders to fulfill, or guests to serve. Generally, everything must be done, but there is no assigned quota of work each person must do. Second, there is very little monitoring by anyone except our leads who as fellow volunteers do not have much tangible power over the employees. The full time staff rarely take the time to observe the behavior of specific crew members, as they have bigger picture issues to be focused on. Third, we were only supposed to have 1 performance review in the entire 3 months, and for most people that one didn't even happen. Finally, there were no alternatives to hire. Constantly crew members would make jokes saying they couldn’t afford to hire us, and in a way it was true. They did not just have other college students sitting around able to fly out to remote California on a whim. Together, all of these characteristics of our work environment resulted in an incredibly high and incredibly annoying presence of shirking.
1 comment:
I also worked at a summer camp this summer and saw a lot of the same issues with shirking. There was not a well defined output, behavior was monitored by "head counselors", who, while able to help hold counselors accountable for working well and spending time with campers, were responsible for keeping track of 8-10 other counselors. Performance reviews occurred twice a summer, and while you are paid and can lose your job, there aren't necessarily a lot of alternatives.
The camp directors seemed to be aware of this possibility for shirking and the difficulty in controlling it in a camp setting, so they brought in other incentives in attempt to control it. Throughout the time at camp, they appealed to the counselors' senses of duty by encouraging us to pour out ourselves for the sake of our campers, so that they could grow and have a good experience. Later in the summer, they would provide additional time off and perks like snacks to help boost morale. While these things still do not keep shirking from happening, they provide some other examples of strategies to potentially reduce it.
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