Recently at work, they imposed a new domain-policy to force a corporate wallpaper (background) for everyone’s workstation (desktop). I haven’t noticed it until my password expired and I ended up doing a reboot, when all new policies were applied by the log-on script. After this, my wallpaper was changed to a corporate image (the most recent advertising campaign); of course I was immediately upset.
After calming down myself, I began to wonder why they do this? Later I discovered that some days before the company sent an official email memo explaining the whole thing. They said that the wallpaper will be changed automatically whenever a new advertising campaign gets released.
Not totally bad
I must admit that this kind of policy is understandable when you have your staff visiting clients and vice versa.
If you’ll be in direct contact with clients your workstation (Desktop or Laptop), becomes a reflect of the corporate image (as well as your dress and physical aspect).
But…
But why you should apply that kind of policies to all your staff?
For me, and almost the 90% of my co-workers, this is a nonsense because we never get in touch with our clients (the end users of the applications we work on). We have some internal clients (administrative staff), but they are just another employee; the difference is that they belong to the business people. Even more, we usually show our work in a test server and all applications are web-based. So nobody is looking at my desktop background in the 99.99% of the time. Then, Why to force a corporate wallpaper?
My only guess is that employees are so poorly identified with the company values and campaigns; that they must force us to look every piece of advertising to change our mind. In contrast, I’ve seen some employees, from other organizations, changing not only their desktop background with the company’s latest promotion, but also their phone’s screens have the same the same background.
Instead of
Instead of that sort of manipulation, I think that companies must always pursuit a sincere motivation on their collaborators. That way they’ll become brand-evangelists in a volunteer manner; and there is no better salesman that the one who, truly, believes on the product.
Samples
I did some Google-based research, and found one example of each point of view: the ones who are in favor of “Corporate Wallpaper”-like policies and the ones who don’t. You can tell, by their title, which is which:
There seams to be a strong interest for system administrators to enforce Corporate Wallpapers. Take a look at this stats from search results:
- “How to force a corporate wallpaper”: About 75,000,000 results (0.34 seconds)
- “corporate wallpaper policy”: About 11,000,000 results (0.33 seconds)
From the top 10 results of the first search I want to highlight a “winner”:
“One of the things that is unique to us is the fact that we change our desktop wallpaper across all computers as needed. Unfortunately, … users change their own wallpaper to something else … Once the users change this to something else, we were unable to force the windows wallpapers to change on the computers.
Not until I did a bit more digging and research. Now, …, we force it to do so based upon a login script.” (from How to Force Windows Wallpapers to Change)
People responsible for applying that kind of policies seem to be very proud of it; but no one is looking at the psychological effects of those decisions.
