Unfettered Blather

I always said that if I got into management I would not do certain things. One of those activities was status reports. Why? Because I hate them.

Basically, if I’m going to do a real status report, one that actually means something, I’m going to spend at least an hour compiling it. That is assuming I haven’t been updating status all week, which would probably add up to an hour of effort anyway. Then the manager, project manager, technical lead, or whoever has to take my status report, read it, and compile it into some other kind of report. Let’s assume that effort is maybe another 15 minutes of effort per employee on their part. Possibly more. This is not counting time spent hounding employees for status, tracking down people who never get around to it (Hello, Boss!), or revising reports that were missing information.

Hey, I respect that managers have to manage and doing so without information is a bear. I’m not unsympathetic, but is this really efficient?

One of the best managers I ever had just did weekly meetings. He would bring a project plan or spreadsheet with him that had everyone’s known tasks on it. Then he would go around the room and get a quick update. Any issues would be talked about outside the meeting. This allowed him to not only get everyone’s status at once, but this was a good time to bring up issues so that he could address them quickly. Even though this was a fair size team, about a dozen people, these meetings could be done easily in half-an-hour. Realistically though you plan to lose an hour of time.

I’ve tried this approach on a team of a similar size and by scheduling a known meeting time every week then no one loses more than an hour of their time for status. I keep track of everything myself and it takes me maybe an hour, tops, to update every week. There is no hounding, missing status reports, or incomplete information. Getting status reports does not become a job unto itself and creating status reports does not become an additional task for employees. I admit, it’s not a perfect system. People get sick or go on vacation, and then I have to put in some extra effort, but really not that much.

The cynical side of me wonders if some past managers didn’t insist on status reports because it helped them do less face-to-face management while also generating work for themselves. After all, if I had to spend 4 hours compiling status reports every week I could look busy while maintaining a facade of importance. Maybe I am looking at it wrong, but all I really know is that the last thing I want to do is harass the people who ultimately support me.

I often talk about concepts and ideas with a wide-eyed wonder that would make most people mistake me for a starry-eyed optimist. I can then start talking about human nature that exposes me for the misanthrope I truly am. In truth, at my core I am a pragmatist who would prefer to judge the situation and make decisions based on the facts instead of a sense of idealism or fatalism.

I’m a big fan of the 40 hour work week. I’ve worked in offices where most employees worked 32 hours and I’ve been in environments where people routinely worked 60. For some reason, and I know there are studies about why, 40 hours broken into 8 hour segments seems to be a magic number. Less than 40, not enough work gets done and it’s too difficult to collaborate between team members or other teams. Over 40 and people become so tired that productivity drops and work quality quickly deteriorates. There are exceptions, of course, but planning around the exceptions is foolhardy. My primary reason for being a big fan of the 40 hour work week is because it is an ideal balance between productivity and morale. Companies want high volume but employees want to have a life. You cannot get high volume if employees do not commit to a certain amount of work but morale will drop, as will productivity, if employees feel like they are not allowed to have a life outside the office.

A concept that continues to escape many corporate suits, much to my befuddlement, is that happy workers are productive workers. The answer to happy workers seems to be a stricter enforcement of the rules, which leads to unhappy workers, which leads to a drop in productivity, which leads to questions of how to make workers more productive. Instead of giving workers more incentives, better pay, more flexible schedules, etc. the answer seems to be introducing processes and procedures. More rules to follow and more paperwork to file while still doing the same amount of work just leads to further dissatisfaction. Your best people will flee to other companies, leading to a further drop in morale as the best workers were often the only reason that made everyone else think the job was managable.

I’ve continued to struggle with the concept that happy workers are a problem. I’ve seen senior management at many companies, particularly when I was a consultant, take away minor benefits that were costing the company thousands of dollars a year and then lose tens of thousands of dollars as morale dropped. That is possibly a best case scenario. What a company stands to lose by tanking morale could easily soar into the millions. I know when a large corporation bought out a smaller company that a family member worked for they killed a nightly after hours videogame session played over the company LAN. This was an extremely stupid move as this was done outside of company time, had minimal cost to the company, and furthermore acted as an excellent team building and social bonding tool. These minor benefits have major payoffs and yet are often the first thing to go since they have no direct relation to the bottom line. Unfortunately, some gains just cannot be directly attributable on an accountant’s spreadsheet.

As companies look for more efficient ways to be productive and increase profits, they need to avoid the death spiral of ever increasing workloads, rules, and hours in an attempt to solve their problems. What I avoid are companies who believe that successful managers are measured by how many hours their people work. That is not a measure of success, that is a sign of impending disaster. Start-ups can get away with long hours because those hours are voluntary and employees often have a personal stake in the company. Give someone the prospect of potentially making millions and their attitude towards long hours will change dramatically. Most companies do not want to potentially pay out millions of dollars to employees that are in the trenches, so why expect them to have the same dedication as their start-up counterparts?

I walked out of work yesterday spent, exhausted, exasperated, and burned. As I entered the elevator to go home my shoulders slumped in that universal sign of relief and resignation to the idea that the day may be over but I will repeat it again tomorrow.

The funny thing is, I love my job and I like the company I work for. I entered a new position in the company a month ago on a team that has a lot of challenges and a lot of commitments. I was dropped into the middle of that and have been dealing with the consequences of decisions that were made without my input done before I got there. Yet I really do enjoy it. I enjoy the stress, the challenge, the difficult decisions, the need to coordinate resources, talking to customers, making a plan, and designing software. This is tiring though.

What concerns me a little is that I love my job but I wonder if any rational person should like what I’m doing right now. I guess the difference here is that I love to be challenged and I am like never before.

A long time ago the folks over at Penny Arcade (it’s in the links section) did a comic parodying some game company whose message forum moderator, a paid position there, was complaining about having to deal with all the insanity on their forums. Their assertion was that if you take a job where you have to eat bees you can’t complain about getting stung. After all, if you don’t want to get stung why did you take the job?

I was thinking about that yesterday when I overheard someone complaining about getting yelled at by customers. The job in question is customer representation and that means they get to handle relationships, manage expectations, and are the first point of contact when something goes wrong. No matter how well the company is doing or how good the software is, eventually something will go wrong and a customer will be unhappy. As far as I know we don’t hide this fact. If you know that you’ll be dealing with unhappy customers I don’t quite understand the complaint. Granted, the volume is a little much right now and we need to do a lot of things differently moving forward, but as the first point of contact they should be expecting what they’re getting. My job is to try and minimize these complaints.

I have to attend a lot of meetings now. I do sometimes gripe because I question some of the meetings I go to, but I don’t gripe about how much of my day seems to be spent in meetings because it’s part of the job. I like to complain, I really do, but that just seems wrong. While I don’t love meetings I wanted this position and I took everything that went with it.

Buddy, my co-blogger, does sales representation for small and moderate sized businesses. The nature of his job means he is on the phone on a lot, but he doesn’t complain about it because that is what earns him money. Being on the phone is a good thing.

I always get this picture of a waiter who doesn’t like handling food or someone who shovels horse manure but complains about the smell. Most people aren’t tricked into taking a job they don’t want and there really are a lot of options. If you live in a certain rural town you may not have a lot of options outside of the local pig farm, but unless you do live in such a region I suspect you can pretty well do what you want. Taking an unpleasant job because it pays better than another position you’d enjoy more is not a license to complain. I certainly understand some legitimate gripes, I’ve heard quite a few lately, but griping about something that comes with the territory? That’s just a waste of everyone’s time.

As I touched on Friday, I was promoted to a management position in the company. Speaking in purely relative terms, it’s about as low in the company as you can get and still be considered a manager. Not to downplay it, but I still have plenty of people over me that I report to, so I’m anything but the big boss. This isn’t really my first time to be in a leadership position and I’ve been responsible for larger teams than the one I am currently leading, but it’s the first time I’ve had “manager” attached to my title.

When I joined my current company I put my career on hold. I took a step down. Before I left consulting my last position was as a “Technical Lead” and I was responsible for a team of 8 developers and 4 testers, each with their own team lead. I did a little coding but was primarily hands off. I felt like that job came too soon and so what I was looking for was a team lead position where I could be 50% hands on development and 50% administrative and leadership. As it turns out, the company I ended up working for didn’t want to move me straight into a team lead position, but the environment and team described made it sound like I had opportunities to be a mentor to junior developers and even train up the current team lead. The appeal of having a position that allowed me to be more than just another developer while also not necessarily having any additional responsibility sounded pretty good at the time, so I took it.

I didn’t mind taking a step down career-wise, but I also became complacent quickly. I’m good at solving problems, and the nastier the better. So I pretty happily took on one big issue after another. I drastically improved performance on the application I was assigned to. Yet, oddly, I wasn’t feeling challenged. There just got to be a point where I was sure I knew I could fix it.

The position I took over is not one I initially applied for. However, I took it because it looks like a challenge. There are a lot of unknowns and a lot of uncertainty. I’m confident I can succeed and help make the team a greater success. Still, there exists an unknown, a possibility of failure. I feel challenged again and I like it. Friday was my first day and on the drive home the enormity of what I had taken on hit me like a ton of bricks. Yet I’m not despairing because I think I’m at my best when I’m being challenged.

The one thing I’m hoping is that I have truly learned the lessons from the best managers I had. I want to emulate their example. I don’t want to be the pointy haired boss. I don’t expect to make everyone happy but I do think it’s now my job to make sure everyone I’m responsible for has the tools to be successful. I hope to be an enabler and not an obstacle.