Business Culture in the UK

[sobrique]

It 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.

Comments

[malal.livejournal.com]

Hold on, you're describing what good managers should do. What percentage of good managers out of the total have you come across?

Because my experience is that it's pretty low. And even the good ones are too busy dealing with the bad management above them to do a good job (though I always appreciate when they get metric tonnes of Dung dropped on them, and you don't get hit by the slightest splatter).

Good managers make or break a job. They can't be too nice, or too mean. But they have to be reasonable.

[malal.livejournal.com]

Actually, in complete contrast, I've had some terrible bosses who only cared that the work alloted to us got done. We could do a really shoddy job, in half the time, and they wouldn't care as long as we had the sign off sheet in time.

[mcnazgul.livejournal.com]

I've always subscribed to the view that if I do a job then I do it in the way that I'd like it done to me. Yes it does make me a rarity. :)

I can be too nice and have been taken advantage of before but such things are a learning curve; being reasonable is perhaps one of the best and hardest lessons you can learn.

I agree there are a lot of managers who have their eyes on other things. There does seem to be a slavish devotion to getting boxes ticked instead of getting the jobs done. And it's not unusual for them to get the spatter effect that you've mentioned.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

If we just sack all the bad managers things will be much better. They can go and pick fruit or clean beaches instead.