The Rock, The Hard Place, & The Boat

This afternoon I find myself caught in that proverbial place between the mythical rock and the theoretical hard place.  I have been speculating of late that perhaps I’ve been a bit drawing too much negative attention to myself lately with all of my boat rocking.  To think the Director once complained that I was too quiet and that I should speak up more, especially for myself.  Ha!  I bet he regrets that now.

Anyhow, I recall that at that florescent hell I worked at prior to here, one of the complaints my superiors had was that I became obsessed with things that were not related to my job — you know, like the ants crawling all over my desk and the miscalculation of state taxes in our paychecks.  But I think the overall message I’m supposed to get from that talking down is a reminder not to sweat the small stuff, right?  Let go of the pettiness.  Save my negativity for really big issues.

The reason all of that occurred to me is I kind of heard a tone in the VP’s voice the other day during our end of the year meeting; the Director had told us to bring up anything we wanted to mention and D had commented that she had an issue with people arriving late to meetings; so I comented that I wanted to add an addendum that I had a real issue with people not ending their meetings on time and thus causing the next group to have the room to start late — and what was worse, if you opened the door to let those people know their time was up, they didn’t care; I said I didn’t want to name names or anything.  Well, aparently, my complaining about the misuse of that conference room has gotten old, because the VP was like “Just write down the names and give the list to me” in a kind of annoyed teacher voice.

The truth is that it’s no one in our section.  It’s the people upstairs.  Just like it was the people upstairs who E complained about coming out of the conference room talking loudly with no respect for the people in the cubicles working there.  Just like it’s the people upstairs who keep sending UPS and visitors to our door despite the fact that we no longer have an office admin but they do.  However, if we dare complain about them, the golden children, shame on us.  Hey, if I only had one project to work on every day forever, I’d be doing a stellar job too, but I’d have time to get my UPS box from the front door.

But I digress.

So, today, my Manager sent around an email with one of those surveys — you know the ones “How are we doing morale-wise?” and “What are we doing right and what can we do to make it better?”  My favorite one is “What are some thoughts around how we might be able to ‘recognize’, and further ‘challenge’ High Performers?”

Now I would love to somehow explain in this survey that it would be so much easier to be so much more productive and feel so much better about it if the department’s priorities weren’t so misfocused on the appearance of looking productive rather than actually being productive.  If we had less paperwork to do documenting all the work we do, we would have more time to do the actual work.

I would also love to express that we are all adults, even when we don’t always act like it, and it seems to me that if we can be trusted to be out in the world, to pay our bills, to have jobs that take us to places where we interact with doctors, nurses, patients, families, and the general public, and no one has ever complained about what they’ve seen on our 10 status reports and timesheets/week, then I suspect we’re responsible enough to work unsupervised.   For example, some of us are already considered responsible enough to work at home at 2am in an unplanned situation when an emergency situation occurs relating to computers and some of us don’t even have to fill out paperwork or even tell anyone we did.  Some of us come in on the weekend or on holidays to do work and there’s no paperwork for that; on a holiday, you just send an e-mail to the office admin to say you worked so that it’s not counted as a PTO — no one ever asks you to prove you worked or what you worked on, even though no one was around to supervise you.

However, if you want to work from your home for whatever reason (weather, illness, etc.), you have to ask in advance, get two superiors’ signatures, fill out paperwork explaining what you will be working on, how much you plan to get done, and how you will prove you will be productive; then within a week, you need to provide proof of the work you did as if you were in grade school.  This is not how you treat an adult and it’s not good for morale.  If they want to improve morale, they need to learn to trust their employees or at least pretend to act like they do.

Reward High Performers with more education, conferences, and better technology to work with.  Give us the software upgrades we desperately need.  Stop rewarding bad behavior by ignoring it.  For the most part, we want to be treated like equals rather than peasants.  We want a say in what’s going on and in the things that are going to affect us.  We’re tired of being the hospital’s piss boy.

This time last year, our whole Department’s morale was in a pine box in a hole in the ground.  The people in charge then are gone and we have high hopes for the people who are in charge now.  The VP was here then, but not as the VP.  She should know that we aren’t going to fall for the shiny bobble gimmicks that those last people tried.

I want to say all of that, but I sort of promised myself that I was going to be good and quiet and sit still in the middle of the boat for a while and try not to make any waves.  At least until the VP has forgotten who I am.  Summer maybe.  The economy is much worse now than 4 years ago, you see, and I have a really specialized job.  I bet I couldn’t even find it on Monster.com.

Tagged as: employees, IT, management, morale, productivity, PTO, status report, survey, timesheet, work, work at home, working on a holiday