Grumpy Coworker

  • 40 Non-Billable Billable Hours

    I understand that many professions have billable hours.  Lawyers, accountants, and consultants in general need a way of quantifying slices of time in order to request payment from their many clients.

    If you’re part of a business who primarily consults with clients, then I understand the direct link between logging time and receiving payment.

    However, if you’re part of an internal organization that performs a standard function servicing thousands of internal clients who in turn serve internal clients themselves, tracking and categorizing time may be splitting hairs and counterproductive.  Should a timesheet really take an hour to fill out?  Should we really break down what kind of work and who we did it for on a time sheet?

    Apparently filling in 40 hours per week is not acceptable effort in filling in the time sheet.  Are we really talking about “time sheet effort” or work hours here?  I don’t really consider it consequential that I worked 8.25 hours on Monday and 8.75 on Thursday.  If the purpose is to indicate when someone is working too many hours, I think it would be more important to actually talk to the employees directly.  If I’m feeling passionate about a particular project, if would feel that it’s counterproductive to tell me to stop work on it because I’ve worked too many hours.

    Also, how am I supposed to classify “making coffee” and “deleting 2 MB internal bulk email items”?  If we are to assume that 40 hours of productive time occurred, I’m not certain that there would be enough hours in the day to fill those.

    It’s also suspect that every week logged must be over 40 hours per week when hourly employees are not allowed to log 40.25 hours in a week without permission.  This indicates that it’s more a question of how much value [hours] the organization is getting out of an employee for the pay given.

  • Haiku on Following Through

    If you say you can,
    Why do you not follow through?
    You’ve wasted my time.

  • 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.

  • Don’t Confuse Us With the Judean People’s Front

    …we’re the People’s Front of Judea!

    How many times has your organization made minor or major organization changes that made the naming of teams or departments less than 100% aligned with their job descriptions?  Obviously, the confusion generated by such inconsistencies cannot be allowed.

    More importantly, generic department names such as “information technology” won’t because such terms are neither cool nor do they offer enough variety to give every mid-level manager a team with a different name.  Worse still, what would happen if the CIO was also in charge of the sales department?  Clearly, “information technology” would not be a broad enough term for the department, and you’d have to name your department for some job that loosely resembles your function…  You’d become the “Barrista Department”.

    Inevitably, no name fits the mission completely, and no mission fits the need completely.  Therefore, management and teams must change, and names along with them.

    A lovely side effect of this is that the “old” names tend to still be used for some time after the fact.  Maybe you gave your team fancy logo wear to pump them up for the last name change.  Maybe you prefixed all of your documents with an abbreviation of the department name.  Maybe you had 2 million glossy business cards printed up with the new department name and logo.  Maybe you even had a special domain name with that department or division represented.

    Well, forget them.  They’re all useless.  Any use of the old names is likely to produce confusion.  Using the old names may also suggest that the old way was good enough, and we all know that reorganizations are perfect.

    Burn those business cards, shirts, and servers with legacy names and logos on them. Otherwise, you may get a scolding for clinging to the “old ways”.

    [If you don’t get the title reference, see the following YouTube clip (warning: language)

  • No, I will not join your downline.

    I’m not even sure these nutritional “supplements” are non-lethal, much less effective.  How do I know that these vitamins, or whatever they are, aren’t going to show up in a drug test later?

    I also have to ask:  What kind of compensation structure is involved that makes this multi-level marketing network marketing of nutritional supplements worth the time and energy you spend on it?

    Am I the only coworker you’ve tried to recruit for this?  If so, I must apologize for wearing my “sucker” outfit today.  All my other clothes were dirty, and I’m behind on my laundry.

    On the other hand, if I’m not the only coworker you’ve tried to recruit for this “opportunity”, how much work time are you spending recruiting?  Have you tried spending the same amount of time reading a book that might improve your performance?  Even if you get nothing out of the book, you’ll no longer be known as the “guy who tries to recruit people for every money making opportunity he finds.”  You might accidentally make more money from the lack of negative image drag.

    Honestly, if you were intentionally hired to do the job that you’re paid for, chances are fairly good that you’ll get a higher return on your invested time there than if you spend it trying to sell a product that you virtually nothing about.

  • A 15 minute meeting is more disruptive than a 3 hour one.

    A possible fictionalization of the history of meetings:

    A long time ago, possibly before the invention of electronic calendars, meetings were scheduled in one-hour blocks.

    Then, someone noticed that the electronic calendar could schedule meetings for 30 minutes, and so, half-hour meetings were born.

    Finally, someone really, really, smart realized that you could schedule meetings that went from 1:03 pm to 1:34 pm…

    Fortunately, no one else’s brain worked that way, so a happy medium of 15 minute increments for meetings was agreed upon.

    The Lilliputian Meeting Tyranny

    While the Brobdingnagian 3 and 4 hour meeting still strikes far more fear in the heart of productivity, the truth is that the ominous giants rarely have openings in the schedule walls that they can fit through.  Aside from brute force ramming into everyone’s schedules, the giants stay isolated in the wilderness.

    The real danger lies with the 15 minute meetings.  These Lilliputian meetings are not a threat because 160 15-minutes status meetings can squeeze into an open 40 hour schedule.  *shudder* They are a threat because  20 15-minute status meetings can fit into your lunch hour in a week, with none of them causing enough of a threat to be individually defended against.  Even worse, 40 more 15-minute meetings can be scheduled in the small bits of daylight in your schedule.

    Of course, the 15-minute meeting is too small to actually say “no” to.  It’s like making someone return their lunch because they’re 2 cents short of $2.89: What kind of person are you to make someone do that?  Are you that greedy with your time that you can’t spare 15 minutes?

    So, what do we accomplish in these meetings?

    The 15-Minute Meeting Agenda

    • 5 minutes travel time/dial-in time/waiting for people to realize their clock is out-of-sync
    • 5 minutes of greetings
    • 2 minutes of status
    • 3 minutes of disconnect beeps or leaving early for a restroom break

    Inspired yet?

  • 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.