A Movieclips mea culpa and lesson learned

Posted by: Joel Capperella

If you are a frequent reader of The Seamless Workforce, you know that each Monday we publish what we call a Movieclips Monday post. Using clips from popular, classic, and even not-so-well-known movies, we underscore key points for successfully managing a complete workforce.

Regrettably, this Monday a technical issue resulted in an unedited version of the famous “always be closing” scene from “Glengarry Glen Ross” to be published to our blog. If you know the film, then you know the scene as the one in which Alec Baldwin delivers a blistering dress down of the small real estate sales team that is desperate for new leads. Whether or not the scene or movie is good is a matter of personal opinion, but one thing that is true is that the unedited version of the scene is laced with profanity. We have a strict editorial policy to never include profane language or offensive commentary of any sort in our Movieclips Monday or other posts, and in this case, relied on technical tools to edit the clip down to ensure that it did not violate that policy. Unfortunately our efforts to edit the clip failed this week, and as a result, the entire clip ran.

We discovered the error and took the clip down immediately, and thankfully the post was only viewed 15 times, primarily by individuals internal to our own organization. However, the language in the clip could be considered offensive,  and for this, Yoh and The Seamless Workforce sincerely apologize.

As with anything we discuss here at The Seamless Workforce, we try to affix greater workforce meaning to the experiences of the day-to-day. So what lessons can be learned from such an error? Mostly that every single member of the team — primary, secondary, or even tertiary — has a vital role to play.

Our posts are approved before and after they are published. In this case, both approvals were successful and the edited version of the clip played correctly. Thereafter, however, the entire clip began to run for reasons that we have not yet uncovered. Thankfully, the extended team that contributes to The Seamless Workforce takes it upon themselves to review content daily and alerted us to the error immediately. If these team members did not engage in The Seamless Workforce content on a daily basis, then they would not have seen the clip and the distribution of the offending portion would have been much broader.

Again, we sincerely apologize that the unedited clip ran on Movieclips Monday this week, and it is our promise that such an error will not happen again.