Everyone ready for smiles week?
Rough month to schedule it, but the calendar invite had already gone out.
For the uninitiated: SMILES Week is when a large company that sells both chips and soda sends everyone a calendar invite to be happy. It's also the month a chunk of our jobs moved to a shared services center in India or Mexico and everyone left behind got a second job's worth of work to "absorb." The timing is either an accident or the funniest thing HR has ever done.
The agenda, roughly:
Monday: Gratitude Circle. Share one thing you're grateful for. I'm grateful my role wasn't in this batch. Yet.
Tuesday: "Doing More With Less" fireside chat. Less is the headcount. More is you.
Wednesday: Wellness Wednesday. Twenty minutes of guided breathing to prepare you for the twelve hours of work that showed up when your teammate got "transitioned." Chair yoga, because standing up looks too much like a walkout.
Thursday: Career Development Day. Big news: the beverage rep and the snack rep are becoming one person. Two P&Ls, two scorecards, two bosses, one paycheck. That's not a merged role, that's a hostage situation with a route sheet.
Friday: Free lunch. One bag of chips, 40% air. Also the target fill rate for open positions.
Closing note from leadership: "Our people are our greatest asset." Assets get depreciated. Please see the attached schedule.
Weekend Edition
SMILES Week officially runs Monday through Friday, which is the schedule of the people who planned it. The people it's about work seven days.
Saturday: Customer Obsession Day. Corporate is at brunch. The field is in a big-box backroom looking for a pallet the system says arrived Thursday. Our in-stock score is tracked to the decimal point and worked by a merchandiser we pay $20 an hour, hired Tuesday, who can make $22 with no weekends at the warehouse across the highway. We told him he's the face of the company. He asked if the face of the company gets mileage.
Saturday, 6:40 a.m. He quit by text. His route is still green on the dashboard, because the dashboard finds things out on Monday, same as his manager.
Sunday: Rest & Recharge Day. The email says rest. The store manager's text at 7:15 says the cooler is empty. That same store manager fills out our customer service survey. "On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us?" He gave a 3. The rep who covered the route unpaid will be coached on that 3 during Monday's Gratitude Circle.
Weekend Bonus: #SmileSelfie Challenge. Post a photo of yourself smiling in an account. Winner gets a $25 gift card, the biggest raise anyone in the photo has seen since 2024. Pro tip: crop out the shelf.
Coverage note. We are a "One Team" culture. The team is currently one guy covering three routes, because the other two are open reqs HR paused for the transformation. He does not give a sh-t about the service score. It is the only rational position anyone in the company has taken all week.
The org is basically Game of Thrones now, except nobody wins the chair, the chair got outsourced, and the survivors get a lanyard that says SMILE.
Someone told me "smiles" is the longest word in English because there's a mile between the first S and the last one. It's also the distance between the all-hands deck and the org chart