Urban Grimoire: The Review Spell

All acts are magical acts, said Uncle Al, and so hot on the heels of dishwasher magic, magic with reviews, another apparently mundane magical tool.

Actually it makes sense that reviews would cross over into magical territory because they are incredibly powerful. Estimates of consumers who pay attention to online reviews are consistently over 80% and that is why firms are so eager to manipulate them. Not looking at a certain review site about holidays in the slightest, nor rumours that Amazon employees get bribes to fiddle reviews, but obviously you can't always be confident but this post is inspired by the most extraordinary experience I had of the power of a review. I will put some detail because I think it helps to show what my review was up against.

Long term readers will know that I walked out of my shitty employers in 2016. They are one of the two large mental health providers in this city (actually they're both shit in different ways but the other one is merely incompetent and doesn't have the culture of abuse of the one I walked out of) and has a very good reputation amongst the people who work for it. This was difficult to reconcile with my almost consistently bad experience of important governance things being neglected, of bullying, and non existent leadership. It seemed reasonable that if I was that dissatisfied with it other people must be.

And yet, I went on an employment website and the reviews by employees were consistently excellent, even glowing. It couldn't be that in a freak set of circumstances I had managed to experience all the crap in the organization and everyone else had had an excellent experience! I had actually sat in training courses and seen people in tears because they felt so unsafe and were so frightened of their manager!

And then it struck me. It was one of the dysfunctional cultural aspects of the workplace. They have a culture that we can do it and we will deal with it; we know what we are doing and do a good job (usually this is phrased in opposition to the other mental health provider). It struck me that the organization fed off the can do culture of its employees, gained any success it had from their work while also treating them like shit and filling their minds with the idea that stopping to say things weren't ok was because they were incompetent or couldn't cope. The majority of people doubt their own perception, give other people the benefit of the doubt, and those combined with the workplace culture would be guaranteed to stop negative reviews. Perhaps I should say that the reviews online by service users are far from positive, devastatingly accurate and the service is doing a critical incident review after a series of murders. Even the coroner criticised the service for its traumatizing response to a family after a preventable suicide of a service user.

So I left a review. It wasn't overly dramatic but I pulled no punches and it was fairly crap. I made it very clear that I was talking about a succession of bad experiences and gave clear instances of all the shit I had seen.

I was surprised at what happened next, and I think this is one of the strengths of online reviews because my simple act of leaving that review had clearly changed something for other people, and that is always the clear sign that something magical is going on. I went back to the site six months later and the reviews had changed from being uniformly good to being predominantly terrible (with the odd good one) with my review as the turning point. There clearly were other people who had terrible things to say but hadn't said them.

So what change does this actually make? Well I think you have to change thoughts and attitudes before anything else changes. This change in people's minds will chip away at the culture and help to stop people doubting themselves. A change in culture has knock on effects. For example that trust is very good at drilling people what to say before a Care Quality Commission inspection, and I have frequently seen people saying all the right things and the provider keeps looking good. I wouldn't claim to take the credit for it but on its next inspection after my review the report said a lot of the staff reported that they tried to give good care despite the organization and it dropped down a point into requiring improvement. My spies said the powers that be were visibly furious and I couldn't have been happier.

Of course I'm talking about an organization which doesn't take feedback and I would hope that a good organization would deal with a negative review in a way to turn it positive. I am very taken with the philosophy of dealing with complaints which I have tended to associate with Japanese businesses (although I typically can't find any specific reference to it online at present): that a complaint is an opportunity. I just think you can tell everything about an organization by the way it responds to complaints and I'm talking about an organization where the staff would typically avoid a 'complainer' while making a point of audibly moaning how difficult they were. When an organization won't change its mind because any contradiction is threatening or it doesn't give a shit, your only option is to change it whether they like it or not. I would also theorize that although it may seem like some businesses genuinely don't give a shit, a solid bank of negative reviews will build up the karma in a big way. Even if it only warns people what they're like.

So to sum up, reviews are a powerful magical act, which while they can present some problems because of online reviews being manipulated, have a real potential to make changes happen.