Grumpy Coworker

  • Friday Distraction: Venice Beach Palm Trees

    Source: pdphoto.org

    Venice Beach Palm Trees

  • The Producers: Corporate Edition

    For those who haven’t seen The Producers (affiliate link), the premise is two producers who get the idea to oversell shares of a horrible play [hundreds of times over], so that they can make off with the surplus when the play ultimately flops early. Unfortunately, the play is smashing success and the producers are now on the hook for paying out many times the actual profits of the show.

    It seems like support resource planning often goes this way–departments budget and sell their services under the assumption of a best case scenario [virtually nothing goes wrong]. Ultimately, the first outage of services begets additional outages of services, and selling that same support resource to 250 people becomes a recipe for disaster.

  • Political Overtime

    New business analysts. Tight timelines. Sensitive business periods…

    Halfway through the project, one of the “customers” decides to pay attention during a review of minor specification update. Interestingly enough, the customer doesn’t pay attention to the relatively minor changes that you’re pointing out. Instead, the customer decides to focus on wording in the first few lines of the first page of the document [cue the rant about extensive specifications being too long to be useful].

    “That’s not how our business works,” the customer says, pointing to the wording that has been in the document since the very first drafts.

    “That’s how the system was designed, and how your counterparts everywhere else in the company do theirs.” Yeah, the “everybody else is doing it”-style reasoning. That wins over customers about as well as it did parents when you were little.

    Cue a restart of the entire project.

    Months later, you’re far beyond the possibility of making your original timelines, but effectively, you’ve done all the work you can do. The solution? You’re asked come in to work the weekend to make a good show of demonstrating that you’re doing everything you can to finish the project on time. In reality, you have trouble finding administrative tasks to do, yet, you come in every weekend for several weeks under the premise that making the political statement of being there is going to somehow offset the project delay itself.

    Meanwhile, you’re burning yourself out before the next project even begins.

  • Types of Meetings

    Reposted with Permission from YouMightBe.com

    Meeting before the meeting – A select group of people, usually from the same team, decide what the “correct outcome” of the main meeting is supposed to be. When the main meeting comes, the co-conspirators stick to their guns about what must be done.

    Meeting after the meeting – Often, the people who were run over by the pre-meeting decision will have a meeting afterward to discuss what just hit them. Especially true when the main meeting involved a large vendor.

    Meeting just to make sure we keep having this meeting – An agenda-less meeting that occurs during the only available weekly time slot on the calendars of all participants, so everyone shows up and fakes it through the meeting aimlessly until the time is up.

    The mutually ignored meeting – Sometimes coincides with the “meeting just to make sure we keep having this meeting.”  Usually, however, this meeting has a more organized structure.  Everyone participates in the meeting by speaking in turn, yet no one actually hears anything that the other participants are saying.  Often coincides with the “project status meeting”.

    Pep Rally Meeting – These meetings are supposed to replicate the glory days of the tech boom, complete with an enthusiastic leader leading the cheering.  These can be fun if the overall culture of the company fits.  They can also be the source of YouTube videos.

    Sub-Meeting – A complete side discussion that starts by distracting major participants in the main meeting, and eventually overtakes the main meeting purpose, either by acoustics or by importance.

    “Party” Meeting – This may be a special occasion to recognize a milestone birthday, anniversary, retirement, etc., and is often characterized by a lot of standing around in odd clusters of people.  People from each of these clusters take turns migrating to the focus of the party to say a good word, and then drift back to their clusters or to their desks.  Social aptitude generally determines how long a person has to wait to for a turn.

    Project “status” meeting – A regular project “update” meeting where everyone gives an “everything’s okay” status, regardless of what part of the project is crashing and burning.

    Virtual Meeting – A remote meeting that everyone dials into and immediately mutes, proceeding to spent their time more productively, such as by watching Sportscenter or playing ping-pong.

    Meeting to teach someone how to run a meeting – This is generally a status-type meeting where a less-experienced team member learns how to start a meeting, stick to an agenda, and write down and assign “action items”.

  • Look Out for the Cubicle Police

    I’m curious what the ROI of enforcing rules such as these are:
    • No more than 3 personal items on your desk.
    • No obscuring the translucent partitions.
    • No whiteboards.

    Rules like these require either a system put in place to snitch on your fellow coworkers or someone to watch for violations as part of their job.

    This isn’t to mention rules such as the following:

    • No window seats below a certain pay grade.
    • No cubes above a certain shape and size below a certain pay grade.
    • No non-fixed tables for certain cube types.
    • Only one chair per cube.
    • Contractors can only have a single desk and not a cube.

    These rules often require a lot of effort, such as tearing down and rebuilding all of the cubes, just to be in compliance.

     

     

  • The Styles of Crisis Management

    Mountain out of a Molehill Crisis Management – There’s a problem. Maybe, it’s not really a problem. Maybe, something arrived five minutes late one time. This crisis manager is on the phone and mass emailing everybody at the first sign of imperfection.

    It’s Your Fault I Screwed Up Crisis Management – This time, there really *is* a problem. However, the true cause of the problem escapes this crisis manager. Every team that interacts with this crisis manager is emailed, called, or blamed for causing the problem. Sometime later, this crisis manager’s crazed emails stop with a minimal admission of actual guilt.

    Screaming the Loudest Crisis Management – The above two crisis manager types generally resort to this method. Emails and phone calls escalate up organizational charts until the crisis manager is hit with the threat of termination or felony harassment charges, whichever comes first.

    Legit Crisis Manager – Stays cool, analyzes the problem objectively, makes key decisions and… *yawn*.  Let’s move on…

    Problem Creators – Like a workplace case of Münchausen by Proxy syndrome, this crisis manager creates problems that, while in theory should question competence, really call into question whether the person is creating the problem for attention or to “showcase their problem solving skills.”

    Ignore Problems Until They Become Crises – The procrastinating crisis manager. Doesn’t really care about a problem unless it is a crisis. This is possibly due to an inability to solve even the most basis of problems without an intense adrenaline rush.

    Too Understaffed To Address Any Issues That Are Not Crises – The source of the common complaint, “Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.” Examining the underlying issues that aren’t crises or staffing appropriately would involve risk, and therefore, nothing beyond crises actually gets worked on.

  • How Not to Leave a Phone Message

    Many of us phone novices are guilty of this…  Do not leave your phone message like this:

    My name is [x] with [y]

    Paragraph 1

    Paragraph 2

    Paragraph 3

    Paragraph 4

    Paragraph 5

    … two minutes later …

    My number is [blur]

    My cell number is [blur]

    My name is [x]

    I have to replay/navigate to the end of the message to get the phone number. With cell phone message functionality this works okay, however, I don’t have my voicemail shortcuts memorized, so I’m stuck re-listening to the whole message.

    Also, the only thing you repeated was your name. That’s moderately useful, but your contact info is far more important. If I don’t have that, remembering what your name is is useless.

    I would personally prefer a script like this:

    Hi, my name is [x] with [y].

    My number is [spoken while you write it down].

    My cell number is [spoken while you write it down].

    I’m calling about [n].  [Maybe a second sentence goes here].

    Again, my name is [x] with [y].

    My number is [spoken while you write it down].

    My cell number is [spoken while you write it down].

    Please don’t try to solve the issues you’re calling about on the message. There’d be no reason to call in that case.

  • Email Violating Personalities

     

    Yes, Email is Still the Way to #fail in a Deep, Meaningful Way…

    However, there are some ways to fail in smaller ways on a daily basis:

    • General etiquette violators
      • bcc: everyone – There are times when bcc: is desirable, e.g., when sending out a broadcast email to a large group to limit the damage of those who are too quick with “Reply to All” button. In this case, however, a person is conducting a business transaction of some sort and not revealing who else is “in the know”. Results in a lot of, “I don’t know if you’ve seen this or not,” email forwards.
      • Thread trimmer – selectively deletes one or two people periodically from a large email chain, confusing every participant on the list.
      • Reply to All abuser – distinguished from the casual Reply to All user by the use of the button in replying to department-wide email distributions.
      • Subtle Humor User – keeps you guessing on whether the person is joking.
      • !???!! – really is enthusiastic and/or concerned.
      • Priorities are out-of-whack – uses high (or even stranger low) priority markers to try to get attention for what is generally little more than an FYI email.
      • Receipt requestor – Good grief, do you really need a read receipt from the 100 people you emailed about the pot luck on Friday?
    • Appearance violators
      • Pastels and Cute Fonts User – Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
      • Script kitty – uses a nearly illegible cursive font for a default font.
      • Noisy Backgrounder – uses a background that obscures the ability to read the text on top.
      • Reverse video – loves light on dark appearance settings, which completely wreck havoc with anyone else’s replies.
    • Signature violators
      • The signature that never ends – Really, if you need to be contacted so badly that you leave your mother-in-law’s home phone, you probably should have a company cell phone.
      • Motivation spreader – Puts motivational sayings in the signature.
      • Massive signature image – Uses an embedded image in the signature that often dwarfs the email body itself.
    • Attachment violators
      • Media mailer – Those who try to attach mp3s and videos and somehow manage to fly under the “attachment size limit” radar. Unaware that audio and video actually take up a lot of storage space.
      • Sender of abnormally large documents – Someone who manages to send “office” documents that somehow violate the normal proportions and end up hitting the attachment size limit after about 10 pages.
      • Image embedder – Someone who doesn’t realize that Outlook converts embedded images to the most inefficient format possible. May use PowerPoint as an email formatting tool.

  • Signs you picked the wrong startup to work for

    • you build a website with WordPress or Blogger that used default templates and you’re all of sudden the lead designer.
    • the CEO of the company still uses a Quixnet or other MLM program email address.
    • the CEO is selling the premeasured coffee packets for brewing coffee.
    • the prototype website was built by one of the VC’s nephews in WYSIWYG website builder.
    • the total of all virtual goods sold last year does not equal how much you’re supposed get paid for your next paycheck.
    • your company depends on outsourced designers and web developers, yet the last three web design firms have “ripped the company off”.
    • your CEO wants to create the next Facebook/Twitter, but has never used the sites themselves.
    • part of your business strategy is sell professional services packages for less than the hourly rate of the subcontractors you’re using.
    • this business strategy seems to repeat elsewhere as a buy high, sell low strategy.
    • you’re becoming suspicious that the primary revenue source of the company is the employees themselves.
    • business direction change frequency depends on how often the CEO’s favorite blog posts articles.

  • The iPhone Method of Better Meetings

    I’m not a huge fan of people checking their email during meetings, but I have to admit to doing it or worse. However, there are two sides to the smartphone inattention problem during meetings: people’s OCD or lack of etiquette and the lack of value or engagement of the meeting presentation.

    I propose two solutions:

    For small/serial meetings, the smartphone should never be responded to inside the meeting room. Ask those who use their phone in the meeting room to leave the meeting for 5 minutes on the first offense and expel the person from the meeting on the second offense. The lack of engagement of the distracted person wastes everyone’s time, including that of the person who is absorbed in the phone. This also serves to remove non-contributors from meetings and gets the attention of those who actually need to contribute.

    For larger meetings, the minute more than 1/3rd of the audience pulls out their smartphones, that should be a two minute warning to end the presentation. If that many people aren’t paying attention, what’s the point of continuing the presentation to that audience? Either the audience is a bad fit or the presentation is.