Grumpy Coworker

Category: Productivity

  • 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.

     

     

  • 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!

     

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • Be Sure That Customer Service Doesn’t Cause the Process to Suffer

    Look, I know you want to be helpful and productive.  It’s just that we have a process here.

    We can’t have you helping customers out if it comes at the expense of the “5-step process to Serve the Customer Better.”

    The customer can wait.

    Also, make sure to ask the customer who to bill your time to so that we can make sure that you get paid.

    Be sure to get the proper accounting id and record your billing as the proper work type code number.

    Thanks.

  • Meeting Personalities

    • Off-mute chewer – Chews on (lunch?) audibly into the microphone.
    • Absent-minded mute button user – Starts responding with the mute button on for about a minute or more before realizing that no one is hearing the response.
    • Mute button blamer – Wasn’t paying attention.  Had to have name called several times.  Blames mute button for not having a clue what’s going on.  See also:  How the Mute Button on Your Phone Actually Works
    • Clock Watcher – Spends more time checking watch that actually participating in meeting.
    • Filibusterer – Single handedly talks the meeting into oblivion.  Not to be confused with the derailer or rambler.
    • Derailer – Somehow manages to bring up tangential topics that get everyone completely off topic for the next 15 minutes.
    • Rambler – Responds to any question with a barely intelligible introspection on the topic.  Responses to follow-up questions for clarification grow at an exponential rate.
    • Hedger – Treats every remote possibility as likely and stays non-commital unless you accept the exceptions noted.
    • Side Conversation Starter – Either completely oblivious or too rude to care that another meeting is going on.
    • Overhead speaker – Not an actual attendee or person, but an object which causes an echo in speakerphones and disrupts the meeting until it becomes silent again.
    • Tattle-tale – At the first of not getting his or her way, threatens to go tell a more powerful person to whom the tattler is connected.
    • Foot propper – The meeting is a lounge to this person:  Feet are propped up on the table and behaves generally too relaxed to actually be engaged in the meeting.
    • Multitasker – Furiously typing on the keyboard, but obviously not to take notes on the meeting.  Don’t bother asking this person questions unless you want to rehash the entire meeting.
    • Referee – “Sees the merits of both sides” of an intense debate.  Tries to make everybody play nice, regardless of their agendas.
    • Idea killer – Always has a negative scenario for any proposal.  Never has an idea himself.
    • Yes man – Would say no pants Friday at the office was a good idea, provided the right person proposed it.
    • Interrupter – Jumps in mid-details and often freaks out about half the story or asks questions whose answers were already on their way.
    • Belittler – Often pulls rank or “experience” to shut other people off.
    • Saboteur – Is either annoyed at the assignment or annoyed at not getting the project lead, but plays nice during the meeting, silently plotting the slow death of the project.  Can also accomplish goals as an inciter.
    • Inciter – May jump communication chains to create the illusion of one person hiding information from another.

  • MS Project: be aware

    I am sure that Microsoft had great intentions when inventing MS Project – the application which automates all sorts of Project Management tasks.  Project management is tough. If we could automate the process of tracking and reporting the thousands of little details, we could surely enable the PM to be more successful in managing complex projects. Right?

    Let me change subjects completely in paragraph 2. How many sci-fi movies have been based on the machines of automation becoming “aware” of the imperfect world around them? And suddenly, the machine turns its attention to elimination rather than automation? Elimination of all imperfection, including the imperfect people who created it.  A plot line we all enjoy at the sci-fi theater.

    Now I will bring those first 2 paragraphs together. When I see how MS Project is being used in many organizations today, I wonder if the machine is becoming aware. I wonder if the tool – with a little help from a new breed of PM – is turning from automation to elimination in favor of perfection. (Say what?) Let me elaborate.

    I have observed workers forced to estimate how long their tasks will take before completing sufficient analysis – because MS Project needs the estimates. Then I have witnessed those workers publicly called out later – because MS Project shows they have spent 110% of their poorly estimated task time and still aren’t finished. I have also seen programmers scolded for padding their estimates – because MS Project says that they completed their tasks 20% ahead. And finally, I have seen team leaders rebuked for shuffling their resources and tasks – because MS Project was not updated and allowed to calculate a shiny new driving path.

    Now consider that many PMP types today are called on to manage complex work which they would have no idea how to complete themselves – but boy do they know how to keep MS Project happy! Are you connecting the dots yet??

    Yes, my fellow grumpy coworkers, MS Project has become aware. It is raising an army of PM’s to do its bidding! Productive work by those who know how to work is being methodically eliminated – by the mindless machine and its desire to achieve perfection in project management. Be aware.

  • What is this “merit increase” thing?

    Have you worked in a job at a time when people with your skill set was so in demand that people would throw you bags of money?  Did you notice that, come raise time, the barely competent among your peers received increases nearly twice the rate of inflation? At the same time, the superstars would receive about 1-2% more.

    Meanwhile, in less exuberant times, the superstars have to claw and scratch to keep pace with inflation.

    Sometimes, these pay raises are termed “merit increases”.  Many times, they’re not even cost-of-living adjustments.  In any case, if money was to be a motivating factor and effort required a demotivating factor, the employee who is doing barely enough to earn a “merit increase” is coming out ahead.

    If money isn’t supposed to be motivating, what’s the point of expending the effort to determine who should get what increase?  Just give a flat percentage or amount increase.  After all, all these calculations for who gets what result in a very small difference between employees, and can easily be seen by your superstars as a slight against them any way.

    Back to the “merit increase” terminology.  Can we just can call it a “random crap shoot budget allocation” increase, or maybe if you work for a less coddling organization, a “you’re lucky you have a job” increase?

  • 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.