Grumpy Coworker

  • 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.

  • Email is Still the Way to #Fail in a Deep, Meaningful Way

    Twitter is for Explosive Fails

    I have to admit, if you’re going to fail spectacularly, email is no longer the best option.

    At this point in time, Twitter is the best option:

    The upside of failing on Twitter is that everyone following Twitter news seems to have such a short attention span, that…  oh look a cute kitten.

    Email is for Deep, Meaningful Fails

    Still, if you want to fail on a deep, personal level, email is still the way to go. Email allows you the space to make you think that your sarcasm or bad humor is getting across, unlike Twitter, which limits you to 140 characters.

    More importantly, unlike phone conversations and face-to-face meetings [assuming no external recording devices are used], email always leaves a somewhat permanent record of your poor judgment.

    Some tips on making your email failure a meaningful experience:

    • When someone sends an email asking for confirmation before proceeding, be sure to respond in a font 4 times the size of all prior correspondence.
    • …ALL CAPS helps as well.
    • Be sure to add sarcasm to your response, but be careful not to indicate sarcasm in any way.  Your readers should be able to recognize the sarcasm unless they are complete idiots, in which case, they deserve to take the response the wrong way.
    • Be sure to use non-neutral and high contrast foreground [lime green]/background[fire engine red] colors in your response, in order to simulate a migraine in the person reading your response.
    • Be sure to reply to all whenever you’re angry.  This increases the likelihood that someone will respond quickly.
    • Whatever you do, don’t hesitate to use email when you’re emotional. Talking on the phone or in person can only show weakness.  In email, everyone’s a WARRIOR.

  • Office Supply Micromanagement

    If there’s one cost-saving pursuit that seems tremendously disproportionate to its savings in terms of benefits, it’s micromanaging the use of and access to office supplies.

    Let’s say that, it terms of salary and benefits, your average office worker costs $100,000 per year. Assuming two weeks vacation, that employee spends about 2000 hours in the office. That’s $50 per hour.

    Now let’s say that an average employee uses 4 reams of paper per year (at about $12), an entire toner cartridge worth $31, and 5 fairly nice office supply cabinet pens worth $15. I’m making these numbers up, but I think they’re fairly reasonable upper limits for the average employee.

    If you have 1000 employees using this much in office supplies, is it really worth devoting a major portion of any worker’s time to more effective management of office supplies? Do you really need a gatekeeper? Are you afraid your employees having being stealing office supplies so that they can retire early?

  • On wellness programs…

    @ChrisFerdinandi‘s post “When Wellness Sucks” on Renegade HR got me inspired to play around with making a video at Xtranormal…

    The following video, “The Steps to Wellness Program,” is about all those wellness competitions that people take so seriously, at least until they decide that “winning” the competition is really all they really care about, and not making realistic changes to their lifestyle.

    A wellness provider, Recess, put together a website and video, When Wellness Sucks, with quite a bit more production value–it’s also eerily reminiscent of The Office (US).

  • Not Realizing There is a Problem Until the Annual Survey?

    If it takes until the annual employee satisfaction survey comes out to realize that you have a problem, “listening” to employee ideas probably won’t help much.

    Some possibilities here:

    1. Your organization doesn’t have enough trust for everyone having a problem to be able to communicate that problem to the next level and have each level of management propagate that knowledge OR address it.
    2. You don’t have enough contact with your employees to recognize there is a problem yourself. If you see one person forcing a smile at every team gathering–that’s a Grumpy Coworker.  If you see a whole team doing it, that’s a Problem.
    3. Your employees are getting paid by your competitors to say they’re disgruntled.

    One of the above possibilities does not belong with the others.

     

     

  • What’s in a Name/Logo?

    Once, maybe twice, in a business’ life, things change to warrant a name change.  “Bob Jones Consulting” may not be an appropriate name for a company that “Bob Jones” has severed ties with.  “Turducken Shack” might be inappropriate for a restaurant chain who magically found a sleeper hit in its vegetarian fare.

    Understandably, if you’re dealing with customers in person, who you are representing can be as important as how you represent the company.  That’s fine.

    Once you get below a certain level of granularity, however, does the customer really care what organization within the company you represent?  If a customer had a positive interaction with the sales department, but had a horrible interaction when getting technical support for a problem placing the order on the website, do the department labels really matter?

    Does the reporting structure matter? Is your new marketing slogan, “Reorganized to Serve You Better”?

    Does the customer care that the marketing department has a new blue logo, while the IT department has a shiny black background logo with monochrome green outlines?  Does the customer care some guy in the marketing department still has his red logo background on his computer’s desktop?

    Meanwhile, while we’re all splitting hairs, the customer has hung up after hearing, “Your call is important to us,” for the 20th time–probably because it’s a lie.

     

  • The cost of re-re-reprioritization

    Prioritization is a good thing. And there is a very old saying: Too much of a good thing….

    In computer terms, I think of reprioritization as “swapping”.  A computer may be executing one program and get interrupted by a request to execute another higher-priority program.  It “swaps” the first program out of active memory, and the new program gets swapped in so it can be executed.  When finished, the first program gets swapped back and runs flawlessly to completion.  Slicker than snot, right?

    Unfortunately, projects executed by people are not like programs executed by computers. (You might want to write that one down, folks.) There are 2 reasons for this.

    1) Unlike computers, people cannot effectively drop something in the middle, pick it back up an hour/day/week later, and immediately remember exactly what they needed to do next. The human brain needs time to catch up after switching contexts. The more complex the task, and the longer the delay between swapping out and back in, the more extra time it will take for the brain to catch up.

    2) Unlike computers, humans are emotional beings. When told to put something down before it is complete, they will often experience a negative emotional response. If this is the 3rd time in 3 weeks that I have been told to drop my previous assignment and go work on something “more important”, I guarantee you that my emotional self will start to take considerably longer to get his head back in the game.

    Frequent reprioritizing can wreak havoc with employee morale. Grumpy co-workers have been known to descend into sarcastic thinking, such as, “If this new assignment is SO important, why wasn’t anybody working on it yesterday?” Or the more combative, “My managers obviously don’t know what the heck they are doing.” Or in particularly severe cases, “I think it’s time to update my resume again.”

    Obviously, humanity is frail and undependable when compared to computers. This is why managers get frustrated with humans.  On the other hand, managers should understand the costs of re-re-reprioritization, and not be surprised or angered by the diminishing returns. Any manager who IS surprised probably brings a measure of truth to the sentiment that they just don’t know what the heck they are doing.

     

  • The follies of flex-time

    The invention of flex-time brought with it the dawn of a new era in the workplace. An age of freedom and flexibility, resulting in unprecedented happiness and fulfillment. Certainly flex-time went a long way in eliminating grumpiness in our coworkers.  Right?

    For those of you still working in the Dark Ages of precisely prescribed starting and quitting times, here is a brief description of the golden age of “flex-time”.  (Try not to weep over what you are missing.)

    Flex-time is when my boss flexibly leaves at 3:30pm for a round of golf with her fellow bosses, on the day when I need her final approval of presentation materials I just finished at 4:00pm for tomorrow’s meeting.

    Not to worry, I determine to make use of flex-time myself. I arrive the next day at 7:00am to finish preparing and printing the handouts for the 9:30am presentation, only to discover the person with access to the printer supplies for the out-of-ink printer won’t flexibly arrive until 9:00am.

    When Mr. Printer Supply Person finally arrives at 9:15am (darn that traffic!), I don’t see any dark circles under his eyes, and he seems very well rested and cheery.  But regretfully (so he says) he cannot help me because he’s already 15 minutes late for the Printer Supplies Department’s weekly staff meeting.

    Though my meeting presentation was a bust, behold! All is not lost! Because I arrived at 7:00am, flex-time allows me to leave at 3:30pm today. I think I will get in a round of golf myself before dinner.

    That is, until my boss trumps flexibility, and schedules a meeting at 4:00pm to discuss why my presentation didn’t have handouts. Gotta love this flex-time invention!

     

  • Bookmarks… Rules as a reaction to failure

    Great thoughts on how bureaucracy begins:

    However, lets not forget the other side of the equation:

    • Hyperactive attorneys [hot liquid warnings on coffee cups]
    • Hyperactive congress [regulations on how long business records, email, etc. have to be held]
    • Overreaction to 1 in a million accidents, i.e., not respecting the statistical risk of getting killed by a falling satellite vs. the risk of being hit by a car while on your motorcycle.

    However, in general, humans just prefer to apply very general solutions to very specific problems.