I’ve ranted about my awful company here a few times, but I’m to the point now where I think it’s all just hysterically funny. So here is an amusement post rather than a rant.
Leadership decided we needed cultural change based on consistently awful Glassdoor reviews and around-the-grapevine comments about conflict. They identified a new culture they want to become, part of which is to become innovative. They decided that the way to do this is to accept volunteers for divisional teams who will identify the problems and propose solutions to the leadership. HR is guiding the process but trying not to influence us. Except…
One of our complaints with our culture is that we work too much in silos which hurts communication and trust. A few people rightly pointed out that since several of the divisions identified the same problem, we should work together on the solutions instead of being siloed. HR disagreed and insist that we work in our divisional silos for this cultural change initiative. So, off to a good start, yes?
The primary problem in my division is a toxic VP whose personality and management style causes conflict and over time has resulted in tons of dysfunctional behaviors. So quick reminder: we’re presenting our solutions to our leadership… so we had to somehow diplomatically tell this VP that he was the problem. Funny. One of his dysfunctions is that as he promoted through the ranks, he got full of himself and casually implemented a strict chain of command. The way it was presented to many of us was that we used to be able to talk to him, reply to his emails and whatever else, normal business communication. Then suddenly one day we were told that we had to communicate to him through our managers. This was his directive, not that of a manager annoyed at being bypassed.
So anyway, during our problem/solution presentation, he explained why the chain of command was important. Here is how one coworker described his justification: “There is a chain of command but it should not be looked upon as a hindrance to your personal innovation.” :rolleyes:
And today they had to present all over again, this time to the whole leadership team together. It was summarized thusly: "We still need to relay everything to our directors, then our teams, and we are to hold our VPs accountable to the changes."
Oh, yes. I’ll get right on that, holding a VP accountable. Should I put him on a performance improvement plan or just fire him? (I’m a business analyst in case my role in the company isn’t clear.)
I once worked at a company when they were having a big push to ‘improve productivity’ – seminars with groups of employees, outside facilitator, etc.
During our seminar, there was ‘worker participation’ – we were given paper and told to individually identify any “barriers to productivity”. one employee (a well liked guy who was a minister part time) asked “Do you want us to write down their actual name, or just their job title?”. After the gasps and some laughter, the obviously very flustered facilitator explained that it was only processes or technical & physical problems that they wanted us to identify. Then people called out “But that’s all minor stuff” & “You already know that the office space is overcrowded, and system response time is too slow, and haven’t done anything about that.” So the facilitator told us that physical conditions were ‘beyond the scope’ of this session, so we should leave those out too. So a lot of us turned in blank papers (though there were a few “wasting work time in pointless seminars” returned).
But that pretty much killed off this whole seminar. It had been promoted as a 3-seminar series, but after this they never seemed to get around to seminars 2 & 3, nor the big meeting to summarize the response and the resulting changes in the workplace.
I love my new laptop at work. Big screen for when it’s undocked, powerful, a nifty carbon fiber appearance overlay with the company logo, etc.
I had to have some software installed. The software was not on the IT shared drive. The software was in a co-worker’s drawer, who failed to tell ANYBODY about it before going on vacation, and thus a big project for me has been sitting idle for three weeks until he came back to work. Get the software, get the Administrator permissions from IT, and here we go!
That’s in George’s desk drawer. He’ll be back end of the month.
We seriously have a number of functions that can only be done by one person. Need access with a new folder on the company server? That’s Martin. You email him and ask him nicely. The last time I needed one, it was: email Martin, email him again, try his office, get someone to show you a photo of Martin and lay in wait as he comes out of his divisional meeting. Only to find he was on vacation.
Actually…yeah. It was the same guy, but I didn’t find out about the USB drive until we had found a tower with a DVD drive and copypasted everything around.
This project is specifically to avoid one of those “Only Mike knows how to do that” situations, by eventually having the documentation done for “how to do that”, dumb enough for any engineer. Whether anyone will be able to find it in our mess of document “control”, is another thing, which also requires documentation. It’s a rabbit hole of idiocy.
Wouldn’t ANYONE see the need for having these things organized?
I am utterly unqualified to be a CEO. But if I were one, and Glenn the Lowly Engineer came to me and said “We’re going to have projects coming to a screeching halt if we can’t find the files”, even I would instantly say “My God, Glenn, get that department organized! Here’s a bucket of money and a title, you’re in charge of getting and keeping things running smoothly!”
Why can I figure that out and so many managers/supervisors/CEOs not?
Sure you do. I wrote half the manuals on my last job because they didn’t exist. When I went to the Dev teams to document which databases their processes use, most of them said “Um, we don’t really know. None of that was documented.” :smack:
My favorite doc clusterfuck was that company where we had to go through a week of training re. documentation, from a [del]bibliotecarian[/del]documentalist who just read every single slide, and who, when we asked “is there a list of these ‘document type’ codes?” merrily answered “oh, no! People just make their own!”
After a while my coworker and I started playing sink the fleet. I hadn’t done that in class since 6th grade.
I spent a good part of the last year before I retired documenting everything I could about our processes and systems, as a backup for the previous documentation strategy which was “Ask Bookkeeper. He’s been here forever and knows all that stuff.”
I totally know this song, too. At every job I’ve worked at the prevailing attitude was that it was acceptable to communicate things verbally rather than in writing. And management was just like “that’s fine, nothing wrong with that”.
The most amusing was one time when the lead developer I was working with (I was a business analyst) was designing screens and workflow for a new internal program and clearly had no clue about concepts like workflow. He was designing it based on how his technology platform functioned. I was looking at it from the eyes of a user and saw that he was going to make the user fill out some details on one screen, click over to another screen, click back to the first one, etc. He wasn’t listening to me when I tried to politely offer suggestions, so I finally just said bluntly “BUT HOW IS THE USER GOING TO KNOW TO DO THAT?”
He said “just tell them”. Not even write an instruction manual. Tell them. Verbally. :rolleyes:
JcWoman, your post just made me realize that the Access-based order processing program used by several departments has no written documentation - new employees have to be shown how to use the various features. Fortunately, most features are simply a nice interface for viewing and editing database records, but there’s really nothing written down anywhere to explain how (and when) to transfer items from one tracking code to another, as an example.
See, that’s why I’m a bad consultant. I hate both prolonging the problem and defending those solutions which will involve the greater amount of billing for the least usability.
I was offered a job a couple of months ago that I would have liked, but unfortunately, it didn’t work out with the consulting firm. :mad: During my single interview, after which I was offered the job, they asked me if I had experience with Access databases. I said yes I did, but I would recommend moving to something else.