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Our organization has a new manager (been there about a year). The way we have always worked is decentralized, with the product engineers who are the main contact with the customers located in the plant where the customer's work is being done. But now our new manager is very much of the mindset that if he doesn't see you working then you can't be working.
Our actual productivity and flexibility to meet the customer's needs in a timely and efficient manner has always been our competitive edge. But now everything that we used to do at our level has been pulled up one or two levels above us. Decisions we could make in days now take weeks and our customers are not happy about that. This is a direct result of the micro management slowing down the process. One of the standard events at our weekly staff meetings is the schedule review where management points out all the product that is late, sometimes embarrassingly so, to which the standard response has become "it's sitting on your desk waiting your approval." (with the unspoken "where it's been the last three weeks.")
So, what is management's response to customer complaints? It's to pull all the engineers back into core office where he can see us working. They're spending hundreds of K tearing down and moving walls, buying new furniture, etc just so he can see us at our desks. Which will actually make the problem worse since it moves us out from where the work is adding another layer of inefficiency to the process.
What are you going to do about it is the question to ask yourself.
There are companies I have seen where they hire expensive consultants, fly them from far away, pay weeks of top hotel for them, all to get a report on how to re-arrange things on layouts or other such things on ways employees work. That is why what I see is promoting from within works you won't get those shenanigans. That because the internal candidate will know and see what works already. But hiring a guy with an MBA as a new manager and you often get this during the coming year. They waste money, re-arrange people, don't do any good, then they get promoted to new levels. It happens. Try to tuff it out if you can.
I have been a manager in an organization where distrust of the workforce ran rampant. Policies would come out directing us to jump through all kinds of hoops and devote huge amounts of time during the day to insure our staff was "accountable" for being productive.
All these policies were really doing were causing morale deflating micro management, unnecessary conflict, and being a huge distraction for those managers who had to sacrifice time which could have been used doing positive things for the team/organization in order to micromanage minor details.
Why does this happen? I am sure a variety of reasons, but in general, I think the management where I was had long cultivated a belief the staff would do as little as possible, and had to be beaten into continuing to work.
The irony, that belief became a self fulfilling prophecy, as it made people so miserable that they were no longer motivated to work.
Why does this happen? I am sure a variety of reasons, but in general, I think the management where I was had long cultivated a belief the staff would do as little as possible, and had to be beaten into continuing to work.
The irony, that belief became a self fulfilling prophecy, as it made people so miserable that they were no longer motivated to work.
Interesting you would say that because that is exactly what is happening where I work. Everyone is miserable, so they inflict more "help" on the problem. What we're ending up with is the older guys like me who are too vested in the pension to quit and a lot of transient younger guys who grab a few years experience and then move to better jobs.
To rise up in todays corporate environment, one needs to exhibit traits that are undesirable to most people. Be sneaky, backstabbing, lie constantly, just basically be unethical in all of your affairs. Managers spend so much time doing stuff like this, they automatically assume everyone does. They know that they just ditched work for an hour, so they are automatically suspicious that someone else might be thinking like they do.
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