Here’s another example of corporate stupidity caused by the shortsighted desire to save a buck.
Earlier today, I was looking through the 2010 annual report from Ontario’s Toronto-based Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB). The 2011 annual report is not yet available.
The annual report contains one business portrait of its chairman and one of its president. All the other executives, managers and employees shown in the other photos are fake. None of those people work for this agency. The offices shown in those pictures are also fake.
This 20-page, official corporate document contains 12 photographs. Ten of those pictures are cheap stock pictures. How can you tell? As we all know, cheap stock photos scream, “CHEAP STOCK PICTURE!” Plus, it’s easy to extract the images from the PDF and trace them back to the originating stock agencies.
These same stock pictures are currently being used by hundreds of other companies around the world: pharmaceutical companies, paralegal services, realtors, recruitment companies, hotels, security companies, an office cleaning company, financial companies, a software company, a cafeteria service, debt collectors, law firms, a tourism business, an air traffic control supplier, offshore banking business, etc.
Why would any organization, especially a government agency, intentionally mislead the public and its stakeholders? What are they trying to hide? Don’t they have any real employees?
To be fair, some previous WSIB annual reports did use a few pictures of real people.
The Ontario government claims it supports Ontario small business but obviously its actions speak louder than words. This government agency intentionally chose to avoid hiring any Ontario corporate photographers or editorial photographers.
Let’s recap:
This multi-billion-dollar organization, which does not use any taxpayer money, decided to …
• cut corners and be unoriginal and boring,
• avoid working with local photographers,
• use fake employees in pretend offices,
• ignore the importance of photography as a communications tool,
• not bother providing truthful information to the public,
…just to save a few bucks.
Also, to save a few more dollars, the WSIB has been reusing the same business portrait of its chairman since 2007. Jeez, it looks like the poor company chairman can’t even afford a new tie.
A company’s most valuable assets are its corporate image and public trust. If a company doesn’t care about either of those then why should the public?
