There’s also plenty where it does. Not all corporate cultures blow goats.
And corporate cultures have subcultures inside, and managers who work around the corporate culture or who have enough clout to ram their way through it.
Manager agreed to let me work 8-4 instead of 9-5, saving me over 1h worth of commute time every day. Allowed coworker to work 10-6, saving a similar amount of time. HR said not acceptable “because we can’t know when are they working”. Solution ended up being coworker and me sending an Excel to HR every week reporting the hours of the other one (yep, he totally was there to check the exact time when I arrived and I totally was there to check it when he left).
HR manager was a presentialist. Company had the rule that WFH time had to be approved by direct managers. Someone remarked to one of the managers who’d just approved a whole week of WFH for someone who needed heavy work done in his house “HRdude is going to have a stroke” “the hospital has wifi, he can work remote.”
Admin assistant of Important Dude (officially not a VP, but when he got a cold the VPs and the Board sneezed) tells him she’s going to leave the job because of her son’s medical and school problems; she needs to be able to meet with his teachers frequently, lots of doctor visits… he says “please don’t, this team can’t find its own behind without you.” They agreed on “10x4 and any time off you need for doctor’s visits is fine”. HR throws a fit. Important Dude and all his team threaten to leave. 10x4 and as much time as she needs yessir not a problem.
Also sounds like a culture where HR has way too much power.
Now the way obnoxious companies deal with people who want to work from 8 - 4 is to schedule important meetings at 4:30 or 5. Sure you can come in at 8, but you leave after the meeting is over.
I spent over 40 years working for Fortune 100 companies, and I was never convinced that Human Resources ever regarded humans as a resource. When your job title and your mission contradict each other it can lead to some confusion.
I worked for 3 large tech companies, and HR was always helpful. But I think that they had no idea of what half the words on the resumes we got meant helped. From what I’ve read this isn’t always been the case.
Woke up in the middle of the night last night to the realization that I’d misdirected a coworker into drafting a solution wrong, and then proceeded to have insomnia stewing over work. It occurred to me that the problem isn’t simply having too much work to do.
The problem is that my work is cerebral: coming up with detailed designs, writing them up and then presenting them to 40-60 people who are external customers. Because our management can’t seem to plan ahead, I got 4 weeks to do this for 5 business problems. I was able to “offload” two of them to coworkers, however they are new to the company so need a lot of coaching. I can’t let them do them wrong because guess who is presenting their work? Me.
So what’s been going on lately is I’ve been heavily task-switching between working on these business problems, attending all of the stupid Agile coaching meetings and ceremonies only 5% of which apply to me*, having other things thrown at me to do, and being told that I’m not answering emails completely and correctly. I’ve barely had 10 solid minutes to work on any one topic, and as a result, I’m doing many things, poorly.
(* Management has mandated that everyone on the team should use the Agile methodology, but are ignoring the fact that this business problem/solution design/working group activity does not lend itself to Agile at all. We’re up against hard deadlines imposed on us, which is the opposite of Agile. None of the work can be split into small chunks that are fully deliverable at the end of the two-week sprint. Some of it may eventually turn into actual software development but that’s at some unknown time in the future. It’s primarily campaigning and building consensus and rewriting the solutions to make as many people happy as possible. So I’m sitting in these meetings wasting a lot of time listening to the detailed software development stories being handed from the other BA’s to the devs and then to QA.)
I don’t really have a problem with responsibility or handling a large workload. My problem is that I don’t deal well with intense pressure. It’s when I start feeling pressure that I kind of freak out. I don’t think there’s any way to improve that aspect of my personality so maybe I just need to find a job that doesn’t have high pressure work.
Not sure if that kind of thing exists anymore, though.
When I was working on something that required concentration I didn’t even look at my email for an hour, say. If it was important enough someone could come to my office. And they did.
Your boss will someday say “JcWoman, I never knew you were so overloaded. You should have told me.” So you might try “What do you want me to do - answer emails or go to Agile meetings? I can’t do both and do my real job too.”
Another thing you can do is to jot down a note of the next thing you meant to do on a task when you got pulled off it. A pulp writer - it might have been L. Ron, would stop writing in the middle of a sentence so that when he started again he could easily finish it and thus get his momentum up.
Honestly, most places I’ve worked, I’ve seen very little interaction with HR. During hiring and exiting, mostly. Maybe if there’s a problem with something or someone. Depending on the size of the company, I might know my HR rep as someone I see around the office or at happy hour. But usually they are sort of just “there”. Like “accounting”.
Good … you know the solution to your problems then … the opportunity will come to go alone full-time … let us know if you need a kick-in-the-ass when the time comes …