I think it also depends on the industry. For instance, in retail, this is one of the “biggies” simply because your attitude in dealing with the public relates directly to your employer’s reputation.
For example, one of my former employers forbade any kind of disagreement between employees unless they were well away from the sales floor. Another forbade any “shop talk” between employees while the employees were on the floor because it got in the way of production. It also cut down on the petty drama which has the tendency to crop up in such settings, which I think that former employer was trying to avoid “for the good of customer service”.
Minor rant, but i’m seeing this more and more. People putting question marks at the end of a statement. “I will be testing this package tomorrow?” I’m so tempted to write back “i don’t know, will you?”
A piece of my employer was recently sold to new owners. We’ve been undergoing training in accordance with New Owner’s way of doing things, which in many ways is diametrically opposite to what we’ve been doing all along.
It’s a learning curve. New Owner demands a lot, and many people are unhappy with suddenly having to possess “a sense of urgency”. OTOH maybe New Owner’s trainers should have taken this into account before upending everything? I can see why they wouldn’t from a business perspective, but still.
In the meantime, though, things are chaotic, people are exhausted if not discouraged “because this isn’t the way we’ve been doing X”, and this is my first day off in almost 2 weeks. I’ve been told this is generally the norm for New Owner. Oy.
I get really tired of a permanent ‘state of urgency’. This is just STRESS CITY and not only isn’t very productive, it is like acid to your organization. People burn out and leave. People get tired of being yelled at and leave. People get tired of the false urgency and get passive aggressive about it to retain their sanity.
People can’t spend 8 hours a day keyed up, day in and day out.
People who do and enjoy it are doing coke. Or they’re extreme outliers on Human behavior.
Yeah, we couldn’t find any plastic forks at work the other day, and I cocked my head and said “Anyone hear a shredder running?”
Crickets*. No one said “You know flatline?”; so I don’t think I work with any closet Dopers.
*Same response as when I get to #3 on a two item list that I’m making on a whiteboard…
I have found myself doing that. Someone close to me was doing it as a shortcut way of saying they were unclear and had a question. Like “I don’t see the attachment you said you would send ???” instead of writing out same, plus “where is it and would you please resend” which takes twice the time and effort to type out. Call it lazy, call it shorthand, but I have only ever done it with people with whom I don’t have to be formal and who will easily understand.
Or a manager’s annual bonus depends on how much money their department makes in a within a number of specific time periods. It’s sometimes scary what a manager might do in order to rake in that money.
There’s a fair number of people with ADHD in my industry…or at least I’ve worked with a fair number of them.
I don’t like making generalizations, but I bet some are like me in that they’ve never wanted to be stuck behind a desk. I had two office jobs after college graduation as well as a teaching stint and I never felt so draggy and tired since. To me, it was akin to claustrophobia. I hate sitting , tbh, and I’m hating it even more the older I become.
Food service has a notorious reputation for assholey behavior because of that “sense of urgency”. You only have that ONE time to make an impression on your customer; ergo, everything had better be perfect. Therefore you put as much pressure on your workers and on yourself to attain that “perfection” (which, of course, you’ll never attain so it becomes the perpetual golden ring). That “sense of urgency” in making that impression – as well as money – is the bulk of that stress.
A lot of people thrive on it. I do, to an extent: Like I said, I don’t like being trapped behind a desk in a quiet office. You holler at me because I’m “too slow” with something? When I was younger I would’ve silently wept. When I stopped weeping, that burning indignation I felt in my chest forced me into a “I’ll show you” stance. Now that I’m older I’m liable to holler back
I’ve worked with a lot of people whose dispositions don’t align with this business. At this polint I can spot them from miles away. I currently work with a few of them. They’re masters of the passive aggressive but lack the courage and/or qualifications to get a job more suited to them. They drag everybody down. You can’t fire them because they’re living, breathing, and possess working hands. So you give them as little as possible to do, which, in turn, puts more pressure/sense of urgency on YOU since now YOU are doing their job on top of yours.
I just got a recruiter email. The email said he’s a “Six Sigma Champion”. The recruiter said he’d found my resume in an online search and wanted to know if I’d be interested in a temp-to-perm warehouse or production position.
I’m a technical writer. There is *nothing *in my resume that indicates I’ve ever done work of this sort at any point in my life. I almost emailed him back to ask him if he’d actually read my resume; after all, a Six Sigma Champion ought to notice things like that, right?
I’m betting all he did was notice I lived local to this position. This is why, for the most part, I hate recruiting agencies.
LOL, I just went back and reread it. The bonus, of course, is never mentioned but if you hang around long enough you’ll discover it.
Our recently former employer didn’t give out bonuses last year and cut bonuses for upper management in anticipation of this sale. Needless to say there were many pissed off front line managers walking around. Now they’re pissed off because nobody has the help New Owners presumed we had.
Um, Co-worker, I don’t think the 5 second rule applies to our workplace. In particular, I don’t think a wise person would eat anything (even an m&m) dropped on the floor of our Dock-- where Fed Ex, and Milk deliveries occur, and many things are maneuvered around on pallets, sometimes pretty gross pallets. And who knows when the floor has been more than swept?
And while I’m here . . .
No, Reset Person, I can’t promise that your pallet will be accessible to you in the morning. After we all go home, one more major truck shows up for the day, and the people who distribute some of its pallets onto our dock DON’T CARE if we can maneuver around them.
Leaving a note won’t help-- they’ll still bury your pallet.
Also, tomorrow, I’ll be too busy doing my job to worry about whether you can do yours.
OOH One more mini-rant for the day . . .
No more socks to mark down, thank you very much. At least for a week or two . . . (Signed-- a person who has marked down four standard sized grocery carts full of socks in less than a week. Plus a couple of other grocery carts full of Bargains).
Spent this morning dealing with a test technician who has no use for women and despises engineers (I’m both). He had found a slight inaccuracy in a sketch in a test procedure, completely missed that this particular part has been tested and sold by the company before (that is, he could have asked his supervisor how it was done last time), and decided to make an epic case out of it. >.<
Then I spent my afternoon trying to rush to finish a report, only to find that the documentation was riddled with errors that need to be corrected by another department. I was actually happy to be leaving for an appointment. >.<
I get out on the interstate, and immediately get stuck in traffic because of a jackknifed tractor trailer (and the associated cleanup efforts) blocking one lane. Being a polite person, I call up the doctor’s office to let them know I’m running about 10 minutes late…and am told that, even though I’m scheduled to be the last appointment of the day, they’ll just have to reschedule the appointment. In November. :smack:
