Putting on the Dunce Cap.
Simple question:
What’s the dumbest thing your organization does?
Gruesome though they may be, I look forward to your comments. Feel free to post under a pseudonym if necessary. Fire away!
~
(Excellent found-item dunce cap by my Twitter pal ninjapoodles.)
Category: Management12 Comments so far
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The most frustrating aspect of my organization (from my perspective) is that the management is more willing to listen to outside sources than internal people.
It’s very hard to get support for a new initiative unless we can prove that someone else is already doing it successfully outside of our company. This leaves us playing catch-up more often than I’d like.
In 3 years, I have not had a single performance review. People need feedback in order to evolve and improve.
No need for a pseudonym…I speak my thoughts to management as well!
It is difficult for a company to “build a bench” if said company is always reaching to consultants for research or solutions. Consultants are not long-term and associates must learn to do their jobs without a crutch. Have some faith in the associates you hired.
There will always be people who abuse flex time, but do not punish your good associates by taking the benefit away from all. Productivity is improved with happy associates and their families.
Empowerment is a lie.
I look at my people and I see nothing worth liking…
No, seriously, even though I’m an oil man…it would be nice to work from home at least one day a week.
Past organization i am no longer affiliated with - Decentralizing the marketing department amongst the different business units and then complaining constantly that these decentralized marketing departments are too autonomous. It still makes me laugh.
Though I’m thankfully not affected too often, one weakness here is fuzzy meetings.
Personal Theory of Meetings: Use them to 1) share information and/or 2) make decisions. So at the end, I need to have 1) learned something that I could not have over email, chat, or phone, and/or 2) come out with an agreement on upcoming tasks and commitments.
Specific pain points
-No warning. Nothing kills joy like a same-day meeting for non-emergencies.
-No agenda. What’s the goal here?
-No leader. It helps to have one (1, uno) person to guide meetings through aforementioned agenda, table the tangents, schedule the follow-ups, etc.
-No cancellations. Regularly scheduled meetings that happen even when there is no new information… why?
-Not on time. The big-picture collective time waste drives me insane.
Luckily my team is pretty solid on these, but interdepartmental meetings can be frustrating. I think one thing most organizations could use is “court vision,” having a better sense of how our actions and interruptions ripple through the network.
Thanks for the nudge, Tim. I should lead a little brainstorm about Our Dumbest Things to see what others here think.
Previous company-purchasing a biometric time clock so that we could all clock in with a fingerprint. Mind you-we were salaried employees. Then deducting 15 minutes from vacation time if you were 5 minutes late to work.
As a career coach, I work with a lot of folks who are downsized. Among the dumbest practices I see are the companies who need to save money by reducing headcount, and then bring some of the folks let go back as consultants, making more than what they were paid as employees. I’m sure there is some reasoning that a Finance department could explain as to why that might make sense, but I sure can’t see it.
Second dumb thing I see happen all the time in technical recruiting. Companies will spend months searching for a candidate who has the right mix of 5-7 specific programming languages / tools / technologies. They will pass over a candidate who has 6 of the 7, even if the 7th could be learned in just a few weeks. But instead they’ll hold out for months and months to find a “plug-n-play” candidate with all 7.
Jeff
Travel policies are really messed up. For example, several companies I have worked for use Expedia as their outsourced travel portal. The two funny things that I have noticed:
1. Many times their is a cheaper rate using any number of other websites. Even when I do find the flight I am looking for using the approved solution, the flight is frequently “out of policy”.
2. I had to fly to travel to Europe on a regular basis. Corporate policy prevented business class travel for anything under 10 hours. That’s acceptable, I suppose, for shorter people. I’m 6′3″ and that makes it more than a comfort issue: its a productivity issue, or maybe even health.
The problem is, corporate policy also forbade choosing a specific airline (from Expedia) just to use your frequent flier miles to upgrade your seat. Basically, it was a mandate to fly coach.
However, the company WOULD pay for you to join the airline “club” if you travelled more than x number of times in a year. Bizarre.
I enjoy my job, what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis. The organization I work for regularly comes up with good ideas and does 1 of 3 things.
1. Moves forward, full steam ahead, gets the project going and then drops it. The organization is horrible at follow-up, especially if solid results aren’t immediate. We launched a new site and it is hasn’t been updated in 6+ months.
2. Everyone will agree to an idea and no one will do it. No one will take up the challenge and move it forward, then upper management will remember the idea 4-6 months later, ask for an update and folks stare at each other.
3. Along those lines, the new project is unfunded and requires collaboration from other departments, who have incentive to assist you on the new initiative.
I don’t have time to continue, but I could.
A previous employer’s hot water malfunctioned, and they never fixed it. Not having any hot water puts a lot of things into perspective post haste.
There are too many to list, all jumbled in my brain, but one that comes to mind is the fact that I first found out who my official boss is on April 1st. I started my job in August. That’s how insanely screwed up the organizational structure is and it’s not looking to get better. Sigh. Another major one is school districts blocking web applications, which therefore blocks teachers from using new technology in education. The insanity. I could go on and on but that would be an entire book