After the Super Bowl on Sunday, CBS debuted a new series called Undercover Boss. In case you are not familiar with the show, it takes high-ranking executives and CEOs from major corporations and places them in entry-level jobs within their own organizations. This way, they can see first-hand what their employees experience on a day-to-day basis.

For the premiere episode, we followed the president and COO of Waste Management as he took on several entry-level positions within his company. This was an eye-opening experience for him and, above all else, he learned about the impact that some of the rules and policies have on his workers.

One example was when he followed a female driver, seeing that she could not veer off her route when nature called. Instead, she was forced to use an empty can. That is no way to work and this really hurt her morale. She had a strong dislike for the organization and the COO instantly recognized this. Also, employees were docked two minutes for every one minute they were late coming to work or coming back from breaks.

While these policies were designed to improve efficiency, they made for resentful sentiments toward the company and this ultimately hurt productivity more than it helped it. The COO is now working to fix some of these problems. For your own company, consider how morale can be ultimately much more important than efficiency-minded policies. A happy employee works harder and more effectively.