'That would require Mr. Micro-Management to do some actual work': New manager spies on employees, employees waste two full days of work to spite him

Advertisement
  • 01
    It's all about efficiency, but only when I say so
  • 02
    Backstory: I've been working for (almost) 3 years now at a local market data center for a nationwide company that offers Colocation and Cloud based services. It's a good "foot-in-the- door" type of job for someone who dropped out of college because of the cost but still wants a career in IT. When I got hired, I was told that I was one of two new hires that would be starting in the NOC but was starting 2 weeks before the other
  • 03
    guy. However, on my first day I was met by an older guy who stated it was also his first day. I was really confused and assumed he was the other new hire, at the time I was 20, this guy was almost 50 leaving me to feel very under qualified for the job. Soon after, I discovered that this guy is going to be the new manager. Being that I did all of the on boarding calls and corporate nonsense with the new manager, we have built a pretty decent relationship that he simply
  • 04
    doesn't have with the rest of the team. I've since worked hard to go from "not really qualified", all the way up to Team Lead of my colleagues. The leadership role, along with the different relationship I have with my manager leaves me being the guy who regularly has to speak up on behalf of my coworkers to the manager when there is a problem. I act as sort of a "middle man" between my team and the manager. Now time for the MC...
  • 05
    Last week my manager comes to me with an idea to change the schedule. Now, keeping up with the schedule is part of my job, and I have a pretty good system about it. My manager knows that, but will often times come to me with an idea, I'll give him feedback and we will work together to make something work. This time was different, he showed me his proposal and I instantly pointed out where the negative feedback was going to come from but he wasn't worried
  • 06
    and told me to brief the staff accordingly. As expected, I was 100% correct about where my team would push back. Of a 6 person staff, 4 of the people were not happy with the schedule leaving only myself and my #2 guy who literally got bumped from an 8-4:30 shift to 10-6:30. And really I wasn't happy either because I'm not comfortable publishing a schedule that my co-workers are unhappy with week in and week out so he basically had no support on his
  • 07
    proposal. So we had a group meeting to discuss the new schedule and my colleagues. shy'd away from voicing their feelings as expected, so I spoke up as usual. My manager responded with "I don't care about making anyone happy, I care about being efficient" in front of god and everyone....wrong move bud. I understand that he's the manager and he has the final say, and you're never going to make
  • 08
    EVERYONE happy at work, but his idea did absolutely nothing to improve efficiency and ultimately had the opposite effect because of the morale drop around the staff. But efficiency is what he wants, so that's why he will get....unless it doesn't work well for him. I spent the rest of the day/week taking EVERY request he had and telling him how it could be more efficient just to be an . Eventually he got tired of that, but i didn't.
  • 09
    One of my co-workers has been working hard on a project to re- format and clean up outdated documentation on our market specific "wiki" pages for our documentation. A project that I have had absolutely no involvement in. My manager, with his usual indecisive, micro- management style, has shot down her suggestions for consolidating multiple pages into 1 while also telling her that she has free range to do the project however she would like. She
  • 10
    asked him for a little guidance on what he was looking for and he responded "ask Jake". I sent him a message back in Cisco Jabber telling him that "historically when you've given someone a task like this, you're never happy with the outcome and tell them what you want to afterwards before you make them do it again, so it would be more efficient if you just explain it to her since I don't know what you're trying to accomplish and I don't want her
  • 11
    doing it twice". Well, that would require Mr Micro-Management to do some actual work outside of spying on his employees vial camera from in his office, which is just not his schtyle. So he gave me a very vague explanation of what he wanted, I told him I would need to look at everything to determine what to do, he said that's fine and I said "okay" before spending the better part of 2 entire days reviewing all of the documents and child pages
  • 12
    on these 2 wiki articles to determine what should go where and what could go away. I saw the co-worker in charge of that project for the first time this afternoon, where she told me she had pretty much done the same thing I did over the weekend and already marked the project as complete. How's that for efficiency, boss?
  • 13
    tl;dr: manager proposed a new scheduled that I of 2/3 of my staff and said he doesn't care about making anyone happy, only about being efficient. Proceeded to point out every instance where we could be more "efficient" by not listening to him. He chose to take the least efficient route on a task so he didn't have to do any work, so I wasted 2 days deciding what to do for said task that ended up being finished before I could even communicate my findings

Tags

Scroll Down For The Next Article