
How Company Culture Demotivates People - xhrpost
http://watercoolernewsletter.com/3-ways-your-company-culture-is-demotivating-your-people/
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derekp7
For the "busy work" problem -- Let's say you need to keep staff for certain
job functions, which require a certain amount of institutional knowledge (so
you can't easily hire off the street for them). And, you only need those
skills periodically (once a month, a few times a year, etc). What do you do
with those people when they aren't needed for the important periodic work,
except to give them busy work that is somewhat related, to keep them skilled
in that area?

Take the reports generation example in the article. Now sure, those specific
reports can be automated. But everyone once in a while, they may want to issue
new categories of reports. Someone has to design them, and put out the initial
prototypes. And the people best qualified in designing them may be the ones
manually generating them every month. If you automate it, and employees
eventually cycle out through attrition, then there may be no one left that
remembers how to put that style of reports together.

So, how would you normally handle that type of situation, besides avoiding the
automation so that this skill remains fresh in the institution? (i.e., you may
assign this task to each new crop of junior employees).

One example we had at a large telecom equipment manufacture I used to work at,
was whenever someone new came into the group, the first thing you would have
them do is physically inventory all the servers. At that time, they were
spread throughout the main data center, several data closets in a large
building, and some were off site. This ended up getting the new staff familiar
with the equipment, and location, and how to navigate the building. Even
though we could have automated the inventory through software.

~~~
memracom
Your telecom equipment manufacturer probably did not exclaim that the
inventory taking was high priority and needed to be done in overtime as well.
In fact if their goal was learning they probably would have spread the work
out to only a few hours a day so that you get maximum retention of the
knowledge.

It's the hurry up busy work that is so bad.

In one of my jobs, I was providing technical support to sales for major
accounts. It was challenging work which involved reading RFPs in languages
that I did not know very well to catch where the sales team was
misunderstanding technical requirements. Sometimes there was hurry up work to
meet a prospect's deadlines. And we only won about 5% of the bids that I
worked on. But it still felt good to do the work. I knew that it wasn't wasted
any more than a football practice session is wasted. It was a competition.

I wonder if there is some way to incorporate gamification into the enterprise
to solve this problem.

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aaronbrethorst
When everything is critically important, nothing really is. If you ever find
yourself in a company where they foist this on you, or offer banal platitudes
like "we work hard and play hard", don't walk, _RUN_ , in the other direction.

Life's too short to waste your time on this sort of thing.

~~~
derefr
> "we work hard and play hard"

Boy, it'd sure be nice to work for a company that _didn 't_ have this attitude
(games industry.)

~~~
Macsenour
Did I read that right? You think the games industry doesn't have that
attitude?

~~~
aaronbrethorst
The way I interpreted it was:

    
    
        Boy, it'd sure be nice to work for a company that
        did not have the attitude "we work hard and play hard"
    

i.e. they think the games industry exhibits this trend.

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j_baker
A company that's doing #1 is very easy to recognize. Everyone's always rushing
but never getting anything done because they haven't taken the time to clean
up the mistakes the last rushed project caused. It's not the worst problem a
startup can have, but if it's sustained it will kill the startup in the long
run.

Number 2 is just a sign of management either not caring about or being too
arrogant to see the truth: their company is going under. Chances are, such a
company won't be around for much longer.

Number 3 is a sign that a company doesn't care about its peoples' happiness.
It just wants them to be good little drones while management gets to do all
the interesting work.

~~~
dasil003
This article seems to be about Fortune 500s since the type of waste it
demonstrates would not even allow a startup to get off the ground.

~~~
DrJokepu
Success hides inefficiencies. Even at startups.

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rarw
#1 bugs me the most. False urgency is the name of the game everywhere I've
ever worked. From my experience it's a problem of how the company is
structured. When everyone thinks what they are working on or assigning is top
priority it's because (a) they really don't have a sense of what is actually
important (b) managment is fragmented such that each person's individual most
important task seems like a global most important task.

In a law firm, which is basicly 1000 separate practices trying to exist
simultaneously, this happens all the time, usually because of option b. When a
"team" is really a group of people who happen to be in the same place instead
of a collaborative unit, what is imporant is up to each person. It's a bad way
a run a business and totally messes with your employees.

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coldcode
The right answer is - leave. Sure it isn't always simple, but burning yourself
to death for nothing is a waste of life.

~~~
lesinski
Woah now... How about trying to communicate with senior management to change
these things first?

~~~
MrZongle2
Fair enough question. Here are the obstacles to that:

* In larger companies, senior management may be completely inaccessible. Not "officially off-limits", mind you, but busy enough that you've got to deal with _their_ assistants merely to get onto their calendar; and doing so may attract attention from their underlings (still at least one level above _you_ ), who may try to influence things before your meeting if they're aware of your agenda.

* Management ego: if the senior management in question has been in their position for quite a while, they may bristle when informed that their master plan has some holes in it.

* Management ego, part II: if you're relatively new to the company, you may have considerable difficulty getting buy-in from the old guard.

* Drowning new management: if senior management has recently undergone a turnover, the new kids in charge may be drinking from the firehose and unable to grasp the enormity of what you're saying. Or, worse, they rely on the input of a longtime company veteran whose "contributions" over the years may have directly caused the problem.

* Out of sight, out of mind: problems for _you_ and your peers may be not be seen as a problem for senior management, especially if there is a great disparity in working environments. Work in a cube on a noisy floor while senior management has large, quiet offices on a different floor (or a different building)? They might not be sympathetic to complaints about your inability to concentrate.

* It's all about the Benjamins: ultimately, management is guided by two things. The first is money; if it's rolling in at the same or greater pace than last year, _there is no problem_. The second is risk; if you can't specify a specific risk to future business...again, there is no problem. Worse, if somebody can provide a toothless risk mitigation plan that _sounds_ good but does nothing to actually solve _your_ problem, then senior management may still consider the whole thing moot.

This is why many folks -- especially the ones who have been around long enough
to have burnt by one of the above a few times -- simply advise suffering
employees to look elsewhere.

It's not about apathy, it's about preservation of sanity.

~~~
ollysb
Adding to this, any structure involving a large number people is generally
extremely change resistant. If you're looking for changes that go against the
grain of the culture that you're working in then you might as well forget it.
You can push back to a certain degree but cultural pressure will reverse any
changes you make without a significant, continued investment of energy on your
part. For this reason it's better to find a new culture (new job) which aligns
better with what you want to do.

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krstck
To add on to #1, it is especially demotivating when the higher-ups drag their
heels on even getting the project to you (hey, they're busy too) and then it
NEEDS TO BE DONE RIGHT NOW! Or even better, when someone higher up screws up
and you have to fix it, nights and weekends be damned.

It took me a long time to realize that most of these "urgent deadlines" are
basically arbitrary. It's almost as if they think their employees can't
function without the sound of a ticking clock over their heads. It's extremely
stressful and counterproductive. I enjoy a push every once in a while, but
it's demoralizing when it's not for a damn good reason.

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auctiontheory
People typically end up in management via promotion. But they are not promoted
because they would be good managers - they are promoted because they were good
individual contributors.

The folks who might make good managers (because they have better people
skills, not necessarily better technical skills), often struggle as mediocre
individual contributors, and never get promoted.

~~~
jacobquick
On the other hand companies that think this way trip themselves up by letting
people fail upward: "they can't do the job as an individual we'll let them
manage everyone else into the ground."

~~~
dhimes
It's called the Peter Principle

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle)

~~~
jacobquick
Well no in this scenario the person has been promoted two steps past his level
of incompetence.

------
mmsimanga
Before I worked for a corporate company I used to think Dilbert was funny. Now
I use Dilbert cartoons as a learning tool. Helps me prepare for situations at
work.

------
vinceguidry
This sort of thing has one and only one good aspect, to train you to not put
up with it.

You can't really blame it on "company culture", because then you could
realistically expect that the next job you have won't be like that. You could
expect to stop dealing with it by freelancing or consulting it. But you can't.

It's just the way people operate. To externalize broken process to those
willing to put up with it. Shit will keep coming your way until you put a cork
in it.

Refuse to accept broken process. Don't work late without a good reason. Spend
some time looking around before you start working on anything tedious for
anything that will make things easier. A few insightful questions can turn a
wild hare's chase into a cakewalk.

And if you find something that can be automated, do it! If they tell you no,
do it anyway, and don't tell them. When they hand you something they expect to
take two days, and you "take two days", no one's the wiser.

------
memracom
Imagine this. The company recognizes that it has too many staff, therefore it
offers early retirement deals and voluntary redundancy deals, which pay
significant bonuses if you have been with the company for several years. But
you need to get approval up the management chain, i.e. your manager, their
manager, their manager's manager, etc. And it is refused.

Six months later, the deal is offered again, you apply and it is refused. And
again six months later, and again, until 3 years have passed. All these years
you have hardly anything to do, i.e. your job responsibilities can be
completed in 4 hours per week. You spend a lot of time browsing the web,
reading research papers, gaining the equivalent of a university education. You
spend some time on the corporate wiki documenting things, explaining stuff,
collating a glossary of corporate jargon etc. From time to time you find
someone else with a problem and help them out with it, in secret because that
is not your job.

And finally, after carefully crafting emails to everyone in your management
chain, pointing out how you do nothing useful for the business and haven't for
the past several years, and how there is no risk to the business because you
have trained person X to do your 4 hours per week of real work, and built an
automated tool as well, they accept your application. You get a check for 4
months wages, and never have to return to that place.

Do you think such a person would ever recommend anyone to work there? The
worst part of this is that when this happened to me there was another
department that desperately needed people with my skillset and experience, but
I could not be considered for such jobs without approval of my management
chain. Somehow they got the idea in their head that I was an employee too
valuable to lose, even though I did so little work that I "worked from home" 4
days a week so that nobody would notice if I took a nap or something.

I have some sympathy with Yahoo and HP for wanting people to work in the
office, but if they happen to have this kind of problem, I think that they are
solving it in the wrong way. Instead, try zero-based budgeting for headcount.
If you cannot justify every position in dollars and cents, that person is out
of your organization and goes into a pool where anyone in need of their skills
can bid for the headcount.

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aschambers
Agree, it's a combination of both, as well as some other challenges. Yes, it's
a culture that seems to support these behaviors broadly across the
organization, a leadership team that isn't demonstrating the right behaviors
and managers that are emulating their leader's behavior. There are definitely
opportunities to change processes, behaviors, beliefs/thinking to tweak the
culture, as well as give their managers training on how to get the best from
their teams and support the company strategy.

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Pxtl
#3 must be related to a local culture or industry, because I'd like to think
anybody involved in that kind of logic would be laughed out of the room in a
modern mainstream software company.

~~~
thomasd
This can even happen in a tech company. More often than not, this is an issue
with managers who are non-techie. They're not sure what automation will do,
and since they don't know what's going on when processes are automated,
they're reluctant to try. #3 can plague any company. It happened at Apple as
well, in supply chain, far away from product engineering.

You know how every product on the Apple Online Store has details on how long
it'll take to be delivered to you? E.g. 2 Business Days, 1-2 Weeks, Within 24
Hours. These quotes are manually changed. That's right. Every product on every
Apple Online Store (e.g. Singapore, Hong Kong, China, US etc) has their own
quote, and these need to be changed manually by someone.

I remember I hated the manual work and made several automation scripts that'll
just do everything for me. The managers wanted to have nothing to do with it.
"What if the script screws up?". That was their biggest concern. We all know
that programs are more consistent than human being so that's nothing to be
worried over.

I was only able to convince the managers that automation is an improvement
after having everyone in the department using the script without their
permission.

I suspect their reluctance was also due to some degree of "if it's not broken,
don't fix it".

~~~
coldcode
Likely the humans will fail more often than the automation. I worked in a
place where they didn't trust automation to copy 1000 files from one server to
another so they had someone manually copy the files every morning. I bet he
missed a few every day.

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MAGZine
This sounds more like bad management then bad corporate culture. I mean,
perhaps some corporate culture, but really sounds like the managers need
manager training.

~~~
j_baker
The thing is that managers help build a company's culture. Really, a few bad
managers in the right place is all you need to kill a company's culture.

~~~
MAGZine
Not necessarily.

Corporate culture is defined in large parts by the people who started the
company. It's the first few, and to a smaller extent, dozen, and smaller
extend, 50, etc people that will define your corporate culture. At a large
company, such as the one (I'm guessing here) discussed in the article,
corporate culture can be VERY resilient to a few bad apples.

~~~
moocowduckquack
In a very large company, the corporate culture becomes massively varied by
department. Critical parts of a company can easily develop a culture that
comes from organisations and societies well outside the founders culture.
Ultimately a companies culture is affected by who it can hire as much as
anything else.

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knodi
It comes down to is the money worth the time. If its no then leave, if its yes
then stay.

------
VladRussian2
it is like this guy has never looked at
[http://www.despair.com/lithographs.html](http://www.despair.com/lithographs.html),
even Barney Stinson has posters from there :)

------
avty
Yup, hostile coworkers are the worst. Incompetent people establishing process
to bring everyone down to their level.

I've seen every trick in the book. This industry sucks.

~~~
krstck
What industry doesn't have incompetent management?

