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On the job: Does anyone pay any attention to what you do?
August 12th, 2008
One of the most obvious, and most valid, questions you’ll ever hear is whether management has any idea the amount of work people do. It’s the one that drives employees up the wall, with good reason. Ironically, it’s very frequent with people getting a lot of supervision, that their supervisors, although right there, watching, don’t seem to understand what’s being done.
If you’ve ever worked in a demanding, high stress, job, that question becomes a lot more common. The more work there is, the less appreciation seems to be forthcoming. Hard work, difficult situations, and no great interest being shown by management are classic symptoms.
People don’t like lack of appreciation. They realize they’re getting paid for what they do, but they usually feel that they don’t get paid anything like enough for it.
Here’s a few reasons for that:
Putting up with screeching customers,
Thieves in and out of the workplace,
More bureaucratic procedures than results,
Getting endless so-called information from people who don’t seem to have ever been anywhere near the workplace,
Management babble and tantrums
Understaffing
Cheapskate employment policies
Antiquated working conditions
Fossilized employment packages
Dinosaur speed promotions
HR gobbledygook
Add to this enchanting list a level of serious, continuous insult: Employees are considered to be some sort of inferior species.
Put all of that together, and the fun park is open for business. Is it any wonder people learn to hate their jobs and their bosses?
Is it really a surprise that people don’t try too hard, if all that comes back in return is something that says you’re a good gerbil?
So much is talked about Employee Relations that anyone would think that it meant anything. Most of it is garbage, and none of it is taken seriously up the food chain.
Most people would say that the relations, if they’re supposed to refer to any sort of relationship, are pretty academic.
Having found out they’ve got a job where they’re expected to do only so much, and don’t get any benefit from doing it, that’s all they’ll do. After all, they’re not paid to do anything more.
This is an incredibly destructive mindset, which management science, (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) has strangely failed to address.
After all, who are you supposed to be managing?
The lack of communication is doing quite a lot of damage.
The workplace may not be producing much work, but it is producing lots and lots of litigation. People aren’t too worried about suing employers these days. A lot of them are winning their cases, too, because of the staggering lack of understanding management, particularly in the US, is showing to basics.
Perhaps more seriously, management seems to be having a hard time comprehending the realities of the new workplace, and particularly the New Economy. Many employees are now as highly qualified, some would say more so, than their bosses. They’re not inferior beings, and they resent being treated as if they were.
That’s made clashes more likely, and management more likely to lose those clashes. It’s an unbelievably stupid situation, because without the employees, particularly the trained employees, there’s no business.
It may be an overstatement to say that management is completely ignorant of employee needs by definition. Some managers came up through the ranks, and do know their people, and the work, as well as anyone in their businesses.
That said, the insular management culture obviously just does not get the idea that the world has changed.
The Boss is no longer some godlike omnipotent deity. He or she’s more likely to be seen as an irritating, obsolescent old fool who doesn’t know his or her own business. That’s a situation which is potentially fatal for any business, as disgruntled and infuriated staff take their jobs and everything that’s not nailed down with them. They can take clients, information, credibility, and expertise and leave a desert behind them in terms of skills.
Employee expectations have gone up, and the old theory of just hiring someone else no longer holds good. The new person will have at least the same career expectations. They’ll also quite likely the same view of any manager who’s still living in 1950, or whenever this management/employee charade started.
It’d be nice to be able to say that whole new employment regimes are being developed.
It’d be good to think some new world, in which the human rights of the employee are not only spelt correctly, but actually enforced, was on its way soon.
That’s not happening, and there’s no indication that anyone’s trying too hard. Google may be a great place to work, but how many others have you heard of, in the last few decades?
For job seekers, the answer is a modern job, where someone’s heard of the basic amenities.
The only way to get rid of the Bad Old Days of employment is to starve them out and make them modernize.
No decent workplace, no employees.
No decent wage, no employees.
No justice, no employees.
No sane managers, no employees.
It might take a while, but they’ll get the message.
A new and better world has to start somewhere.
It seems appropriate that it would start in the workplace, where the worst of the old world doesn’t seem to realize it’s being asked to leave.
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