Grumpy Coworker

Author: Grumpy100

  • Not Realizing There is a Problem Until the Annual Survey?

    If it takes until the annual employee satisfaction survey comes out to realize that you have a problem, “listening” to employee ideas probably won’t help much.

    Some possibilities here:

    1. Your organization doesn’t have enough trust for everyone having a problem to be able to communicate that problem to the next level and have each level of management propagate that knowledge OR address it.
    2. You don’t have enough contact with your employees to recognize there is a problem yourself. If you see one person forcing a smile at every team gathering–that’s a Grumpy Coworker.  If you see a whole team doing it, that’s a Problem.
    3. Your employees are getting paid by your competitors to say they’re disgruntled.

    One of the above possibilities does not belong with the others.

     

     

  • What’s in a Name/Logo?

    Once, maybe twice, in a business’ life, things change to warrant a name change.  “Bob Jones Consulting” may not be an appropriate name for a company that “Bob Jones” has severed ties with.  “Turducken Shack” might be inappropriate for a restaurant chain who magically found a sleeper hit in its vegetarian fare.

    Understandably, if you’re dealing with customers in person, who you are representing can be as important as how you represent the company.  That’s fine.

    Once you get below a certain level of granularity, however, does the customer really care what organization within the company you represent?  If a customer had a positive interaction with the sales department, but had a horrible interaction when getting technical support for a problem placing the order on the website, do the department labels really matter?

    Does the reporting structure matter? Is your new marketing slogan, “Reorganized to Serve You Better”?

    Does the customer care that the marketing department has a new blue logo, while the IT department has a shiny black background logo with monochrome green outlines?  Does the customer care some guy in the marketing department still has his red logo background on his computer’s desktop?

    Meanwhile, while we’re all splitting hairs, the customer has hung up after hearing, “Your call is important to us,” for the 20th time–probably because it’s a lie.

     

  • The cost of re-re-reprioritization

    Prioritization is a good thing. And there is a very old saying: Too much of a good thing….

    In computer terms, I think of reprioritization as “swapping”.  A computer may be executing one program and get interrupted by a request to execute another higher-priority program.  It “swaps” the first program out of active memory, and the new program gets swapped in so it can be executed.  When finished, the first program gets swapped back and runs flawlessly to completion.  Slicker than snot, right?

    Unfortunately, projects executed by people are not like programs executed by computers. (You might want to write that one down, folks.) There are 2 reasons for this.

    1) Unlike computers, people cannot effectively drop something in the middle, pick it back up an hour/day/week later, and immediately remember exactly what they needed to do next. The human brain needs time to catch up after switching contexts. The more complex the task, and the longer the delay between swapping out and back in, the more extra time it will take for the brain to catch up.

    2) Unlike computers, humans are emotional beings. When told to put something down before it is complete, they will often experience a negative emotional response. If this is the 3rd time in 3 weeks that I have been told to drop my previous assignment and go work on something “more important”, I guarantee you that my emotional self will start to take considerably longer to get his head back in the game.

    Frequent reprioritizing can wreak havoc with employee morale. Grumpy co-workers have been known to descend into sarcastic thinking, such as, “If this new assignment is SO important, why wasn’t anybody working on it yesterday?” Or the more combative, “My managers obviously don’t know what the heck they are doing.” Or in particularly severe cases, “I think it’s time to update my resume again.”

    Obviously, humanity is frail and undependable when compared to computers. This is why managers get frustrated with humans.  On the other hand, managers should understand the costs of re-re-reprioritization, and not be surprised or angered by the diminishing returns. Any manager who IS surprised probably brings a measure of truth to the sentiment that they just don’t know what the heck they are doing.

     

  • The follies of flex-time

    The invention of flex-time brought with it the dawn of a new era in the workplace. An age of freedom and flexibility, resulting in unprecedented happiness and fulfillment. Certainly flex-time went a long way in eliminating grumpiness in our coworkers.  Right?

    For those of you still working in the Dark Ages of precisely prescribed starting and quitting times, here is a brief description of the golden age of “flex-time”.  (Try not to weep over what you are missing.)

    Flex-time is when my boss flexibly leaves at 3:30pm for a round of golf with her fellow bosses, on the day when I need her final approval of presentation materials I just finished at 4:00pm for tomorrow’s meeting.

    Not to worry, I determine to make use of flex-time myself. I arrive the next day at 7:00am to finish preparing and printing the handouts for the 9:30am presentation, only to discover the person with access to the printer supplies for the out-of-ink printer won’t flexibly arrive until 9:00am.

    When Mr. Printer Supply Person finally arrives at 9:15am (darn that traffic!), I don’t see any dark circles under his eyes, and he seems very well rested and cheery.  But regretfully (so he says) he cannot help me because he’s already 15 minutes late for the Printer Supplies Department’s weekly staff meeting.

    Though my meeting presentation was a bust, behold! All is not lost! Because I arrived at 7:00am, flex-time allows me to leave at 3:30pm today. I think I will get in a round of golf myself before dinner.

    That is, until my boss trumps flexibility, and schedules a meeting at 4:00pm to discuss why my presentation didn’t have handouts. Gotta love this flex-time invention!

     

  • Bookmarks… Rules as a reaction to failure

    Great thoughts on how bureaucracy begins:

    However, lets not forget the other side of the equation:

    • Hyperactive attorneys [hot liquid warnings on coffee cups]
    • Hyperactive congress [regulations on how long business records, email, etc. have to be held]
    • Overreaction to 1 in a million accidents, i.e., not respecting the statistical risk of getting killed by a falling satellite vs. the risk of being hit by a car while on your motorcycle.

    However, in general, humans just prefer to apply very general solutions to very specific problems.

     

  • Instant Messenger is the Devil

    I have my list of things to do. I’m right in the middle of wrapping one thing up, when *ping*.  A blinking notification on the task bar of my Windows machine, and a pop-up preview of a “yt?” message.

    Gah.  I’d like to ignore the message, but then, that just means that Outlook will consider this a missed conversation and send it to me in an email. Either way, I’m marked away from my desk–unthinkable that that should happen at any point between 11am and 1pm.  Apparently, for impromptu instant messages, this is the time range in which senders figure they’re most likely to get a response, much like telemarketers at dinner time.

    Back to reality…  I decide to respond, because it’s rude to not respond to a flashing notification and a “ding” noise.

    The sender’s response is a simple question, which requires me to temporarily abandon the half-completed email that I was composing, and search my inbox for a message that answers the question.  This takes 15 minutes, because I eventually have to resort to sorting by sender, by conversation, by date, by size to find what should have been fairly easy to conduct a simple search on.  Question answered, and I forward the email that describes the answer in great detail.

    I then take 5 minutes to regroup, and begin to focus on my next task.  20 minutes into that task, another impromptu instant message with similar results.

    Fast forward to the end of the day:  I have 3 half-completed documents and 5 draft emails composed, and now, I can’t shut down my computer without dealing with them.

    I guess I could’ve went the day with “do not disturb” on, but then people not nearby in the office would have assumed that I was out of the office and not working, which is fine until people start assuming that I’m never in the office.

    Ok, maybe instant messenger isn’t the devil, but a stalker or overbearing significant other.

     

  • Have You Been Soaking in Your Cologne?

    Cologne’s pretty expensive by volume.  It’s not exactly the kind of thing that I’d expect someone to fill his bathtub with. However, when a stiff breeze carries the smell of your cologne across the parking lot, I have no choice but to imagine that this is what you do.

    Part of me wonders how many showers it takes to clean the scent off, much like what happens with the smoke smell after a night at a smoky bar.

    The workplace, in general, has long been smoke-free. Do we have to start lobbying Congress or our local legislatures for the same protection from pervasive perfumed smells as we have from tobacco smoke?

    Maybe I should figure out what cologne is choking off my air supply and find out who makes it. Then, at least, I can  wait until I notice that you’ve stopped wearing this particular scent, and then bet against the company. Of course, there would probably be a good case for insider trading, at the levels at which you purchase their product.

     

     

     

  • If it’s “not your department”, be prepared to be left out of the loop.

    If your pattern of behavior is to push the load to another team consistently when there is a problem with a specific area, then we will have to start assuming that you either have no ability to deal with the problem, no knowledge of the area with a problem, or both.  This forces the rest of us to conclude that we are wasting everyone’s time including you on the problem-solving meetings and emails.

    Once this is the case, you will be left out of the loop. Once this happens, why do you start complaining about not being included on our discussions?

  • Exclamation points necessary!!

    Once upon a time, in what people used to call “grammar school”, the exclamation point was a thing of mystery. It was generally something that seemed to never have a use in writing, with the exception of after an interjection or a strongly emphasized command.

    The Wikipedia article on the exclamation mark quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald:

    Cut out all those exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own jokes.

    So, when did exclamation points go from “to be used as sparingly as capsaicin extract in chili” to “like salt on french fries?” It seems as though any reply of gratitude via email, text, or instant message requires at least one exclamation point if you’re grateful, and two if it was a big help. Don’t underemphasize your gratitude with a period. It may come out as a forced “thank you”, similar to the way your parents made you thank an aunt for an ugly sweater.

    Some people even extend this required emphasis by put things in ALL CAPS.

    Maybe we should suspend coffee service to the office for a while.

    THANKS FOR READING!!

  • Risk Taking and Startup Mentality in a Large Organization

    Can a large organization really encourage the risk taking and game changing thinking that a small business or startup does?

    What if large team performance is very much like a well-diversified portfolio, but in the sense that the high performing ideas get offset by the stable performing ideas and horribly performing ideas.  The consensus ideas tend toward the mean of the group.  The larger the organization, the closer the sample is to the general population, and the more likely that the results will tend toward the mean, i.e., mediocrity.

    By contrast, a small business or team is going to be a less diversified sample of the population.  With less diversification of ideas, performance becomes concentrated.  This increases the possibilities of a spectacular failure as well as of a spectacular success.

    The advantage of this quick success or death is that failure becomes obvious.  In a large organization, the slow death may be enough for the organization to continue on its path for decades, until their business is completely gone.

    Think of this as the difference between investing your 401(k) in CDs, bond index funds, or maybe even index funds [large organization] vs. picking a single company to throw money into each year [small team/business].  In the former choices, you will get higher performance only by sheer volume, and yet, even the CDs seem like they’re gaining in value all the time.  30 years later, you will have anywhere from the low end of mediocre performance to the high end.

    In investing in a single company each year, you may end up with a boom or bust scenario, but you’ll have opened up the possibility of performance outside of the “mediocre” or “average” range.

    The bottom line is, the smaller the sample size, the larger the performance swings can be.  Would a large team really even want those performance swings if they were possible?