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The comic strip Dilbert may have been created by a racist, misogynist homophobe, but it really struck close to the nerve on office politics.
I won’t dwell too much on its controversial — with good reason — creator, other than to say memories of Dilberts past came rushing forward Tuesday when publishing the story about incentives to celebrate the adoption of a home-care scheduling system workers and patients dismiss as an abject debacle.
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“It’s insulting to expect people to celebrate a milestone that is nothing but a reminder of the level of trauma we have endured this past year,” one home-care employee said.
The switch to a centralized scheduling system happened March 27, 2025. A year later, the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority held draws for prizes to celebrate the anniversary.
If celebrating the anniversary of something staff hate wasn’t bad enough, check out what the “prizes” were: boxes of facial tissue, tomato seeds and bags of chips.
Staff dismissed the gifts as cheap, insulting tokens. (Supplied)
“It’s like they went to Dollarama, up and down each aisle and just chose whatever and wrapped it,” the same anonymous employee said.
If the goal was to present a case study in how not to mark important events, well… objective achieved. If the goal was to study parodies of human resource management — Dilbert, The Office, 9 to 5 — and implement those same mistakes, bravo.
The WRHA should have hired Steve Carell or Ricky Gervais. At least that would have demonstrated some situational awareness.
It would be different if the event was held as a sort of apology, along with a promise to do better. It would be different if the anniversary was of a beloved change in policy.
Either way, however, the choice of “prizes” is embarrassing. If you’re really trying to motivate staff and thank them for hard work under impossible circumstances, do it with more than what people give out on Halloween.
If ever there were a case where it would have been better to do nothing, this is it. Not only are you rubbing the centralized scheduling system in staff’s faces, you’re humiliating them with meaningless tokens.
More troubling is what this may signify on a wider scale: if the people in charge can mismanage this episode this badly, can they really be trusted to manage things that matter?
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