Grumpy Coworker

Author: Grumpy109

  • Just Because You’re the Customer Doesn’t Make You the Dictator

    Customer service is important.

    The customer is always right.

    Always make the customer happy.

    Guess what, though? The difference between a customer and a dictator is that while the optimal number of dictators is 1, there generally needs to be more than one customer.  If you are the only customer and provide full funding/payroll/benefits for the person who is serving you, that makes you an employer.

    Since there need to be multiple customers, that means there is a certain amount of prioritization involved. If there are other customers to be served, and no amount of attention is going to please you, you will be pushed to the lowest priority.

     

  • Types of Meetings

    Reposted with Permission from YouMightBe.com

    Meeting before the meeting – A select group of people, usually from the same team, decide what the “correct outcome” of the main meeting is supposed to be. When the main meeting comes, the co-conspirators stick to their guns about what must be done.

    Meeting after the meeting – Often, the people who were run over by the pre-meeting decision will have a meeting afterward to discuss what just hit them. Especially true when the main meeting involved a large vendor.

    Meeting just to make sure we keep having this meeting – An agenda-less meeting that occurs during the only available weekly time slot on the calendars of all participants, so everyone shows up and fakes it through the meeting aimlessly until the time is up.

    The mutually ignored meeting – Sometimes coincides with the “meeting just to make sure we keep having this meeting.”  Usually, however, this meeting has a more organized structure.  Everyone participates in the meeting by speaking in turn, yet no one actually hears anything that the other participants are saying.  Often coincides with the “project status meeting”.

    Pep Rally Meeting – These meetings are supposed to replicate the glory days of the tech boom, complete with an enthusiastic leader leading the cheering.  These can be fun if the overall culture of the company fits.  They can also be the source of YouTube videos.

    Sub-Meeting – A complete side discussion that starts by distracting major participants in the main meeting, and eventually overtakes the main meeting purpose, either by acoustics or by importance.

    “Party” Meeting – This may be a special occasion to recognize a milestone birthday, anniversary, retirement, etc., and is often characterized by a lot of standing around in odd clusters of people.  People from each of these clusters take turns migrating to the focus of the party to say a good word, and then drift back to their clusters or to their desks.  Social aptitude generally determines how long a person has to wait to for a turn.

    Project “status” meeting – A regular project “update” meeting where everyone gives an “everything’s okay” status, regardless of what part of the project is crashing and burning.

    Virtual Meeting – A remote meeting that everyone dials into and immediately mutes, proceeding to spent their time more productively, such as by watching Sportscenter or playing ping-pong.

    Meeting to teach someone how to run a meeting – This is generally a status-type meeting where a less-experienced team member learns how to start a meeting, stick to an agenda, and write down and assign “action items”.

  • 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.

     

  • 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.

     

  • 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?

  • Length of Interruption is not Proportional to Amount of Disruption

    This topic has been covered here before: Just because something requires very little time on its own does not mean it disrupts less. Any activity that takes “only a small amount of time” is likely to be accompanied by many other ones that carry the same justification for their existence.

    Justifying that something should be done because it takes an insignificant amount of time is the same as saying that a 0.02% increase in your property tax should not concern you. The individual amount may be insignificant, but after years of property tax increases, you may end up with 1 or 2% extra in taxes.  More importantly, every additional request will carry the extra guilt trip of having accepted increases before and may embolden further, possibly larger requests.

    Cognitive disruption

    Deep thought tasks require deep concentration–see Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.  You can’t do deep analysis or intense tasks if you have 30 minutes between meetings.

    Meetings are only one such offender.  Logging your time by work code and customer, and filling out three pages of forms upon beginning or ending a task are other such offenders.  Let’s say that you were reading an unabridged copy (1488 pages) of Les Misérables (Signet Classics), and every 10th page, read a page of A Tale of Two Cities (free Kindle Edition). You’re going to get the details of the characters confused because the settings are so similar.

    This example may seem extreme, but in reality, is this not what all of this extra tasks are doing? You record time about a project. You send an email about a project. You open some form and fill out information about the project. At some point you may actually do work on the project. At this point, you’re going to have to start a spreadsheet to keep track of your tasks and what necessary steps you’ve done as part of completing a task. Fortunately, you can at least create some sort of calculated field to turn the task green, yellow, or red, based on whether the task is complete, partially complete, or not started. That should save you the mental energy of determining whether a task is actually complete–so at least you have that going for you.

  • Keep your motivational sayings to yourself and not in my email.

    I appreciate that you love your job, or that you at least have a daily affirmation that you repeat to tell yourself that you do.

    Do you know who reads your motivational saying when you use it in your signature line?  Hint:  It’s not you.

    Yes, that’s right.  Everyone else reads your motivational saying.  It gets attached to every request for help.  It gets attached to every reminder to fill out my bureaucratic paperwork.  It gets attached to every admonition that you send out.

    Now I know why you enjoy your job.  You’re making us miserable with being a bureaucratic task master.

    Think about the perception of that email signature.

  • Is your job redundant?

    Amazon.com link

    If you’ve seen Office Space, you may recall Tom Smykowski becoming flustered when describing his job to “the Bobs”.  Initially, his job description sounds like some kind of business or technical analyst,  then degrades to courier between the engineer and the customers, and finally, you realize that he’s not even the courier–his secretary is.

    How often do you deal with a situation like this:

    • You’ve identified that a certain product needs to be deleted from the catalog.
    • You don’t have access to delete things from the catalog.
    • You’re told that you have to identify what data needs to be deleted.
    • You write queries for the database to identify the data that needs to be deleted, identify how much data will be impacted, and do virtually everything but try deleting data.
    • Despite not being trusted to actually run the commands to delete the necessary data, you’re required to write the commands to delete the data.
    • You send out the commands that should be run, but are told to fill out an online form to have the change made.
    • You are required to get manager’s approval to have them run for you.
    • Someone else runs the commands.

    Getting everything signed in triplicate doesn’t really protect us from ourselves.  It just makes those of us doing the actual leg work along the way more frantic and careless about trying to get things done with the added bureaucracy and fixed time to complete tasks.

    When the added time required to get something done greatly exceeds the potential time spent undoing whatever mistake can be made, something is wrong.  I understand the use of gatekeepers, but gatekeepers who do none of the analysis of the problem have no vested interest in guarding the gate.  They have fingers to point elsewhere, and at least until the first catastrophe happens, they may just rely on that backup plan.

  • How the mute button on your phone actually works.

    I guess I had made some incorrect assumptions about the function of the “mute” button on my phone.

    I’ve always assumed that when properly activated, the mute button prevents other people from hearing things that are on my end of the line, and not like how the TV mute button works, which prevents me from hearing things from coming through the phone.

    After comparing notes with several other people, I’ve determined that, at least for conference calls, the mute button works quite differently.  While the mute button is activated, not only can people not hear their names being mentioned during a call, but they apparently hear very little of what’s actually going on during the conference call.  Only after being prodded by several alternative methods can a person whose phone was on mute actually realize that the rest of the participants on the call are waiting for feedback.  More importantly, the last 5-10 minutes of the meeting have to repeated for the benefit of the person on mute.

    A side effect of the mute button is the rendering of the feedback provided by the person who was on mute completely useless.  The best remedy for such feedback is a verbatim quoting of the feedback in a mass email to all participants of the call.  At this point, one of two outcomes will take place:  Either there will be a complete retraction of the erroneous feedback or there will be a written record of commitment to the feedback provided.

    Hope this helps.

  • Meeting double-tax

    Everyone’s favorite meeting is the meeting to prepare for a meeting. It’s like a double tax on your already overtaxed time.

    When our work is behind schedule, and someone calls a meeting to discuss creative ways to get back on track, why does our team need a meeting to prepare for that meeting?  Because it’s not about creative solutions, that’s why.  It’s about agreeing on who we can blame for sucking worse than we do.

    And when the project is done and the project manager schedules a “Lessons Learned” meeting, why does our team need a meeting to prepare for that?  You guessed it … it’s not about the lessons learned.  It’s about being prepared to deflect all criticism and prove that everyone else on the project sucked worse than we did. Thanks, but I’d rather have my time back, so I can do more and suck less!

    Here’s the point:  meetings to prepare for meetings always contribute to the suckiness of the workplace. Without them, people would have more time to do real work, and could actually have real discussions in the real meetings.  So please, stop double taxing my time.
    Hmmm… reminds me of the Types of Meetings.