How to make Covid-19 quarantine errors impossible

It wasn't the system. It was the people who couldn't speak up about it.

Recently in New Zealand there was a serious and bizarre border-control failure. New entrants to the country coming from overseas, who were in mandatory quarantine, were supposed to be tested for Covid-19 before being released. Yet literally thousands were not tested, leaving the country vulnerable to the development of a second-wave infection.

But the question is - how could it happen? Of course the people working at the coalface would have known what was going on. It's impossible for them not to. They would have at least wondered if what was happening was right. So the question is, why did they not inform senior management, and if they did inform senior management why then did senior management not respond? At heart, the problem can only be a communication breakdown - on some level.

With this example, I believe we can see a kind of communication problem that exists everywhere, in just about any large professional organisation. And it's rooted in the fact that subordinates cannot speak as freely to their bosses as they can with their co-workers, and for ultimately understandable reasons...

If you open your mouth when it's not invited, then guess who's going to be the first cab off the rank when it comes to restructuring and redundancy - probably you. Especially if you embarrass your boss with ideas or problem-finding that, in principle, they should have recognised for themselves.

The problem is, in large organisations no one really works for the company, they work for themselves, and no amount of idealised 'company policy' will change that. Having the "right attitude" as companies demand, is pathetic. No one really has the 'right' attitude. What they have is personal incentives. That is the real world.

In turn, the only good assertion from you, as far as your boss is (quietly) concerned, is the one that makes him look good - not the one that makes you look good. This is why I believe bosses typically don't want your input outside day-to-day operational specifics, and why they will tend to be agitated if you give it to them. Ego is part of it too of course...are you telling your boss "how to do his job"?

The question is, how do you break down the game so people can communicate freely from bottom to top? It boils down to power structure and again incentive. The way to do it, I believe, is to isolate all hiring and firing and promoting and demoting decisions to an external personnel department, and also by creating a kind of 'court' within personnel for all staff assessments, so subordinates can have a right-of-reply with respect to everything their supervisors might say about them. Assessments should be completely open.

This way, for the sake of example, when an employer treats an employee unfairly due to maybe ignorance or personal bias, the employee can then feel comfortable speaking up and out immediately. They could even be superficially abusive and say "piss off!" to their boss if the conditions warrant it, and know that it probably won't lead to a fault-finding operation to be rid of them at the first excuse.

Imagine the openness you could get when staff are not inordinately worried about company politics, and when they know they will always have a legitimate defense against the threat of unprofessional bias and the abuse of power...

Mistakes like New Zealand's outrageous border-control error would then be almost impossible, I believe. There would have been a loud "what on earth is going on!?" right from the beginning, and the error would have been corrected before it could even begin. But alas - no one wanted to embarrass the boss?

Message to Jacinda Ardern: Let's fix this. We can start with government departments. Maybe do an experiment with just one? Because when people can't or don't speak up, you have a problem.

-Andrew Atkin