I’m going to be purposely vague, but I think you’ll have enough info to understand the situation.
The workplace: a hundred or so employees, which I will divide into ‘professionals’ and ‘non-professionals’. The pro/non-pro mix is approximately 80 pro/20 np.
The typical professional: college educated, caucasan, young-ish, earns more than twice what the non-pro earns.
The typical np: high school education, African American, older.
The pros and the nps must work together as a team; this involves the pros delegating tasks to the nps regularly.
There is a continual influx of new, young (22-24 yrs), eager pros. The nps have been in their positions for years, frequently longer than the pros have been walking this earth.
The problem is probably obvious: many of the older, experienced, nps do not like taking direction from the whippersnappers, and serve up a heapin’ helpin’ of attitude at every opportunity.There is clearly a component of resentment and jealousy at work. Often, they simply do not do the work. When this occurs, typically the pro will simply do the nps work, reasoning that this is easier than causing any sort of trouble (many are also too intimidated to pursue the matter).
Make it clear to EVERYONE Ps and NPs alike that failure to do acceptable work or outright refusal is cause for termination. Follow up on it if necessary. Document the shit out of everything and if there are people, Ps or NPs, who have been spoken to and properly written up several times with no sign of correcting the offending behavior you have no choice but to let someone go.
If there is an unwritten understanding that employees, regardless of job description, will be allowed to ignore their work without consequence your company is sunk. This is not cruel, it’s a reality.
It sounds like you work for a law, accounting, consulting or other type of professional services firm. Typically those sort of workplaces have “support staff” who are usually less educated than the professionals or lack the required certifications (CPA, JD, etc) to be part of the professional track. Admin assistants, paralegals, lit support, office managers, even HR and IT in some companies. In many ways, similar in structure to “officers” and “enlisted / NCOs” in the military.
The first thing to understand is that the Support staff are essentially a different organization from the Professional staff. They may never be promoted to Professional positions because they do not have the formal qualifications to be professionals. Because of that, they may not have a lot of upward mobility. That does not mean they should not have their own career track with appropriate increases in raises, titles and responsibilities.
Also because the Support staff are not typically tied directly to the revenue generating activities (IOW, they don’t “bill”), their work is often not seen as valuable.
There should be someone at the manager or director level who leads the Support organization and has hiring and firing authority. This could be someone internal to that organization. It could also be someone from the professional organization. The role of this person is to both to advocate for the Support team and deal with attitude and insubordination issues.
Support activities should be billable (although at a lower rate than the lowest Professional) and Support staff need utilization targets. This creates incentives for Support to do their job and for Professionals to utilize them to lower costs. Failing to meet your utilization target is a tangible justification for termination.
There also needs to be strong disincentives for Professionals taking on Support work themselves.
IOW, the Support group should be treated as a service organization within a service organization.
Another thought I had was assigning Support staff to specific Professionals by according to whatever structure makes sense given the nature of the work.
For example, in the Big-4 accounting/consulting firm where I worked (and similar), each manager, director and partner has an executive assistant. The EA will support multiple managers because we don’t need them all the time.
Support staff can also be assigned by project, issue ticket or whatever makes sense.
The system also needs to have adequte performance feedback mechanisms.
The role of Support and Professionals needs to be well-defined and documented in a “service agreement”. This will include contact procedures, service hours and availability, delivery timelines, escalations procedures and so on.
Training for Support and Professionals is also necessary so each are aware of the others expectations and capabilities. ie Support will get frustrated if 22 year old Professionals are calling them 5pm on Friday with a 25 hour job they need “right away”.
It’s not as simple as just saying “do this or your fired”. It requires structuring the organization in such a way to deal with the fact that you are asking two groups with two very different cultures to work together.
One of my side-chores at my old firm as a Client Delivery Director was liasing with the Director of Client Support each month. Client Support was basically our help desk consisting of mosty tech school /Dvrey grads while my group were all MBAs, Ivy League types, former attorneys, accountants, CPAs and other certified professional types. Basically we had many of the same issues as the OP described. Except for the “too intimidated” part. One of the issues was preventing stressed out directors from berating the Support reps when they fucked up.
Sergeants run the Army. Chiefs run the Navy. Gunnys run the Marines. Admins run any large business. Good admins actually let the boss think he does it.
Lesson #1 for young Whippersnappers coming in : “Your np’s may have forgotten more about this business than you will ever know. If you have at least three brain cells to rub together you will work with them and learn all you can. Make them feel valued and a vital part of the team, and things will be easy for you. Or you can piss them off, and you will wind up doing their job AND yours.”
Then you need to get selected nps to mentor the whippersnappers and bring them along. Perhaps a small bonus arrange for mentoring their new leaders. You know what they say, money talks, bullshit walks.
I don’t understand why you have a problem. It makes perfect sense for inexperienced people, immature people to be ordering around experienced, loyal, long term employees. Good thing you pay them twice as much also.:rolleyes:
So let’s say these ‘pros’ have some college degree that is a requirement for some kind of work. And you have these ‘non-pros’ who have to perform tasks for them. Nauseated as I am by this concept, I’ll offer you some advice. Select a 2 or 3 ‘non-pros’ to be supervisors. The little snots, I mean ‘pros’ can give their requests for work to one of the supervisors, who will then assign a specific ‘non-pro’ to do the work. Your ‘pros’ should communicate all problems through the supervisors. The ‘pros’ and ‘non-pros’ can talk about the specifics of the task, but if it’s taking too long, or not getting done, they go to the supervisors. You should give the supervisors management training, and include them in the management process. The managers have to show leadership, and let the ‘pros’ know that the supervisors know how to do their job. Those supervisors have to be paid more as well. Otherwise the position is hollow, and they’ll have no motivation to get things working smoothly.
It sounds like this is a pretty clear cut case of insubordination on the part of the NPs. If you want things to change. My suggestion (from an easier said then done POV). Make your stance on insubordination VERY CLEAR. P asks NP to do something. NP refuses, P reports to his supervisor, supervisor writes up NP (or gives NP one verbal chance to do the work). In the report, it is made clear that there will be two more warnings and then the NP will be terminated. Follow up with this method. Office Max has forms that do this all very nicely and I’ve had them stand up in unemployment court (in Wisconsin) in the past for me. If you are in an At Will state and the NPs are Non-Union and considering their age, they’ll probably shape up quickly. They might resent it, but they’ll start getting the work done.
Remember, you hired the NPs to do this work at half price. When they refuse, not only are you paying double the hourly wage to have a P do the work, I assume the NP isn’t doing anything during that time. It’s money out of your pocket (or whomever the owner is).
It sucks when you have to fire someone, it sucks if they are supporting their family. But you’re running a business, not a charity.
I can’t tell from the fuzzy picture but this might be the form we use. On the front you fill out the employee info, the infraction, the warning number (first/second/third) and what the previous warning was (written/verbal) and have them sign it under a statement saying they understand that if they continue this behavior they may be terminated. Then on the back is a similar warning form. When they have another infraction, you fill out the back the same way, have them sign it. The next time they misbehave, you give them the boot and you have all the warnings (signed by them) on one piece of paper ready to show to the court commissioner if they decided to file for unemployment.
Managers have to have understand it is a TEAM. And you are given people to work with. You have to make this work.
A manager leads the team. There are tons of ways to do this. Each person has to have a style but it all boils down to respect. A manager has to get the team to respect him/her. Without this the manager is preceived as an orgre or a wimp or a jerk.
When I’ve managed people I’ve always started out by letting them know we are in this together. Then I SHOW them this. This is the key. If you are all talk, they soon find out.
You set guidelines and let your staff know what’s to be expected of them. You also show them that you will go to bat for them and the buck stops with you. Show your team you’re looking out for them and I guarantee they’ll return the favor 'cause a good manager is hard to find and the staff want them as well.
I’m guessing it’s more of a hands-on type of situation, where the non-pros are the tool guys and the pros are the management/policy guys. I think the non-pros have to realize that they aren’t the decision-making, direction-giving guys, and the pros have to realize that they are. The non-pros need to get written up every time the are insubordinate or don’t do their work, and the pros need to not do the work for the non-pros (and not feel guilty about doing THEIR jobs, which is directing the non-pros). The company overall has to treat ALL workers with respect and make policies universal whenever possible (i.e. no perks for the pros beyond what is reasonable for their positions).
IME, sometimes the NPs are better/more valuable than the Ps (thinking in different ways and yada, yada). N00bz are always a challenge but, if you get the good ones, they worth more than their weight in [choose your valuable substance]. Positive reinforcement makes the good ones (the stars) shine… the ones who are in it for a paycheck fade quickly (I’m no astronomer, so I won’t make a star-fading reference).
That’s because you don’t understand how those companies work.
I gave specific examples why that makes sense. “Professionals” could be attornies, accountants, management consultants, or financial analysts. These employees are typically highly educated, typically having a JD, MBA or other masters or a specific professional degree from well respected schools. They may have additional required certifications like a bar certification, CPA, Series 7, CFA or others. They get paid more because people are hiring them for their specific expertise.
The “Support” people do not have these qualifications. Their job is to perform routine, mundane but necessary work that frees up the professionals to focus on their professional tasks. A paralegal, for example, supports a lawyer, but they are unable to practice law. My admin assistant may be a lot older and been with the company longer, but she doesn’t have the skills or qualifcations to perform my job.
Just because your job is necessary doesn’t mean it’s important.
It might not be a good idea to have one on one task assignment. As noted above, the NP have to have a manager or leader who distributes the tasks and gets them fair representation in some policy decisions. The Ps should specify the task and the deadline, not how or who does it.
A number of years ago our CIO encouraged all his employees (many US based IT folks, but also folks in Asia) to read “The World is Flat.”
You need a culture change where everyone recognizes that they are not entitled to a job.
People who don’t do the work are not needed. No matter how long they’ve been with the company.
(I really hate it when people manage to make their own job disappear. I was working with a team that was working on doing just that. And no matter how many times I tried to say “look guys, your jobs can be done in Asia cheaper and with less attitude. Don’t make it such that when management gets rid of you they high five in the hallways” they didn’t get it. And then a bunch of them got laid off and their jobs went to Asia. And while no one high fived in the hallways, we have spent a lot of time saying ‘its sure nice to get stuff done.’)
Nailed it in one. This is the way that people have solved this problem since about the time that it became a problem. Long term support staff aren’t drones, have a better idea and understanding of what goes on and how things work than any new person ever will, regardless of the newer person’s qualifications.
It’s a failure of leadership from the youngins because they have no leadership ability. It’s not something that’s taught or encouraged in school anymore and so it should be lesson #1 for a new associate. Everyone of them should start in the NP role for a period of time and get to know what they do and how they do it before ever assuming they have the qualification to tell them what to do. Then once they understand how the world that they operate works they might be qualified to actually run things.
There is, but it is extremely difficult to terminate someone; buttloads of documentation is needed. And most of the younger crowd are afraid of repercussions from those they write up. So there is very little documentation when a very lot is required.
There are annual peer reviews as well as management reviews, but that’s pretty much it as far as performance feedback.
The roles are well-defined, but some of the professional role overlaps into the support role; it becomes murky because there are tasks that can be performed by either role.
My primary goal is not to get some folks terminated (though that wouldn’t be all bad), but to create a more functional and positive work environment.