Business Culture in the UK
Feb. 5th, 2008 06:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sobriqueIt makes me wonder sometimes, if 'business culture' in this country is just completely messed up.
I mean, I see many places, where 'face time' is what's important. The hours you're in the office, and LOOK like you're grinding hard are valued far more than the productivity.
I see so many people 'wasting' time, filling in spreadsheets, and merging data from one spreadsheet, to another, to another.
And updating them, and ... essentially reproducing the 'paper office' in electronic form.
I can't help but wonder if this is endemic. If we are, in fact, shooting ourselves in the face, by actively not making it worth 'working hard' by punishing those that do, by giving them more work - I mean, if they're not busy, they can take on more, right?
If I write a shellscript to do a proportion of my job, as ... well more or less happened recently, this was discarded as showing off, and otherwise 'being out of line' for not accepting the tools provided. But I guarantee if I had started automating my whole job, tben I would suffer in comparison to the guy at the end of the desk, filling in row after row on his spreadsheet.
We live in an IT age. Computers are great - they move data around, they manipulate things, they do all manner of mindless, repetitive thing. Why then, do we get people to step the computers through, one thing at a time, and essentially entirely discard this extremely powerful tool?
It's quite simple. We have places where people don't care, because they know full well that the person 'measuring' what they do, has no clue how to measure their performance, except by
'seeing if they're in work and typing'.
Worse still, if said person actually tries to be efficient about it, and ... automates it, then goes off to chill out whilst it does ... whatver... well, that's clearly SLACKING isn't it?
Worse, it's making the rest of the department LOOK BAD.
We need to remodel our business culture. EVERY employer, and place of work out there, should positively reward people based upon getting stuff done. It should be _worth it_ for me to write a script, to do my job.
It should be worth it, for me to make infomation dissemination easier, faster and more efficient - to make computers do the mindless moron jobs, and leave the people to do the stuff that computers can't do AMAZINGLY WELL.
But it's not. If I clear my workload, then I guarantee you, that doesn't mean 'oh good, I'll go home early then'.
So it pays me to slack off, in a vaguely constructive looking fashion. It pays me to be frantically typing in notepad, regardless of whether I'm setting up a change request, or writing my novel on company time.
But we're just still caught in this rut, of pay = hours. And hours = pay.
I mean, I see many places, where 'face time' is what's important. The hours you're in the office, and LOOK like you're grinding hard are valued far more than the productivity.
I see so many people 'wasting' time, filling in spreadsheets, and merging data from one spreadsheet, to another, to another.
And updating them, and ... essentially reproducing the 'paper office' in electronic form.
I can't help but wonder if this is endemic. If we are, in fact, shooting ourselves in the face, by actively not making it worth 'working hard' by punishing those that do, by giving them more work - I mean, if they're not busy, they can take on more, right?
If I write a shellscript to do a proportion of my job, as ... well more or less happened recently, this was discarded as showing off, and otherwise 'being out of line' for not accepting the tools provided. But I guarantee if I had started automating my whole job, tben I would suffer in comparison to the guy at the end of the desk, filling in row after row on his spreadsheet.
We live in an IT age. Computers are great - they move data around, they manipulate things, they do all manner of mindless, repetitive thing. Why then, do we get people to step the computers through, one thing at a time, and essentially entirely discard this extremely powerful tool?
It's quite simple. We have places where people don't care, because they know full well that the person 'measuring' what they do, has no clue how to measure their performance, except by
'seeing if they're in work and typing'.
Worse still, if said person actually tries to be efficient about it, and ... automates it, then goes off to chill out whilst it does ... whatver... well, that's clearly SLACKING isn't it?
Worse, it's making the rest of the department LOOK BAD.
We need to remodel our business culture. EVERY employer, and place of work out there, should positively reward people based upon getting stuff done. It should be _worth it_ for me to write a script, to do my job.
It should be worth it, for me to make infomation dissemination easier, faster and more efficient - to make computers do the mindless moron jobs, and leave the people to do the stuff that computers can't do AMAZINGLY WELL.
But it's not. If I clear my workload, then I guarantee you, that doesn't mean 'oh good, I'll go home early then'.
So it pays me to slack off, in a vaguely constructive looking fashion. It pays me to be frantically typing in notepad, regardless of whether I'm setting up a change request, or writing my novel on company time.
But we're just still caught in this rut, of pay = hours. And hours = pay.
