Grumpy Coworker

  • 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.

  • Inbox Trolling

    A fun game to play when you have a completely unmanageable inbox is to start replying to long email threads that you were included on but never participated in. It helps if the administrators of your mail system allow messages to stick around for about 3 months–usually long enough to potentially impact a decision, but way too late to do so without tremendous cost.

    The key is to remain inconspicuous about your trolling. You must raise legitimate concerns, but not be too adamant about decisions being changed. The best policy is to plant little nagging doubts in everyone’s minds, then walk away.

    Start with the oldest threads first, resurrecting them in mid-discussion, then sit back and watch the discussion re-ignite.

    Repeat in sequence with newer threads in your inbox once the entertainment value of the current thread dies away.

  • The Priority Queue, or Why the Low Priority Tasks Don’t Exist

    A queue is wonderful thing… the next person in line gets the next available worker.

    However, in many situations, the first person in line shouldn’t always be serviced first, for example, in an emergency room: You can’t leave a person having a blow-out heart attack in the third place in line behind a broken arm and someone who has a rash on his foot.

    In these cases, you create a priority queue, and process first-come, first-serve for all concerns of like priority…  Your priority tiers in the emergency room could be something like: immediately life-threatening, potentially life-threatening or capable of resulting in permanent injury, all the way down to mild irritation [the symptom or the patient].

    In a strict priority queue, if there are enough immediately life-threatening emergencies, the people with broken arms and mild irritations will not receive attention until the life-threatening emergencies go away.  If the hospital is chronically understaffed, those low priority issues will never receive any attention. In the middle of the spectrum are those whose problems aren’t immediately life-threatening but will become so if enough time goes by.

    This is not to mention that at some point between serious issues and irritation is lunch for the hospital staff.

    There comes a point where either the low priority and medium priority patients need to be shipped to another hospital unless you want a couple of them to become life-threatening and the rest to cause a riot in your hospital, in which the overworked hospital staff may be tempted to participate.

    Just admit to the mild irritations that they’re going to have to go elsewhere to be treated–unless they have extenuating circumstances that make them higher priority than your original assessment.

     

  • Diseconomy of Scale

    From Wikipedia: Diseconomy of Scale (The article has the “original research” warning, and therefore, should be taken with more of a grain of salt than even the average Wikipedia article.

    Diseconomies of scale are the forces that cause larger firms and governments to produce goods and services at increased per-unit costs. They are less well known than what economists have long understood as “economies of scale”, the forces which enable larger firms to produce goods and services at reduced per-unit costs. The concept may be applied to non-market entities as well. Some political philosophies, such as libertarianism, recognize the concept as applying to government.

    There are obvious efficiencies that come with increased size: The per-worker overhead of a leased office for two people can be slightly more than half that of an office for one person. Meanwhile, two people can potentially accomplish at least double what person can do.

    Moreover, there is a certain minimum size below which certain tasks are not feasible. One million individuals working alone would likely not be able to create a practical system of roadways going from Atlantic to Pacific coasts. Some things require big scale to make them happen.

    Unfortunately, there is a point where the additional costs incurred by adding additional resources [see Handshake Problem] are greater than the additional savings gained by sharing the resources with one more person.

    The scale problem illustrated with keeping track of organizational “to-do” lists:

    • 1 person – might be forced to write things down on a scrap of paper to keep things organized.
    • 2 people – leave post-it notes.
    • 5-10 people – use team to-do list software.
    • 10-30 people – may use more sophisticated, “issue-tracking” software.
    • 30-100 people – may use a more generic activity management software
    • 100+ people – have to be certified to be on the use of standardized language and procedures so that activities may be managed in the most effective way possible.

    The last step in the chain here are procedures for dealing with procedures to track tasks.  That’s a virtual calculus of bureaucracy. Considering how few people are any good at the mathematical calculus, which deals which actual numbers and formulas, I would imagine that bureaucratic calculus is nearly impossible.

  • Bookmark: Ever Feel Like the Latest Fad is Oddly Like the Old One?

    Break through Mo@#&#ing B@##%!t.

    Mo@#*&#ing Manifesto for Programming, Mo@#*&#ers (NSFW language)

  • Defeating the Clockwatching Game

    Your rivals and managers in the office are playing a clockwatching game with you. Among their tools are:

    • Email timestamps.
    • Parking lot spots.
    • People witnessing you walking in and walking out with your bags.
    • Instant messages peppered through lunch hours.
    • Away status on instant messenger.
    • Online status on instant messenger.

    These things cannot be used in your favor so much as having interference run against them.

    • Schedule Outlook Messages
    • Park in the farthest space available, always.
    • Keep a coffee mug in your car, and fill it up on a different floor. Walk in with you laptop powered up or a keep a spare notebook in your car and walk in with that.
    • Hook up your smartphone to an instant messaging client that works with your instant messenger.

    By the way, if you’re using this to slack off, your lack of productivity will ultimately be found out, you scoundrel.

  • Cubicle Maze

    If you search Google for “cubicle maze”, you’ll find about half a million results. Many people have made connection between cube walls and the the walls of a maze.

    Under normal circumstances, the wall angles are where the resemblance ends. However, after years of reworking office layouts and adding height to some walls for privacy, the plentiful aisles and virtual hallways begin to disappear. The contorting of sections of office has the same scrambling effect that turning random sides on a Rubik’s cube has.

    After hitting one too many dead ends trying to get to the elevator, I’m wondering if the fire marshall should be called. I mean, is there a clear evacuation path for everyone in the building? Are all the people in the office able get out of the area in which they’ve been walled in? Do they jump the walls to enter and exit their cubes?

    Maze, found on publicdomainpictures.net

  • The Social Bonds of a Team

    I’m sure that, somewhere out there, some popular business wisdom says that people get stagnant when they stay in the same core group too long. Maybe they’re supposed to start failing to come up with new ideas because they are stuck in the mode of groupthink. Maybe they’re too comfortable and complacent. Maybe well-bonded teams are supposedly full of self-promotion and cronyism.

    There must be some business wisdom that says that, because it seems that reorganizations often target the cohesive teams as non-productive.

    Here’s a different perspective: Teams are families. They have black sheep and dysfunctional members. However, they also find a way to survive despite the individual failings of each team member that would otherwise be somewhat insurmountable. Teams have an implicit loyalty and trust that bypasses the initial trust evaluation phase that occurs with a new relationship.

    What if teams function as an extension of the neural networks that shape the individual members of the team? Just as a person who takes up tennis one year, then switches to piano, then cooking,  never becomes good at anything, teams that never build a cohesive unit never become good at anything.

    Of course, reorganization itself doesn’t have to permanently break down team cohesiveness. New teams can form, just like people join new families. The danger occurs in the perpetual reorganization cycle, especially when team members have no real input about their interests. Such cycles have the same effect on team building that moving a child from foster home to foster home has on trust. Eventually, people just assume that any bonding effort will be wasted and quit bothering to try.

  • 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.