How NOT to motivate your staff 74

[chiph]

OK, this forum is dedicated to sharing ways to motivate your technical staff. I've decided it also needs a place to provide negative examples -- thus, this thread.

I'll start it off with:

- Have an HR director who spends most of his time locked behind his office door. Problems with your pay? Send an email, so that the IT staff can read it too!

- Offer free sodas, but don't assign anyone the responsibility of refilling the refrigerator/soda machine. Yummm! Nothing better than a warm soft drink first thing in the morning!

Chip H.

 

[gurner]

expecting employees to be versed in ESP (as well as ASP) asking why something that was never asked for has not been done.

having a customer talking about a particular part of a big project that was changed 6 months ago whilst employee was on holiday, and change was never logged and is still in employers head.

RFCs are mean for a reason

Mystic Meg is not my mother

Gurner

http://www.divineparadox.co.uk

 

[KornGeek]

Gurner,
I find honesty to be the easiest solution for this.

Boss: Why was this feature not implemented?
Me: Because I never saw a request to implement it.

or, when it's something that I was expected to create on my own (but overlooked):

Boss: Why doesn't it do this?
Me: Quite frankly because that idea hadn't occurred to me.


I get good results from this. Then again, I have a more open relationship with my boss than some.

 

[SQLSister]

However did I miss this one?

How to demotivate your staff:

Promote the girl you want to sleep with form secretary to system analyst, Make her responsible for requirements for the entire staff. Not be at all concerned when she says:"I don't think requirements are necessary>" In fact agree with her. "Small companies don't have the time to develop requirements."

Blame the programmers for incompetence when they failed to read the system analyst's mind and provide the system exactly as she envisioned it but couldn't be bothered to tell you.

Blame the staff for incompetence when the system analyst tells you to do something one day before a demo which will require a major redesign and re-programming.

Expect staff to work unpaid overtime to perform tasks not mentioned until day before a release. Blame them if there are bugs. Oh, by the way, the system Analyst leaves early (without taking leave; she is the girlfriend by now) to get personal parts of her body waxed.

Freeze salaries. Fire the graphic artist and give duties to system analyst along with a big pay raise. Oh what the heck give her another big pay raise in another month. Find out she can't do graphic artist job, so hire a new graphic artist. Do not subtract pay raise for additional duties no longer performed from already overpaid system analyst.

Girlfriend needs more money. Promote her to Marketing Director but continue to make her the person responsible for "requirements'. Another big pay raise. Oh yeah as marketing director, she never lands a new customer or does anything to market the product. Give her an outstanding performance review. Apparently this is not enough; make her the project manager with a huge pay raise, one so big the accountant quits because of it.

New project manager becomes much more arrogant now that she is in charge. Can't be bothered to ask questions about what the staff is actually doing or pass on the information on decisions made in meetings with customers because the peons don't need to know. She stops talking to new graphic artist and publically treat her like dirt (man I wish she'd stop talking to me!). Agree to new projects without consulting anyone on the actual programming feasibility of what she promises customer. Get furious and scream when programmers point out that what she promised is not possible.

From other jobs:
Change one person on two person staff to be exempt from overtime. Assign all overtime to that person so you don't have to pay the other one. Wonder why person working 80 hour weeks quits while person working 40 hour weeks does not.

Put people in cubicles!!!!!!

Force people in cubicles to listen to managers using their speaker phones. Can't they at least close their office doors?

Pay your most productive person 25K because you can't afford more. Pay 80K to the boss's friend who sits in his office drunk all the time and produces no work. Expect 25K person to clean up the messes he makes when he attempts to do work drunk.

Tell worker that she should be able to a go a minimum of 3 days without sleep. Wonder why she makes mistakes after two days without sleep. Must be incompetent.

Do not fire co-worker who is changing (deliberately breaking) your database without authorization even though you have proof. Also do not fire him after he tells the customer about how he put bugs in his programs to bring down the system after he leaves a job.

Ask programmers to answer the phone when the receptionist needs to leave the building. Make sure you only ask female programmers though.

Lower a performance rating for not meeting a deadline on a project that had no deadline. Ignore that the same person completed several hundred projects which did have deadlines on time or early. Also ignore that the person did excelent work in four different (auditing, analysis, it support and editing) professional specialities during the rating period. Ignore that the non-auditor (who was asked to work on an audit due to specialized knowldge) was the only person whose audit work papers passed quality control with no changes (not just that year, but ever).

Tell people that if they got a promotion in the last year, they are not eliigble for a performance rating of anything higher than Satisfactory.

Put all managers in a bonus pool with the one person who rates them all. Act surprised when the first line suprevisors are furous because none of them got a rating high enough to get a bonus and the person who rated them got the enire organization bonus pool.

I have 26 years of work experience, I could probably go on in this vein forever. I guess I'll quit now, but boy it sure felt good to vent.

 

[LesleyW]

SQL Sis - um, have a look at what you just wrote. You've mentioned the boss's girlfriend before, but didn't realise all the other stuff was going on as well... um I presume you are looking for a new job? Surely someone with your skills should easily get new job in another company if there were any going?

Not being facetious but you've cheered me up.. I'm totally demotivated by constant changing scope meaning we can't move out of the business requirments stage (I've got some spare business requirements we don't need any more so if you give me your address you can have them FOR FREE!!).. my problems are so tiny beside yours.

Best of luck!

 

[chiph]

SQLSister -

Sounds like a company located in the local area that a few friends escaped from.

The boss promoted his girlfriend to be head of HR (had no qualifications for the job). He reorgs about every 3 months. Has fired executives on a whim: "You're fired. You have 20 minutes to clear your desk" -- to people with the word "Chief" in their title. Runs the place like it had 10 employees. Now that it has over 200, he still runs it like it has 10 employees.

Probably the least-fun place to work that I know of. Glad I'm not there.

Chip H.



If you want to get the best response to a question, please check out FAQ222-2244 first

 

[SQLSister]

I am definitely looking for a new job. Anybody know of any leads in Virginia Beach, Norfolk, or Chesapeake?

I'm tired of feeling like I work in a frat house (only with somewhat less professionalism).

 

[gurner]

Handed in my notice last week, have 3 weeks and counting to go.


Gurner

"What is Divine Paradox?"

http://www.divineparadox.co.uk

 

[thepastwa]

Right I got one. You argue and beg for a decent laptop budget, and the first thing the management do who dragged you over burning coals, is spend it on getting themselves new toys and ignoring the real reason for having it.

 

[SQLSister]

thepastwa, I see you've run into the "only managers can have laptops" problem. We've run into a simlar thing here where we need to make something work on tablet pcs and PDA's. Used the project budget to buy such, but gave them to the managers not the programmers. Very annoying.

 

[compaqtech]

Right i have decided to update everyone on my little scenario (read previous post) In January 03 i was called into personell and told that i was been let go , this was after a year of working for them remember i moved country with wife and child sold house car moved my daugher from school. To say i was f**ked off is saying very little. There was no point in arguing however i brought them to the unions and they were forced to pay me a year and a half pay.
Not too bad eh .. They never officially informed my colleagues in other countries that i was leaving (i of course let them know) and my colleagues and friend were so pi**ed off they acted as they thought i still worked there ie no support for the site. Now i hear that the site is in a mess and they may need someone there again. Just thought you all would like to know. There is justice sometime in a weird way.

 

[smittytech]

Hey - Why not tell your 1 & only tech that if she wants additional training that not only will she have to pay for it, she'll have to take vacation time to do it - but - only if that vacation time doesn't interfere with anything else. Then tell her that since the company doesn't require the training they won't pay for it and is she DOES get the training and gets a new certification, they can give her some additional duties, without a pay increase, so that they don't have to spend as much on the IT Consultant they have for the Sys Admin. Budget contraints you know.



******************************************
"Life without chocolate is too terrible to contemplate!"

 

[SQLSister]

I presume she didn't run right out and get the training?

Not paying for it is bad enough, but to make her take vacation time. Ouch!

 

[rosieb]

I hope she took the training and found a better job!

[There's an expression in UK employment, "working without enthusiasm" ie you fulfil your contract - to the letter and to the absolute minimum. So you can't be sacked for not doing your job.] Just a thought...

Rosie

 

[SQLSister]

Well If I took that training on my own time and with my own money, I sure wouldn't mention it to this particular company so I could get some new duties with no additonal money. Nope I was visiting my mother for that week I was gone!

 

[smittytech]

She is looking for another job but has determined that only having an A+ (and having only 3yrs of experience w/small company of less than 50 people) just makes real IT people laugh.

She hasn't taken the training because the only reputable place that offers it is owned/operated by the sys admins friends. Even if she wanted to keep it a secret she wouldn't be able to.

She bought the Network+ book and is reading it and she's going job-shadowing in the near future. Maybe that will be a foot in the door or the right direction.

rock (her) hardplace



******************************************
"Life without chocolate is too terrible to contemplate!"

 

[willir]

I can see many of us "have been there and done that"...

I will try to brief on past woes...

a) Send memo to manager and team lead advising them of several serious vulnerabilities. Repeat the message and include senior manager after no action. Fault: Manager is not listening their employees.

b) A few months later, vulnerability causes a small problem. Repeat message to manager. Team lead and manager reply that that there is no problem and dismiss memo to technical ineptness. Fault 1: Non-technical guy making technical decision; Fault 2: CYA by dismissing the problem does not make the problem go away.

c) A few months later, vulnerabilities bring several sites down, plugs up the LANs and WAN, IT and business comes to a screeching halt. Team Lead and manager diagnosis the problem and take credit for their technical experience in uncovering the problem so quickly. (Non-IT management never researched the problem, understandably, to find out the problem was know for over 9 months.) Fault 1: Not giving credit where credit is due; Fault 2: Hiding the problem.

d) IT management instructs all IT to work day-and-night to resolve the problem per instructions on 1000's of desktops. Everyone will be paid over time. Seems reasonable, at least action is being taken. Still no credit being given.

e) IT works day-and-night (10 to 30+ hrs for 2 weeks) and submits OT for approval. Management than claims they can not pay OT because they incurred too much costs and penalties, and OT is not approved. Fault 1: Broke a promise. Fault 2: Did not value work done by employees. Whoops, the techs messed up here -- verbal instructions given, nothing documented in email, etc.

f) A few techs mysterously disappear.

g) IT manager, senior manager and team lead get bonuses. Everyone else told there is no money in the pot for bonuses. No techs get a raise -- had to pay out too much in OT. Fault: Do by example, and not valuing work.

Hind sight. Bonus for senior manager depending on IT budget. OT would have resulted in IT being over budget and no bonus to management. It was the senior manager who had instructed the IT manager not to pay the OT. The mysterious disappearance were techs who put their foot down -- some apparently did get paid their OT but were out of work. Management made it quite apparent that with the burst of the bubble in IT, that there were lots of people looking for jobs. Fault 1: Conflict of interest influencing decisions. Fault 2: Again, not valuing work done by employees.

Other peeves...
- Technical decisions made by non-technical managers.
- Management not asking questions when they don't know. (Hey guys and gals - you are managers, not technical -- it is okay to ask technical questions - honest!)

Both of these points lead to far reaching decisions that can hinder performance, frustrate users and support and (double / triple / quitiple) increase the work load, and the effects can last for years.

After a merger...
- Keep both IT departments independant of each other. Then ignore the finger pointing as each other when integrating applicaitons and data.
- Favour the IT department that says "we dont have any problems" but fail to note that these same guys dont have any change management, incident reporting or follow up quality control. The IT department that has all these mechanisms in place is penalized because they apparently do have a problem -- "see, you had xx number of incdences last month".

Oh well, life goes on, and the aforementioned management and IT department deserve each other....

 

[medic]

Howabout setting up a trap?

1. Hire a highly skilled entry-level programmer.
2. Promise the programmer fast increase in salary, but...
3. Give the programmer a starting rate of $8/hour or less
4. Have the programmer sign a 10-year contract or more.
5. State in the contract that should the programmer decides to leave before the 10-year contract expire, that the programmer have to pay $100,000 for early termination of contract. Do not state in the contract the promise you made in #2.
6. Do not fullfill the promise mentioned in #2.
7. Now, you can screw up the programmer anyway you want (e.g. assign all types of jobs you can give). The programmer cannot leave you because of condition stated in #5. For sure the programmer will not be able to pay that because of #3.

 

[KenCunningham]

Did you really sign a contract including 5? If so, I think I'd be seeking legal advice.

 

[ecobb]

Or mental help! Why would anyone sign a 10 year contract for $8 per hour with nothing stated in writing about an increase in pay, nothing stated in writing about specified job duties, plus a $100,000 early termination fee?



Hope This Helps!

Ecobb

"My work is a game, a very serious game." - M.C. Escher

 

[medic]

Oops! I didn't know I should exactly describe my case...Sorry.
Do you guys mean to say that the posts on this thread were actual specific incidents?
My case is similar to what I described, but I did exaggerate the figures just to emphasize the points. I was thinking other posts were also exaggeration of actual cases.
But I actually did sign a 10-year contract (I'm on my 2nd year now). Why did I do that? I came from a third-world country, and was earning less than $4000/year. I had minimal career opportunity there, because I did not go to college. I currently work here in the US and doing the jobs of 3 programmers (plus other non-IT-related jobs) who left the company. Modesty aside, I got the job after passing a test involving actual problems they had that nobody in the company was able to solve. This is the reason why I was able to get a US job despite the post-9/11 mass layoff by companies here.
If not for the promise of fast salary increase that would enable me (as the boss claimed) to buy my own house and car within 6-12 months, I would have not taken the job.
I thought what I've heard was "Land of Opportunity", not "Land of Opportunists".