Internet Critisism

These days you can find everything on the internet. You can find an old friend on myspace, or facebook, or any other number of websites. You can find businesses in your area, you can find recipes from your favorite chefs... anything you want is within reach a long as you have a keyboard and an internet connection. The other thing that you will find with the vast majority of these things is criticism. Whether it is your favorite teacher or professor being slammed by a student who got a bad grade, or your favorite restaurant given a poor review because of one wilted salad, it can sometimes be aggravating to see these harsh critiques from someone who likely only had one poor experience.
Where I work, we have had it emphasized that we need to give 100% to all of our clients. In other words one bad review, whether the client never says a word to any of us, or calls our office manager the next day, or writes a scathing review on the internet gets rather blown out of proportion. I understand that for that one client, we potentially made a poor impression, heck maybe we even made them have a bad day... but some people are rude, grumpy, bitter, and always have a bad day, and there isn't a thing that we can do to make them feel better. I don't think it is fair to the staff to turn their working days upside-down because of one complaint. Now, I'm not saying that the company should not work to improve, but I do think that you need to take criticism with a grain of salt. Maybe one poor phone call a day of a thousand really isn't bad. Maybe criticizing the whole company staff, in order to try to get them to work harder is a poor idea. In running a company you have to look at the whole of your business. I understand that in a perfect world we would please all of our clients, but by stressing this sort of perfection to your staff... you are stressing them out!


I look forward to when I choose what matters and what doesn't when it comes to my work... because having someone else prioritize the importance of what's going on where I work stinks, especially when they won't even listen to their own staff's criticism.