"Undercover boss" Highlights CSR on TV

CBS has produced a TV show called Undercover Boss where CEOs work alongside their employees. After watching the "White Castle" episode, it struck me that Undercover Boss was undercover documenting a CSR strategy.

Although mainstream management literature has advocated open communication for at least a decade, advising that managers listen to and empathize with their people on the 'frontline' of their business, this rarely occurs in reality. Open communication is also easily compromised as companies grow. It was simple to hear from everyone when the company was 20 people, rather than 200. Even companies like Starbucks that work diligently to integrate ideas from all levels struggle to actually do so. It's a practicality issue that takes specific effort to remedy. Yet frequent feedback from the lowest paid positions in a company is important to the employee-welfare aspect of corporate social responsibility.

A good solution would be, for companies over 200 people, to make management work, undercover or openly, in various front-line jobs as part of a their job descriptions. It's important to do this for a variety of reasons:

1) It grounds the c-level staff. Like C-elebrities, C-level staff are susceptible to an inflated sense of self-importance. Working the frontline is humbling, as White Castle owner Dave Rife learned. The work can be both physically hard, and executives learn from people outside the upper echelon that actually make their companies run.

2) It offers avenues for innovation. Ignoring the people at the base of the company is a strategic error. When Rife worked flipping hamburgers, he met a young man who had the culinary skills to improve the company product. Another worker helped him set up a leadership program for minorities. These are important reminders that the talent recruiters are likely to uncover excludes a vast, creative, potentially innovative workforce that may know your business better, or differently, than you do.

3) It engages employees. When there is physical and metaphorical distance between employers and employees, it makes delivering uniform products and communicating a unified brand tough, especially for services. Staff that meet executives who listen to them increases morale and buy-in. An employee who inspired Rife to start the leadership program said, amidst tears, that he was "just glad I work for a company that's willing to go through so much to make the company better. It makes me feel secure in my job and feel good about what I do." Other employees noted feeling appreciated as well.

Rife himself makes the best point- a CSR point. "As a boss I've learned it's easy for me to sit behind a desk and make decisions based on numbers. Now every time I look at those numbers I'm going to put a face to them and think about how the decisions I make will impact those faces." When C-level staff works with everybody else, it makes workers important to management. It puts faces on people otherwise only represented by a few lines on the balance sheet. It makes the employees' efforts, struggles and importance to the company real.