How Company Culture Demotivates People
watercoolernewsletter.com
watercoolernewsletter.com
Take the reports generation example in the article. Now sure, those specific reports can be automated. But everyone once in a while, they may want to issue new categories of reports. Someone has to design them, and put out the initial prototypes. And the people best qualified in designing them may be the ones manually generating them every month. If you automate it, and employees eventually cycle out through attrition, then there may be no one left that remembers how to put that style of reports together.
So, how would you normally handle that type of situation, besides avoiding the automation so that this skill remains fresh in the institution? (i.e., you may assign this task to each new crop of junior employees).
One example we had at a large telecom equipment manufacture I used to work at, was whenever someone new came into the group, the first thing you would have them do is physically inventory all the servers. At that time, they were spread throughout the main data center, several data closets in a large building, and some were off site. This ended up getting the new staff familiar with the equipment, and location, and how to navigate the building. Even though we could have automated the inventory through software.
First question the assumption that it must be fresh. Optimizing documentation to make rediscovering knowledge easier may be more beneficial.
If knowledge must be fresh, then either apply the knowledge or share it with someone else. Knowledge can be applied by trying to improve a process instead of merely repeating a process (research and development). Knowledge can be shared in many contexts that give business value (marketing, selling, supporting, documenting, training).
It's the hurry up busy work that is so bad.
In one of my jobs, I was providing technical support to sales for major accounts. It was challenging work which involved reading RFPs in languages that I did not know very well to catch where the sales team was misunderstanding technical requirements. Sometimes there was hurry up work to meet a prospect's deadlines. And we only won about 5% of the bids that I worked on. But it still felt good to do the work. I knew that it wasn't wasted any more than a football practice session is wasted. It was a competition.
I wonder if there is some way to incorporate gamification into the enterprise to solve this problem.
Train them. Let them do their own projects. Anything is better than busywork.
Life's too short to waste your time on this sort of thing.
Boy, it'd sure be nice to work for a company that didn't have this attitude (games industry.)
Boy, it'd sure be nice to work for a company that
did not have the attitude "we work hard and play hard"
Number 2 is just a sign of management either not caring about or being too arrogant to see the truth: their company is going under. Chances are, such a company won't be around for much longer.
Number 3 is a sign that a company doesn't care about its peoples' happiness. It just wants them to be good little drones while management gets to do all the interesting work.
In a law firm, which is basicly 1000 separate practices trying to exist simultaneously, this happens all the time, usually because of option b. When a "team" is really a group of people who happen to be in the same place instead of a collaborative unit, what is imporant is up to each person. It's a bad way a run a business and totally messes with your employees.
* In larger companies, senior management may be completely inaccessible. Not "officially off-limits", mind you, but busy enough that you've got to deal with their assistants merely to get onto their calendar; and doing so may attract attention from their underlings (still at least one level above you), who may try to influence things before your meeting if they're aware of your agenda.
* Management ego: if the senior management in question has been in their position for quite a while, they may bristle when informed that their master plan has some holes in it.
* Management ego, part II: if you're relatively new to the company, you may have considerable difficulty getting buy-in from the old guard.
* Drowning new management: if senior management has recently undergone a turnover, the new kids in charge may be drinking from the firehose and unable to grasp the enormity of what you're saying. Or, worse, they rely on the input of a longtime company veteran whose "contributions" over the years may have directly caused the problem.
* Out of sight, out of mind: problems for you and your peers may be not be seen as a problem for senior management, especially if there is a great disparity in working environments. Work in a cube on a noisy floor while senior management has large, quiet offices on a different floor (or a different building)? They might not be sympathetic to complaints about your inability to concentrate.
* It's all about the Benjamins: ultimately, management is guided by two things. The first is money; if it's rolling in at the same or greater pace than last year, there is no problem. The second is risk; if you can't specify a specific risk to future business...again, there is no problem. Worse, if somebody can provide a toothless risk mitigation plan that sounds good but does nothing to actually solve your problem, then senior management may still consider the whole thing moot.
This is why many folks -- especially the ones who have been around long enough to have burnt by one of the above a few times -- simply advise suffering employees to look elsewhere.
It's not about apathy, it's about preservation of sanity.
It took me a long time to realize that most of these "urgent deadlines" are basically arbitrary. It's almost as if they think their employees can't function without the sound of a ticking clock over their heads. It's extremely stressful and counterproductive. I enjoy a push every once in a while, but it's demoralizing when it's not for a damn good reason.
The folks who might make good managers (because they have better people skills, not necessarily better technical skills), often struggle as mediocre individual contributors, and never get promoted.
The advantage of that system is that people are indeed professional managers, not e.g. engineers who got promoted to management. But there are also downsides...
You can't really blame it on "company culture", because then you could realistically expect that the next job you have won't be like that. You could expect to stop dealing with it by freelancing or consulting it. But you can't.
It's just the way people operate. To externalize broken process to those willing to put up with it. Shit will keep coming your way until you put a cork in it.
Refuse to accept broken process. Don't work late without a good reason. Spend some time looking around before you start working on anything tedious for anything that will make things easier. A few insightful questions can turn a wild hare's chase into a cakewalk.
And if you find something that can be automated, do it! If they tell you no, do it anyway, and don't tell them. When they hand you something they expect to take two days, and you "take two days", no one's the wiser.
Six months later, the deal is offered again, you apply and it is refused. And again six months later, and again, until 3 years have passed. All these years you have hardly anything to do, i.e. your job responsibilities can be completed in 4 hours per week. You spend a lot of time browsing the web, reading research papers, gaining the equivalent of a university education. You spend some time on the corporate wiki documenting things, explaining stuff, collating a glossary of corporate jargon etc. From time to time you find someone else with a problem and help them out with it, in secret because that is not your job.
And finally, after carefully crafting emails to everyone in your management chain, pointing out how you do nothing useful for the business and haven't for the past several years, and how there is no risk to the business because you have trained person X to do your 4 hours per week of real work, and built an automated tool as well, they accept your application. You get a check for 4 months wages, and never have to return to that place.
Do you think such a person would ever recommend anyone to work there? The worst part of this is that when this happened to me there was another department that desperately needed people with my skillset and experience, but I could not be considered for such jobs without approval of my management chain. Somehow they got the idea in their head that I was an employee too valuable to lose, even though I did so little work that I "worked from home" 4 days a week so that nobody would notice if I took a nap or something.
I have some sympathy with Yahoo and HP for wanting people to work in the office, but if they happen to have this kind of problem, I think that they are solving it in the wrong way. Instead, try zero-based budgeting for headcount. If you cannot justify every position in dollars and cents, that person is out of your organization and goes into a pool where anyone in need of their skills can bid for the headcount.
Of course, sometimes this school of thought is correct. https://sivers.org/hi
You know how every product on the Apple Online Store has details on how long it'll take to be delivered to you? E.g. 2 Business Days, 1-2 Weeks, Within 24 Hours. These quotes are manually changed. That's right. Every product on every Apple Online Store (e.g. Singapore, Hong Kong, China, US etc) has their own quote, and these need to be changed manually by someone.
I remember I hated the manual work and made several automation scripts that'll just do everything for me. The managers wanted to have nothing to do with it. "What if the script screws up?". That was their biggest concern. We all know that programs are more consistent than human being so that's nothing to be worried over.
I was only able to convince the managers that automation is an improvement after having everyone in the department using the script without their permission.
I suspect their reluctance was also due to some degree of "if it's not broken, don't fix it".
It is far more common than you think.
Corporate culture is defined in large parts by the people who started the company. It's the first few, and to a smaller extent, dozen, and smaller extend, 50, etc people that will define your corporate culture. At a large company, such as the one (I'm guessing here) discussed in the article, corporate culture can be VERY resilient to a few bad apples.
Corporate culture usually starts with the founders and early employees, but is transmitted in two main ways:
1. Who they decide to hire. In general, people tend to hire folks like themselves, and so if you start with an initial core of people with a certain value system, you'll end up with a company that reflects this value system. For example, Google started with a couple Ph.D drop-outs, they hired all their Ph.D friends, who hired their thesis advisors, and so they ended up with a very academic culture. Facebook started with a college student, who hired some of his college friends, who hired a bunch of young folks fresh out of school, and so they end up with a "move fast and break things" culture.
2. Acculturation of newbies. When a new hire arrives at a place, they instinctively look around for guidance on how to act. They get it from the people around them - their teammates, their manager, and the people that company holds up as heroes.
Either one of those can go wrong. The first one usually goes wrong in the "A players hire A players; B players hire C players; C players hire dodos" way. If you start with a core group of confident, energized, intelligent people, they will typically try to hire folks who are equally or more effective, because they view working with top-caliber folks as an opportunity to learn. Once you start getting some folks who are lazy or insecure in, though, they tend to hire folks who are even lazier and more insecure, because they feel threatened about being upstaged. That repeats until eventually the whole company is full of non-threatening bozos.
The second one goes wrong in periods of rapid expansion. Here newbies outnumber experienced veterans, and so when they look around for how they should behave, they pick up the culture of their new teammates' former employers. It doesn't need any bad apples, only the lack of a critical mass of good apples. This is also why the oldest division at a company often maintains the most of the original culture: oftentimes new divisions are staffed up in a hurry, facing different market realities, and the people in it look toward each other and to the leader of the division to figure out the culture.
If all (or even a significant portion) of your managers need to get training on how to be effective managers, you have a cultural issue.
I've seen every trick in the book. This industry sucks.