Just put up some more of my pics from San Francisco. Now I’m off to bed. There’s nothing like being out at training for a week, coming back to the office, and being absolutely swamped with work to make you exhausted!
Not to mention the cold medicine, thanks to being stuck on airplanes and spending 4 days in a small classroom with cold germ carriers. Like I have time to be sick now? 😉
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Recently, while on a trip to visit Pearl Harbor, we had the opportunity to tour the battleship USS Missouri. Mighty Mo’, as she has become known, was the site of the Japanese surrender at the end of WWII, but more recently the Missouri was also brought back into service as part of Desert Storm, before…
Hopefully the internet connection will stay afloat here long enough for me to post. It’s been sort of iffy all afternoon. Naturally, I spent the morning doing all the database stuff, saving the afternoon for some internet research and getting virus updates and “online” stuff. Isn’t that always the way? Hopefully it’ll stay afloat while…
Personally, I wouldn’t use the term lazy. I don’t think they are just being lazy, I think parents and managers default to this approach because they don’t know any better. They haven’t been given clear direction on how to parent or manage, and they’ve been overwhelmed with the variety and often conflicting information they can get. Without clarity, they’ve defaulted to the simplest solution – do it yourself.
For managers, that looks a lot like Jake describes it. Fixing the work of your reports instead of providing feedback, reminding them repeatedly about deadlines, needing to see them in the office working, being CC’d on every email, and generally just looking over their shoulder at every turn. I don’t know many managers who want to work that way, yet we all know there are plenty of managers who do. As I said earlier, I don’t think they want to be lazy, I think they lack the proper training and clarity about managing. How much better could they be, and in turn the people who report to them be, if our organizations provided that?
We’ve seen the memes. The ones about the law firm offering a lunch hour yoga class to overworked, stressed, associates who haven’t had time to even take a lunch break in months. Or the “reward” for months of 70-80 hour work weeks is free pizza. It just makes people angry because it’s a token that does nothing to actually recognize the work involved, or correct the problems that created this mess to start with.
Workplace stress, anxiety, and other mental health issues are not just something a little mindfulness can fix. Workers are waking up to the fact that it’s the company culture that is contributing to this. Offering a way for employees to help “fix” themselves might seem like a nice thing, and in many ways it is, but doing it while not making any effort to recognize the contributions managers and corporate culture make to the problem, along with a commitment to make changes, is the very definition of “too little”.
On the opposite end of the spectrum from my last post, Douglas Welch links and comments on a Steve Olson post about eating lunch alone as a way to find solitude. I do understand the concept. Working at a help desk, I certainly understand the need to get away from answering questions at your lunch…