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My company embarks on an experiment in which members of management become ground-level workers for one day.
At some point, managers will become helpdesk workers and take customer calls, dealing with complaints. Or become admin workers and the excruciatingly boring spreadsheet tasks. Or deal with other simple routine operations we have, including maintenance, like unblocking toilets. For one day.
Since much of our management has been promoted within the company, this was how they began. People worked from scratch and climbed the ladder. So getting management to go back to basics seems fundamentally sound. But there's something that seems strange about this.
Why re-introduce the past to someone who has been there, done that? What skills or perspective are they going to learn? If the present system is failing, shouldn't the existing system simply be improved?
So what do you think - if a manager is a manager, surely they have the right to remain as they are. Is this good for a company? Yay or nay?
It is odd. Managers don’t necessarily know how to do the jobs of non-managerial employees, particularly if technology or processes have changed since they moved up.
I do periodically work side by side with my employees. I find it is good for morale, they see me willing to pitch in and work to help them out when necessary. However, I would not be able to do their job as well as they do, and simply assigning me to a phone or vacuum for a day strikes me as inefficient and rather forced.
Yes, I believe it's good for managers to have to spend some time doing the jobs of their subordinates, even if they don't have the skills to do them accurately. The most important thing they can learn from this isn't how to do the job, but how much effort it takes and how much nonsense gets dropped down on the staff every day. It helps them understand what the limits really are.
That's a problem with our management; they don't understand the limits and just keep demanding more than the current workforce can produce.
Management should be staff where I work. I am in the IT field and there's a huge disconnect between IT management and userbase in as far as what the business needs vs. what the business actually gets. Complaints galore... yet...
Yes, I believe it's good for managers to have to spend some time doing the jobs of their subordinates, even if they don't have the skills to do them accurately. The most important thing they can learn from this isn't how to do the job, but how much effort it takes and how much nonsense gets dropped down on the staff every day. It helps them understand what the limits really are.
That's a problem with our management; they don't understand the limits and just keep demanding more than the current workforce can produce.
This is also the best way to figure out when you need to hire new people. I worked in one government office where we were able to get new people hired by figuring out how long it would take to do a project with the current process and presenting it to the top management. I worked with a manager in my office and we sat down with how much time we knew each person spent on their parts of the task to come up with the final numbers to present and a) got new people hired and b) got a new process put in place. No one had really thought about how long the process was taking or how many manpower hours it would actually take to finish the project. They were just saying it needs to finish.
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That happens when a union goes on strike, especially in government offices which are almost always unionized. I have been there once, though we did have some scabs that came in, all of us managers and supervisors had to do much of the work of those on strike.
I wish one of my workplaces had done this. My supervisor had been promoted up out of my job, but the job had changed considerably in the 10 years since she had done it. She was always regaling us with stories of how awesome she had been at our job, with included snide remarks about why we weren't quite as awesome as she had been. I would have had a real hoot watching her try to do what we did. It was a physically and emotionally stressful job, with a lot of different responsibilities that meant we were constantly being paged from place to place. She would have collapsed before lunch.
My Hospital Admin made it a point to work a shift with each department over the course of a year...
I think it was a good thing and very well received in general.
This meant transporting patients, doing OR turn overs, working with engineering at the steam plant and up on the roof with HVAC... also the Front Desk, Customer Service, Billing, etc...
My company embarks on an experiment in which members of management become ground-level workers for one day.
At some point, managers will become helpdesk workers and take customer calls, dealing with complaints. Or become admin workers and the excruciatingly boring spreadsheet tasks. Or deal with other simple routine operations we have, including maintenance, like unblocking toilets. For one day.
Since much of our management has been promoted within the company, this was how they began. People worked from scratch and climbed the ladder. So getting management to go back to basics seems fundamentally sound. But there's something that seems strange about this.
Why re-introduce the past to someone who has been there, done that? What skills or perspective are they going to learn? If the present system is failing, shouldn't the existing system simply be improved?
So what do you think - if a manager is a manager, surely they have the right to remain as they are. Is this good for a company? Yay or nay?
The goal is typically to better understand the challenges a staff may face that a manager may no longer be able to see. Even if folks worked their way up, how things were done when they were there may have changed. Or the industry itself have changed and new challenges are being faced.
I do think it can be helpful. I've also seen it go the other way - where staff gets to be in management's shoes for a day (shadowing) to understand the challenges there. It can be eye opening for both parties.
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