Grumpy Coworker

Author: Grumpy107

  • You Do This Well, But You Could Improve That…

    The Problem

    Tragic mask on the façade of the Royal Dramati...
    Image via Wikipedia

    Providing feedback that praises, and then offers suggestions for improvement.

    I’ve always wondered why such a method left a bad taste in my mouth, but I came across one possible explanation in The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.  The peak-end rule proposes that:

    …we judge our past experiences almost entirely on how they were at their peak (pleasant or unpleasant) and how they ended. Other information is not lost, but it is not used. This includes net pleasantness or unpleasantness and how long the experience lasted.

    A description of one experiment demonstrating this rule is contained in Determinants of the Remembered Utility of Aversive Sounds (Schreiber/Kahneman)

    …participants had two experiences of immersing one hand in painfully cold water.

    The short trial lasted 60 s, with water temperature at 14 °C.
    The long trial lasted 90 s; the temperature was 14 °C for
    the first 60 s, then rose gradually to 15 °C over the next
    30 s–still unpleasant, but a distinct improvement for most
    participants.

    When they were later given a choice of which
    trial to repeat, a significant majority of participants chose to
    repeat the long trial. This preference violates logic, because
    adding pain to an aversive episode cannot make it better

    A Possible Improvement on the Constructive Feedback Technique

    Toastmasters uses a sandwich technique [good-bad-good], but the challenge is that the Serial position effect might cause the criticism necessary for improvement to be lost.  However, this modified sandwich technique might provide the benefits of offering constructive criticism while still producing a more positive result at the end:

    1. Sandwich Layer: Bread
      Evaluation Element: Praise – strengths exhibited by the speaker
    2. Sandwich Layer: Condiments
      Evaluation Element: Areas for improvement – where can the speaker improve
    3. Sandwich Layer: Meat, cheese, vegetables
      Evaluation Element: Specific suggestions – how can the speaker improve
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  • Forget that Emergency! Fill Out This Form in Triplicate

    Imagine this scenario: You’re in an emergency room in a hospital, gushing blood and being treated by the staff. All of a sudden, the person in charge of scheduling compliance training comes around and demands everyone stop what they’re doing and verify that they’ve signed up for the latest patient privacy compliance training seminars.

    Some things in the workplace are high priority items. Routine “emergencies” are often poorly planned high priority items. Parts of the process are medium-high priority–they need to be followed as habit, but usually a single miss won’t bring the entire business to its knees.

    Paying your taxes on time and filling out compliance paperwork and public filings is generally of a critical priority. If you fail to do so in a timely manner, the government or your investors will take your business down. Aside from a scenario like this, where having your business burn down or having the government take it down is a toss-up, immediate business calamity takes top priority over any business “process”.

    Don’t stomp your foot because your highly important process isn’t being followed when the building is burning down. You may be the last to be rescued.

  • Political Overtime

    New business analysts. Tight timelines. Sensitive business periods…

    Halfway through the project, one of the “customers” decides to pay attention during a review of minor specification update. Interestingly enough, the customer doesn’t pay attention to the relatively minor changes that you’re pointing out. Instead, the customer decides to focus on wording in the first few lines of the first page of the document [cue the rant about extensive specifications being too long to be useful].

    “That’s not how our business works,” the customer says, pointing to the wording that has been in the document since the very first drafts.

    “That’s how the system was designed, and how your counterparts everywhere else in the company do theirs.” Yeah, the “everybody else is doing it”-style reasoning. That wins over customers about as well as it did parents when you were little.

    Cue a restart of the entire project.

    Months later, you’re far beyond the possibility of making your original timelines, but effectively, you’ve done all the work you can do. The solution? You’re asked come in to work the weekend to make a good show of demonstrating that you’re doing everything you can to finish the project on time. In reality, you have trouble finding administrative tasks to do, yet, you come in every weekend for several weeks under the premise that making the political statement of being there is going to somehow offset the project delay itself.

    Meanwhile, you’re burning yourself out before the next project even begins.

  • 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.

     

  • Hand Washing, Urinals, and Toilets

    A person washing their hands with soap and water.
    Hand Washing from Crestock Stock Photos

    Maybe your use of a urinal made it possible to do your business “hands-free”.

    The rest of us would still like you at least to go through the motions of good hygiene for our peace of mind.

    Also, if you had to sit on the toilet, it’s unlikely that your hands didn’t do any dirty work. Stop kidding yourself.