'Undercover Boss': The Next Unscripted Show You Don't Need To Watch

There are two ways CBS could have approached Undercover Boss, which debuts after the Super Bowl on Sunday night. One approach would be the spy model, where a company's CEO is out among his workers in disguise to rat out workers who are slacking. This would be the schadenfreude version of this concept, similar to the ambush shows where bad guys get their comeuppance.

CBS has gone the other way. What they're going for here is this: Boss does workers' jobs, boss comes to understand what it's like to be the little guy, boss helps various little guys within his own company, makes life better for all, gains understanding, and is able to increase his own benevolence.

It makes sense, given that this is the only model under which a high-level executive of a company would ever — ever — participate in this kind of thing. You might get a C-list celebrity or an attention-seeking waiter to go on a reality show where there's a significant risk of being made to look bad, but the CEO of a large corporation? Absolutely not. The introduction to the show says that it's about CEOs who are "willing to take extreme action to make their businesses better." The problem is that this would require the company to admit that extreme action was required because of the existing state of the company, as if it's some sort of massive edition of Kitchen Nightmares (the show where Gordon Ramsay saves failing restaurants). The odds of any large company allowing that narrative to emerge are, to use the scientific measurement, teeny.

What happens instead, after the jump.

 

In the first episode, the boss is Larry O'Donnell, president and Chief Operating Officer of Waste Management. (You may have their trash bins outside your house right now.) O'Donnell goes out and spends some time picking up trash, riding on a route, and cleaning out a porta-potty. And when he's done, there is a lot of talk about engaging with his workers has changed him, changed his way of looking at his company, changed his way of looking at his workers, and so forth.

At the risk of boring you, I think it's instructive to quote an exchange that took place between a critic and O'Donnell at the Television Critics Association press tour recently when CBS held its panel discussion of this show.

Question: In the version of the episode we saw, it appears that your experience was very good for the five [workers] who you met, but could you talk about the tangible corporate changes, policy changes, top to bottom that came about as a result?

Answer: Sure. I'd be happy to. One of the main reasons I did this was it gave me an opportunity to get out and learn exactly what some of the issues were out in the field. I spend
close to 200 days a year out visiting our field operations, but it's a different engagement
level — when I go out as president, that's a different engagement than when I can go out as a
brand-new employee in our company, and I learned an awful lot. I went out there to learn. I went
out there to engage our game employees, and I also went out there so that our customers could really see what our company was all about, what tough jobs our employees do. Some of the things that I took back, some of the learnings — there were a number.

First of all, if you had the chance to see the whole episode, there was a time clock issue at one of the facilities. Well, I was very concerned about that. As it turns out, it had just been miscommunicated. We weren't docking employees' pay that way, but there was a miscommunication, and we were able to get that resolved. But in the terms of the more longer-term things that we're working on, there was one point where it just hit me like a ton of bricks. We were out — I was out working a residential route, and I then found out that one of the policies that I had put in place was actually causing a lot of frustration out there in the field. So we're working right now on improving our communication and our coaching between the supervisors and the drivers.

Question: Well, I'm just still waiting for a tangible change that was made —

Answer: Well, that's one of them. We communicated better at that location on the time clock issue. We are now working on — we formed a coalition where we're teaching our route
managers to actually be more positive when they're working with the drivers. So there's not that
mistrust issue. One of the things that we're doing now everywhere is, when we do have issues,
we are now including frontline employees on those teams to help us solve the problems. Where the best place to go to try to understand the issues and come up with the solutions is really to go to those frontline employees who are dealing with the problem to begin with. So that's something we're implementing.

Another thing that I'm doing now is we've shot some very short videos that we're going to begin to air after the episode comes on, where I'm going to talk about each one of the learnings that I had out there and the things that we're doing to implement, and we'll continue to have those short videos that we'll send out to the field, you know, as I pick up on other things during my visits out there.

You get the idea. This actually was brought up yet again later, because the answer had been so generic, and O'Donnell talked more about trying to get team leaders to give more positive feedback, but he still didn't really wasn't able to say, "We used to expect employees to do X, and now we don't." Or "We used to not provide such-and-such benefit, but now we do." As he said, there was a specific facility where he corrected the manager about implementation of time-clock policy, but that wasn't a change in policy; it was just implementation.

O'Donnell came across as a very nice man, as he does in the episode, and you will likely find yourself taking him at his word that he was surprised by how difficult some of the "menial" jobs within his own company actually are and that on a human level, it increased his respect for them.

But when you're asked twice for specifics about how you changed the way you run your company in response to what you learned, and you wind up talking about "learnings," the formation of coalitions, and the making of short inspirational videos, you can't be surprised that people doubt whether you've really done anything except get CBS to make a free one-hour ad for Waste Management. ("Waste Management: Enjoy Our Personable Employees And Kind-Hearted COO!")

What's odd is that the vignettes, out of context, can be pretty entertaining. Seeing O'Donnell overwhelmed by the sorting process at one of his plants is funny, and he really does get incredibly frustrated trying to pick up paper trash on a windy day. That's basic fish-out-of-water stuff, not done mean-spiritedly, and it can be good fun.

If the show weren't suggesting the sojourn into the company was going to change policies — if it were a humbler role-reversal idea where a suit tried out the "real jobs" in the company and the frontline employees learned that not everybody who works in "corporate" is a humorless jerk who means them harm, and where the lessons were personal and not alleged to be at a management level — it might be a lot more fun. But they've weighed it down with the baggage of the economic downturn and the attendant resentment of large companies and rich people, and with any corporation's natural desire to promote itself, which is simply more than the thin concept can possibly bear.