Grumpy Coworker

  • ROWE, ROWE, ROWE your boat.

    I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Results Only Work Environments [ROWE], particularly from the book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Amazon link).

    I was curious about finding a naysayer and found Why I Don’t Like Rowe | Renegade HR.  The article points out ethics, some worker’s need for structure, and communication/morale/culture challenges of working remotely.

    I thought of an even bigger challenges–loosely related to structure:

    1. Often, there isn’t much agreement on what results are.  Driven employees will hit home runs that management won’t even understand.
    2. It’s so much more convenient to clock watch employees 8 to 5.
    3. Those same clock watchers would rather judge productivity by seeing that more than 40 hours in a week are logged by everyone than try to figure out if more than 1 hour per week of actual work was done.
    4. How the heck can you have a 3 hour, 120 person meeting if not everyone is working 8 to 5?

  • Bookmarked: Multitasking is still a lie

    Multitasking is still a lie | Christopher S. Penn’s Awaken Your Superhero.

    I love this:  “If you are multitasking, you are either doing work that is trivial or you’re doing a poor job.”

    Try this experiment if you doubt the reality of the above statement:  Next time you’re on a date with your spouse or significant other, be sure to stay buried in your smartphone the whole time.

    Okay, so that takes focus, huh?

    Well, certainly, watching your favorite football team play requires far less focus.  Try watching the game while reading up on some complex instructions.  Did you comprehend the instructions?  Did you enjoy the game?  Or did you lose twice?

    Realistically, multitasking can work if one of the tasks is trivial or tedious and the other more enjoyable:

    • running on a treadmill and listening to music
    • sorting and folding the laundry and watching a movie

    Of course, one activity is primarily physical and the other primarily mental.

    However, in the work world, we’re never talking about tightening lug nuts and financial analysis in the multitasking context. We’re talking about two knowledge-based tasks.

  • 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.

  • Hot Potato Status Meeting Game

    [Amazon affiliate link]

    Originally posted at YouMightBe.com.

    Object of the game: Don’t be caught giving your status update when the potato goes off.

    Requires: Hot potato timer or random timer smartphone app.  If you know of a link to a good one, please leave it in the comments.

    Rules of the game:

    1. A different person starts the status meeting every week.
    2. The random “Hot Potato” timer starts when the first person begins his or her update.
    3. When an update is complete, the person picks a random person to hand/toss the “hot potato” to.
    4. Repeat giving updates and handing off the potato until updates are complete or the hot potato goes off.
    5. If the potato goes off during your update, you must buy coffee and donuts/bagels/etc. for the entire team the next morning.
    6. If the entire meeting goes off without the potato going off, the manager buys the food.
    7. Interrupting an update means that you get to hold the potato next, or if you’ve gone already, until the person giving the update is finished talking.

  • December happens this time every year.

    2011 Planning Calendar (Amazon affiliate link)

    There are certain things that have to wait until year-end… most of them have to do with financials, payroll, or other things that directly involve paying or receiving money or the government wanting to know what the company has done this year. Much of the work revolving around these normal year-end occurrences also happens just after year-end.

    These last-minute projects in the middle of the month December don’t count.

    December happens this time every year.  Why is there a sudden rush of things that must be done before the end of the year?  Where was all of this work in the summer months?

    Do you wait until December to get serious about your New Year’s resolution from the beginning of the year?  Okay, that’s a horrible example.

    Why does all of this work magically need to be done by the end of the year now? Did we look at our accomplishments during the year and find that we didn’t have enough?  If working like crazy during the month of December is all that it takes to justify a paycheck the rest of the year, can we all just have the first 11 months off with pay?

  • Stop sending powerpoint slides exported to bitmaps via email.

    Whack-a-mole
    (Amazon affiliate link)


    I feel like I’m playing a game of digital whack-a-mole with my email.  My inbox keeps bumping up against its quota.

    I then spend X amount of time weeding out my inbox, archiving folders, etc., to get the email that is on the server down to 40% of my quota.  I then leave for lunch, only to find another 5% of my quota eaten up by 3 broadcast messages.

    Did you know you can export a PowerPoint slide to a bitmap image?  Did you know you can copy and paste that same image into an email?  Did you know you can paste the same stuff into a calendar invite that you can put into an email?

    Well, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.  Sure, my inbox quota is tiny by modern computing standards, but this is all the more reason not to attach large images in an email.

    Of course, a picture is worth a thousand words.  Unless it’s a picture of 50 words on a PowerPoint slide.  And 50 words in light green on a white background is probably worth less than 50 words.

    One more thing: If you send important things like agenda updates or such which are embedded in this exported PowerPoint slide, Outlook will not find them.  It doesn’t know how to read the text in an image.

  • Breakroom amenities

    Why does the office microwave look and sound like something out of a cartoon from the 1960s? Is there a small dinosaur in there grinding gears or something?

    And I know I saw that refrigerator go on sale sometime back in the 80’s.  No one would buy it back then, either.

    If you have to stock the breakroom with stuff that came from great grandma’s garage sale, should I be worried about your ability to meet payroll?

  • Stop the rudeness!

    It always seems to happen during the worthwhile presentation:  the ongoing “side-bar conversation” that is loud enough to be heard in the street-bar on a Friday night.

    There are 3 possible messages these people are sending with their rudeness:

    • “I am a higher level employee than the person presenting, and I wish to make it abundantly clear that I don’t have to respect them.”
    • “I am an equal level employee, but I know them, don’t respect them, and should be a higher level than them.”
    • “I am a lower level employee, and a moron.”

    In any case, you are being a disrespectful jerk. Do the rest of us a favor and stop it.

  • Leave the stuff that’s not yours alone!

    How hard is it to leave other people’s things alone?  What is this, 2nd grade?

    I could understand if you had a non-descript Lean Cuisine or Hot Pocket that you put in the freezer and accidentally grabbed the someone else’s flavor, or miscounted how many you had put in there and grabbed someone else’s when your stash was actually depleted.

    No.

    I’m not even talking about mistaking a lone donut on the break room table for a giveaway.

    I’m talking about:

    • Perusing items in the donation bin for a charity.
    • Actually taking things from the donation bin for a charity.
    • Grabbing food from the freezer that is in a box that is clearly someone else’s.
    • Any food in a brown bag in the refrigerator.
    • Any food that’s on someone’s desk–especially if someone has already taken a bite out of it.

    Is the company not paying you enough to get by?  Judging by the maturity of your social skills, you’re probably still overpaid.

  • Ideation, innovation, and breakthrough, oh my!

    You want us to what?  Make time to focus on ideation, innovation, and breakthrough thinking?

    It all sounds good enough. Surely we would crush our competition if we could just put our collective brains together and ideate an innovation that led to instant breakthrough.

    But you didn’t hire us to innovate, did you?  Whenever I try, I find it impossible to think past this stack of mundane assignments and my meager paycheck, which are all screaming, “Get back to work you fool!”  Will I be off the hook if I think breakthrough thoughts for an hour and fail to finish my backlog?  (My ideation says not.)

    Look, if all the Innovators are fresh out of good ideas, maybe you should fire them and find some Ideators to take their place. But please stop piling their work on my full plate; after all, somebody has to keep the wheels turning around here.

    How’s THAT for some breakthrough thinking!