Blockbuster's Compass - Setting Sail for Port Bureaucracy

by Aristotle

As of March 1, 2005, every Blockbuster employee will have spent hours reviewing the new software corporate uses for payroll management: Compass.

Created by BlueCube Software, the expansive software package also includes training modules to help "streamline" future employee promotions.

At its core, the Compass training system is a series of web-based PDF files and interactive Flash media.  Employees click through the selected tasks or read the required documents, and take a brief quiz when they have completed a module.

Tasks include learning how to entering your payroll corporate ID and password to clock in and out, making schedule requests, and viewing their assigned work week.

Sadly, there is no way to skip ahead, so anyone who has used any menu-driven software before is required to move at the same pace as someone who has never seen a keyboard.

While this does ensure that every employee has been presented with all the relevant information, mind-numbing in its redundancy, it also ensures all but the most simple of employees will ignore what they are supposed to read, feeling their very IQ being drained by the system's tediousness.

Once the system goes live, it will schedule employees according to need, as judged by Compass.

In the test run this week, many "full-time" employees found they had fewer than fifteen scheduled hours in the coming work week, while lower-paid part-time employees were given an excess.  Unqualified personnel were scheduled to run store-wide inventories, and almost every individual I've spoken to found they had been scheduled during times at which they were available.  These problems may be resolved by launch, but it is uncertain.

Another aspect of the Compass system is its ability to be remotely monitored.

Four times a shift the Manager-on-Duty (MOD) is required to update the daily task list with what employees had accomplished what, and at what time.  At any point in the day, the district and regional directorate, and most likely others higher on the chain, can see any store's updated task list.  The threat of constant surveillance is intended to be a "powerful motivator," claimed one store manager during a meeting.

In addition to disallowing employees from clocking out from their shifts at any time, a violation of many states' labor laws, the numerous checks and balances put into place requiring a manager override (with a handy alert sent to corporate each time) to accomplish many mundane tasks has already decreased productivity, two weeks prior to the software's full implementation.

In summary, the big blue, ever striving to make the workplace more inhospitable and unbearable for employees, have continued to astound and confuse their workers with each additional bureaucratic layer they place between us and our ability to help customers.

The meager paychecks they dangle before us do little to help assuage the knowledge that we are in fact part of this machine.

I know I have made my decision, and I'd like to thank BlueCube Software for assuring me it was the right one.