Grumpy Coworker

  • The Collateral Damage of a Meeting

    Atlanta, Ga., January 25, 2007 -- Region IV Di...
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    Meetings, much like 1-hour credit lab courses in colleges, carry a much higher price than their appointed time indicates.

    We’ve been over this before:  A 15-minute meeting is more disruptive than a 3 hour one elaborated on the 15-minute meeting agenda:

    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

    Collateral Damage

    There’s more to it than that this.  There is also collateral damage.  Everyone assumes that calendar openings = free time, so you often end up with every hour filled with at least a half hour meeting.

    Appointment Backlog

    Half-hour meetings rarely run under on time.  In fact, the greeting, handshaking, and orientation portion of the meeting may take 10 to 15 minutes, unless you have an incredible facilitator for the meeting.  Therefore, if the subject matter was worth 30 minutes, the meeting will be closer to 45 minutes in length.  This expansion of appointment time is similar to the reason why your doctor’s appointment runs an hour behind.

    Anticipation Frustration

    With good fortune, your hourly half-hour meetings will only take 40-45 minutes, leaving you with free time in between.  In this space of time you will worry about being prepared for the next meeting, take care of things (like eating) that you’ve not been giving other time for, and sit in the frustration of not being able to start anything in the amount of time you have left.

    Action Items

    Effective meeting facilitation will draw out a to-do list of action items that are to be resolved outside of the scope of the meeting, often to prevent the delay in their resolution from holding up the meeting itself. In principle, these are effective tools. In practice, combined with fully booked schedules, they can be like spending 8am-5pm working on adding items to your personal to-do list–it just keeps getting bigger.

    Compound Multitasking

    With the backlog of to-do list items and meetings, people begin doing “other work” in their meetings. Therefore, as meetings themselves impact the productivity of other work, meetings become less productive and end up running longer to get the same amount of work done–a downward spiral of productivity destruction.

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  • Do Not Mess with the Flow of Coffee

    New coffee maker
    Image by scriptingnews via Flickr

    I know times are tough, and that we need to save money wherever we can.

    That being said, DON’T MESS WITH THE FLOW OF COFFEE.

    *ahem* Please, excuse me for yelling.  The supply of coffee to your workers is as vital to the productivity of your office as the supply of gasoline is to the transportation system.

    Some things not to do without careful analysis and communication to your workers:

    • Requiring workers to pay for the office coffee.
    • Changing the supplier of the coffee to your break room.
    • Changing the model of coffee maker to a cheaper one.  (You had better make sure it can actually handle the load that your office staff will put on it.)
    • “Going green” by no longer supplying cups. It’s best to get acknowledgment in writing from every one of your employees, lest a revolt break out due to the inability of people to actually get coffee, or worse, people taking the carafes as coffee mugs.

     

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  • Friday Diversion: Sunrise through the clouds

    Sunrise through the clouds
    Sunrise through the clouds by Betchaboy, on Flickr

  • Crash the Project Plan

    Crash Closed
    Image by Fabio.com.ar via Flickr

    Why in the world would you want to “crash” a project plan? The very use of the word “crash” seems to purvey a sense of doom.

    If you’re not familiar with the “crashing” process, it involves taking a current project plan’s Gantt chart and looking for opportunities to make the chart predict an earlier completion date.

    In some cases, this is a completely legitimate practice.  If you have tasks that can be done at the same time by two different people or tasks that are erroneously dependent upon each other, you can possibly shorten the timeline by crashing.

    However, I’ve also observed the practice of having an already promised date set for a project, and then having your project managers actually figure out how long it will actually take. When realistic expectations are inevitably longer than promised, the discrepancy will either be:

    1. Allowed to slip for the time being if comfortably close to the original promised date.
    2. Immediately scrutinized for tasks that take “too long”.  (Build a highway: 1 year…  Change that to 2 days.)

    Ultimately, there will be a process of crashing either at the start of the project or in the middle of the project. Unfortunately, response to reality taking longer than promised is often to redefine what reality should be instead of actually trying to accept reality.

    The end result becomes a crashing of the project instead of the project plan.

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  • Offensive Email

    No, not offensive email that will get you in trouble with HR, just with the recipients of your emails who already have enough bloat in their inboxes.

    This email is all wrong. Don't send it.

    What’s the problem?

    1. I think we covered the part about motivational sayings in email signatures previously…
    2. The information block in your email signature is excessive. Internally, we know what company you work for. Externally, the title/department information probably won’t mean much.
    3. You’re sending an email for a one word reply. I know acknowledgment is necessary, but coupled with everything else, it’s excessive.
    4. Your one word reply is the same as your valediction or complimentary close:  “Thanks. Thanks,” sounds like “Pizza! Pizza!“
    5. You have an image that’s larger than the rest of your excessive signature block and message body combined–and it’s taking up way more space in email [if you’re using Outlook] than it did on the computer you copied it from.

  • Read Receipts in Outlook

    Read receipts can be obnoxious. Outlook’s handling of them can be equally obnoxious.

    I curiously received a read receipt in Outlook when I scheduled a meeting, that meeting was forwarded by a invitee of the meeting, and the recipient of the forward accepted.

    Why, Outlook? Why? I don’t want read receipts. I don’t want a read receipt for every recipient of the 100 emails I sent last week. I have enough time balancing between my inbox quota and keeping the necessary emails on the server so that I can access them remotely.

    Of course, after seeing the read receipt, I was curious how many people I’m sending read receipts to and not knowing it–so I turned on the option to “Ask me before sending a response” to read receipt requests:

    • In Outlook 2007, select the Tools menu.
    • Click on “Options…”
    • In the “Preferences” tab [the default tab], click the “E-mail Options” button.
    • In the “E-mail Options” window, click the “Tracking Options” button.
    • You have three options for setting the response.
      • Always send a response
      • Never send a response
      • Ask me before sending a response

    Apparently, “read receipts” also mean “send a message if recipient deletes the message without reading it.” That concept is creepy enough, but apparently, even the messages that are just notifications that a recipient has accepted a meeting invite send receipts back if the recipient of the acceptance notification deletes the email.

    I wonder if it sends a read receipt when I’ve read someone’s “Out of Office” message. I wouldn’t be surprised.

  • Be Open to Change!

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    “The only constant is change.”

    “Be open to change.”

    “Embrace change.”

    For those who work in small businesses or startups, these mantras probably aren’t necessary. When you’re breathing constant change, you don’t have to be reminded that it exists.

    No, the only people that have to be reminded that “change happens” are those who work for large, slow moving organizations, such as large corporations and government agencies. Many of us have actually stuck with these organizations, despite all the bureaucracy, specifically because change is such a rarity.

    Stop telling us safety seeking employees about this whole change thing. Stop giving us copies of Who Moved My Cheese? If we truly embraced change, we probably wouldn’t suffer the high degree of bureaucracy in favor of the safety of the large organization.

  • Review: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

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    The Five Dysfunctions of a Team has information that seems like it should be common sense to everyone. Absence of trust, fear of conflict, etc… all of these are negative habits and emotions that erode the ability for a team to actually be effective.

    One result is meetings becoming non-productive time-killers in which eliciting even the most innocuous discussion is met with fierce resistance.

    I see the principles in this book functioning the best in healthy corporate cultures and passionate non-profits. Where I don’t see these concepts functioning well are in caustic cultures and in disruptive periods in a company’s existence.

    While it’s true that every one of these dysfunctions can be triggered internally, possibly exacerbated by a poor leader of the team, the root of these problems can often be traced to the culture of the company or immediate department in which the team functions.

    In lean times, when there is a Survivor culture, detection and exposing of someone else’s weakness is the simplest way to survive another week. It’s hard to not be a dysfunctional team when you’re basically a pack of starving feral dogs.

    In some environments, dissent can often mark people who even turn out to be right. (Why didn’t you successfully argue your case? It’s your fault we didn’t go with your opinion.)

    I guess all management books operate on the principle that you have a basically good environment and good people, and this book is no exception. If you have worthwhile people for the most part, I can see where this book may be helpful, but then again, you probably have functional team–right?

     

  • It’s Just Like Elementary School

    Remember the days when you were in school, and some kid in your class would do something while the teacher wasn’t looking? Then, the teacher would demand that the person come forward or the whole class would be punished?

    Ok, maybe that still occasionally happened in high school, or in training for a military service branch. You’re using peer pressure to the enforce the rules. In the high school case, it’s because the mutual pressure of a student’s peers is stronger than any reasonably proportional punishment you can deal out, especially if you have no clue who did it. In the military case, it’s to drive home the concept that every little thing you do impacts the entire team.

    Of course, at work, everything you do has the potential to impact your team. However, I doubt that one team member’s choice to wear jeans with partially exposed backsides should be met with taking away the privilege of wearing jeans for the entire office. It should be met with some sort of HR or law enforcement action, depending on how bad the offense really is.

    But suppose some people are just pushing the rules too far: If people are wearing pajamas to work, then those people should be told by their managers to stop. If entire teams are doing it, obviously the managers are not getting the message through. Even if there is a failure on enforcing some policy on the part of one manager, there shouldn’t be a company-wide change in response. The solution still lies with one person.

    …or you could just treat us all like we’re back in elementary school. Class, we’re all going to have to stay after school because Johnny didn’t get his work done.  Oh, wait. That still happens.

    Never mind, forget this whole post.

  • 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.