Who Is Worse At Staffing Models: White-Collar Or Service Industry?

You know, this is a close call.

Minus some time in Teach for America, I basically spent 20 years in corporate and white-collar work, with a few forays elsewhere. Since June of this year, I’ve done that (a bit) and also bartend at some places here and again. Most of the bartending I’ve done is also corporate and/or familial-centric places, I.e. games and golf and whatever, so I’ve never been at a dive bar or a “mixologist” place, which is probably good because I wouldn’t be the best mixologist at this stage of my bartending journey.

The biggest element of overlap between “white-collar” and “service,” to me, is two-fold:

1. People don’t communicate as well as they should.
2. Managers hide.

On (2), managers often hide in the back office, munching fries and not walking the floor. White-collar managers hide in other ways — mostly meetings, calls, and long lunches with no transparency as to where they are.

Beyond those two, the next biggest similarity is: neither staffing model is that great.

In white-collar, staffing is often done to (a) minimize personnel cost and (b) to afford the “favorites” (brown-nosers) more headcount at the expense of departments that actually…