Bosses, listen up

Total respect to the people that started a business, have skin in the game create jobs for people. I agree with you, you put your chips in and you can do it however you want, no judgment from me at all. I thought OP was talking about big companies and bosses that have no more skin in the game than the people they manage. I re-read it and maybe that is the case, maybe not. I currently work at one of those big companies and the gripes are seen by me. My boss, his boss, and her boss all have no more of their chips in than I do. If the company tanks they move onto the next one. You can see it in their decision making and communication at times. 

 I have friends that run their own deal, from 2 people operations to a larger company with a couple hundred employees. It is very different at those places. 

So in rambling summary, if you own your own place, awesome communicate and do whatever you want. If you are a little cog in the grand scheme of a fortune 100 company try not to be an shiny happy person, it isn't your ball and it isn't your game.

In reply to NY Nick :

I disagree.  I think my point stands in a company of 3 or 3,000.

I've seen good bosses, bad bosses, mediocre bosses, and bosses who just took up space who were middle-management and who were owner/founders.

The low-quality bosses are just more likely to be self-selected out when they own the business they're not very effective at running.

I don't buy the argument that you have to have done a job or filled a roll to be able to critique the quality of work someone else does. I'm not a plumber. I have 4 tanks in my cellar that ALL leak glycol because of the crap job the plumber did installing them. I know that plumber did a crappy job and give specific reasons why. But he is a plumber and I'm not.

I don't want to own or run a business. I want to make beer and/or whiskey. I'm well trained and very good at that. It requires a very different skill set from being the owner of a brewery. But I want a boss/owner who is good at their job to make it easier for me to be good at mine

While I agree with most of the points presented, I do disagree with the text vs phone call statements.

• A few professional development classes I took stated that text messages are the new phone calls and it is now professionally acceptable to do all business via text in lieu of voice, especially in sales and prospecting. 
• Most people wont answer an out-of-area phone call, but they will get the text and can then decide how to proceed.
• Texting gives people a nice in-between of immediacy.  Faster than an email, slower than a phone call.  You are allowed to think a bit but the expectation is still a reasonably prompt reply.
• Most of my customers work in loud and dirty places with poor cell signal.  Texts go through a lot more reliably than voice, and someone gets a text notification on their watch and can reply when they are 15 feet up in a scissor lift vs having to take time for a phone call.

Of course, YMMV and all that jazz.  

In reply to 93gsxturbo :

I would much rather get a text than a call as do most people I know. The only person that regularly gets a call from me is my mom. 

In reply to 93gsxturbo :

Text messages let me look at a question, roll my eyes, and say, "What kind of an idiot are you?" before responding politely.

The form of communication used needs to match the situation of course.  I think texts are absolutely acceptable for short, quick answer stuff.

I work in a highly collaborative environment, so I find emails frustrating as they are a terrible way to have a short term discussion.  Face to face, zoom, phone calls, etc. are all preferred for most of my work, with IM behind that, and email behind that.

Earlier today someone contacted me via Teams chat about installing an application on a computer.  They wrote a ~300 word message that raised a number of questions from me.  I immediately hit the call button and they didn't answer.  Annoyed, I carried out a conversation via Teams chat that was both unclear, and 5x longer than it would have been had they answered the call.

One additional frustration about some employees is the habit of "throwing it over the wall".  I.E. send an email or IM, then sit back and relax waiting for a reply.  When asked about the status of their project they will say "Well, I asked John Smith 3 days ago, but he hasn't responded."

RE: Zoom/Teams/Webex/etc.

Teams (government version anyway) doesn't allow for annotation.  That effectively makes it a non-starter for any collaborative meetings.  As such its good for a quick 5-10 min call, but not for more serious stuff.  All scheduled meetings use Zoom for primarily this reason.  I actually find design reviews via Zoom more effective than in-person.

Beer Baron said:

In reply to 93gsxturbo :

Text messages let me look at a question, roll my eyes, and say, "What kind of an idiot are you?" before responding politely.

They also give me a handy receipt when someone goes to their boss, tells them I didn't explain something properly to them, and then my boss comes to chew me out for it. Seems tk be a regular occurrence lately. It's nice to pull up exactly the conversation we had. 

In reply to ProDarwin :

Everything seems to have a place, I'm mostly bothered when there's too much redundancy. Most of my communications have to be done in a timely manner, either getting unplanned service changes put out to customers or update various parties during incident investigations. 
 

It gets to be frustrating when in addition to managing an ongoing situation, you have to share the same information across several platforms because each department head has a favorite. 

I headed too many soccer balls as a kid and I'm convinced that hurt my ability to remember things so I greatly prefer typed correspondence - because it allows me to search for something later. Phone and conference calls are great but I will follow up with a text or email to myself (as a crutch).

I think chat apps feel less formal but in reality they're accomplishing the same thing as email - it's just the continued evolution of letters, memoranda, transmittal letters, etc - it's all producing "work" (and all discoverable in a claim - so be mindful of what you say).

We're evolving. And some people are still dicks regardless of the communication tool they use.

Unlike some of the Troglodytes here, as a practicing introvert, I abhor talking on the phone. I do not even enjoy talking face to face sometimes. Text messages, email, and teams, I love. 

Communication has to match the audience, location and importance of the information.  Everyone should be well versed in all communication tools.  I think the OP was complaining about how certain people of a certain generation don't want to learn or use new tools that much.  I do find the generational outrage hilarious though.  Neither side cares to understand the other, and the communication is so far from considerate that mediation becomes nearly impossible.  It's a good reason to have any office stocked with popcorn.  You'll need it. 

Was going to put this into the minor rant thread, but since this a work thread...

From this BBC article Why is technology not making us more productive?

"It seems to be that if you have highly-skilled people, you have a lot of data and you know how to use the sophisticated software, and you can change your processes, so that people can use the information, your productivity is going through the roof.

"But in the same sector of the economy there are other companies that just can't do that."

The technology is seemingly not the problem, and in some respects it is not the solution either. High productivity growth will come only to those that learn how to use it best.

This is the issue I've been having at work. We're a design and engineering office but I feel like we use CAD mainly to eliminate paper use. We have drawings that are dependent on other drawings where if one gets updated we have to manually update the others. Worst is we are hand counting parts and pieces in them.

For a while now there's software that lets you design huge assemblies in 3D, create multiple views for drawings with quantities for the individual parts, and the clever part is that the drawings and parts count get updated automatically when the 3D model gets updated.  We even had a vendor demo a program that was particular to our industry with all these bells and whistles. I've been telling the boss "let's berkeleying do that" for a while now and feel like this job is so inefficient it's a waste of time. We could be churning out so much more work if we weren't being penny wise and pound foolish.

In reply to j_tso :

I just had a thaught. Bosses can be stupid. Hell I am one I should know. But this got me thinking that maybe the boss is not smart enough to understand the new process. Their logic is that if you don't understand it you can not be the boss of it. So no upgrade. It scares them (the bosses that is). Because they will become obsolete along with the old way of doing things.  

dean1484 said:

In reply to j_tso :

I just had a thaught. Bosses can be stupid. Hell I am one I should know. But this got me thinking that maybe the boss is not smart enough to understand the new process. Their logic is that if you don't understand it you can not be the boss of it. So no upgrade. It scares them (the bosses that is). Because they will become obsolete along with the old way of doing things.  

Then they have already failed as a boss and are just expending effort to hide that fact.

If you're managing properly, you don't need to know or understand the components you don't use. That's not your job. Your job is to be sure that you have the proper people allocated to the necessary tasks, you need to provide them with the resources necessary to complete that task efficiently, and you need to insulate them from distractions and stresses that inhibit their ability to perform those tasks efficiently.

In reply to Beer Baron :

I think Carroll Shelby said something like "I'm not a smart guy, but I knew smart guys and was able to get them together."

In reply to j_tso :

We had a similar issue a few years ago.  Everything we did was 2D CAD.  We eventually shifted over to 3D modeling after one of our younger engineers basically fought our management tooth and nail to try using 3D modeling on one of our projects.  And after it was done, and everyone saw how much nicer it was, the shift slowly, and sometimes painfully, started happening over to 3D.  Dude earned his paycheck with that one.  Sometimes you just need that one person to make it their mission to make changes.

Beer Baron said:

If you're managing properly, you don't need to know or understand the components you don't use. That's not your job. Your job is to be sure that you have the proper people allocated to the necessary tasks, you need to provide them with the resources necessary to complete that task efficiently, and you need to insulate them from distractions and stresses that inhibit their ability to perform those tasks efficiently.

This is the way. 

I've been out of the field and behind a desk for almost 3 years now. I can still play the tune but the guys who are hands-on on a daily basis are as good or better than I am at this point. Making that transition was difficult. I have always been a very hands-on person. I don't want to watch or stay out of the way, I want to do. I could have turned into a micro-manager fairly easily to maintain my control and power. It took some mental adjustment to go from the doer to the facilitator. 

My current title is CEO or Owner but realistically, my job is to make sure the people who work for me have what they need to do their jobs. I work for them as much as they work for me. I am lucky enough to have an outstanding team that is capable and willing to get the job done so I don't have to babysit them. I can let them deal with the immediate while I concentrate on everything else and make sure we have future work to do. 

While I could probably squeeze a little more juice out of the carrot, that's short-term thinking and you would have to beat the horse to do it. I'm not just in this for me, I'm in this for all of us. 

I try very hard to be on the right side of this. 

In reply to Toyman! :

I totally agree!