Mismanagement Kills Morale

Mismanagement Kills Morale

Anyone who has ever worked for someone else knows that the person in charge is an idiot. The further up the chain of command you go the more idiotic they become. Let's take a concrete example.

Let's consider what happened at a company X listed by the local city paper as one of the "Top 100 Companies for Working Families". BTW, they weren’t kidding, at this place they'd make your family work if they could.

On Monday at X, SVP & CIO called to task the VP of Application Software Engineering, let's call him "Veep". Some of the people way down in the organization that report to Veep were not readily available (on a weekend) to support a group (not in Veep’s area) whose project was two months late, and looking like it was going to be four months late. If this critical project were late, upper management would be punished. Veep's solution?

To have EVERYONE in his area of responsibility work through the next 2 weekends. The 2 weekends before Christmas!

Would there be comp time later? Nope.
Quick notice to adjust? Nope, some were informed Thursday.

It would take two hands to count the number of children in the office that weekend.

Would there at least be relevant work that pertains to the troubled project to do? Nope.

That’s right! For the vast majority of those forced to give up their weekends to the company – THERE WAS NO WORK TO DO!

Sixty people asked to work on Saturday and Sunday when there in fact was no actual work.

Un-Believe-Able. In an attempt to make this appear to be a rational decision, another group got some ill will from the 60 "wage slaves" when "since they are going to be here anyway" another manager when offered asked the disgruntled to perform testing on an unrelated product. The testing, the only real work that might affect a schedule was completed in four hours.

Was everyone else sent home? Nope.
Was there even a thank you for coming in? Nope.
Was Veep even in the office? Nope.

Why?

His wife was having a baby. His personal time was more important than that of the other 60 people in question.

For at least one of the groups, the demand was presented in the context of "you aren't working hard enough and not working hard enough is stealing from the company". Moreover, some of you are "getting in late", or "not letting us know where you are".

Among the other inspiring things management communicated:

1. You are all overpaid. (I love this one)
2. You're salaried employees and shouldn't complain about unscheduled overtime.
3. Having an "hourly worker" mentality.

So it's OK for company X to steal time off? No mention of the fact that the projects Veep's teams were actually working were all ahead of schedule regardless of the silly hours spent in the office. However, it's easy to count hours and avoid the hard work of actual management. It's easier to blame the workers for their predicament than it is to stand up to upper management. Nowhere in this analysis is the long-term benefit to the organization considered. It was safer and easier for Veep to give a knee jerk response, just as it was safer and easier to pass the edict on instead of challenging it for the Directors. Ditto for the managers and what do you have? Instant organizational Hari-kari.

Resumes started flying off printers and monster.com and dice.com were bookmarked. Recruiters start getting calls and before long, there will be a mass exodus of experienced talent from the organization. There were even rumors of "union" (don't hold your breath; IT workers are notoriously hard to organize).

Eventually sanity shone through and Veep e-mailed (from the hospital?), at 2:30 on Sunday to tell everyone, they could go home.

There's a lesson in here somewhere. I'm just not sure anyone is paying attention.