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.

 

[Enkrypted]

I've got a couple great one that motivate me to come to work everyday<this is just for my position at this wonderful company...

1. Promote an inept tech who knows nothing about management to be your supervisor and do all his work while he gets praised.

2. Have all training classes go through my position instead of the senior tech(s) who are too busy BETA testing video games to train.

3. Challenge my intellect by providing me with the same problems on a daily basis<Must be a test on how many different ways I can provide them with the same answer>.

4. Go through 4 different people to get authorization to order parts and then have to wait 3 weeks until the CEO approves/disapproves the order while being asked on a daily basis about putting a rush on getting the parts ordered.

5. Have the .....

Whoops....gotta go..

I need to think of another way to tell this person his problem was the same thing as yesterday..... Enkrypted
A+
Let others know how much help they are by marking the helpful posts.

 

[blkntan]

How about telling your salaried IT staff that 44 hour work weeks are now mandatory and oh by the way...vacation requests will be denied until further notice, you must make up any sick time you take off and there will be a maximum 3% raise this year...not everyone will get one.

Flex time? What is that? You must be here 9 hours a day monday through friday....so what if you worked 20 hours this weekend???

 

[JGirl]

Hey, you must work in my office! Lucky for you with 3% though, I only got 1%!

<sarcasm>

Not bad though, after tax thats a whole $5.25 extra a week! Now if thats not motivation to work your hardest, I dont know what is!

And as for that weekend work, you didnt HAVE to work on the weekend....

</sarcasm>

This conversation is getting a bit too familiar as well (say, once a month):

Boss: You have too much annual leave built up, you need to reduce this as soon as possible.
Me: OK, can I have holidays next April?
Boss: No...We have too many projects on to approve leave then. The soonest you can have leave is in 8 months time, and you can only have 2 weeks.

 

[blkntan]

Well...I for one didn't get any raise...but average was 2 not 3%. The funny part is, we had people voluntarily putting in 50 or more hours a week. As soon as they stated the 44 hour policy (we are hired based on a 40 hour work week) everybody dropped to 44...no more...no less. THe company actually lost billable hours...some surprise huh?

The vacation policy is what really pissed people off...no vacations were approved for about 8 months.

As a manager I allowed my staff what flexibility I could...work extra hours to leave early, come in late and stay late. I wasn't able to get away with much, but even that little bit helped. The fact that I was as frustrated but upper managements directives as they were helped as well.

 

[gurner]

IT life is one big In-Tray, im amazed anything gets finished

 

[garwain]

&quot;I don't care if there is a blizzard. You are still expected to be at your desk by 8:00&quot;

 

[eloki]

This is the reason (s) why I left my last contract.

(1) back biting and bitchiness from other staff.

(2) not being able to trust other staff, working as a engineer in a small IT team of contractors it is normally a good thing to be able to trust the people that you work with. (and for the permanent employees out there, the whole company is made up of contractors)

(3) hearing from my ex boss, &quot;I don't care if the user spent 10 minutes abusing you over something that I caused just deal with it.&quot;


I am now a unemployed MCT but a lot happier for it.

 

[compaqtech]

I keep hearing these new words Raises Wage increases percentage. My only question is what is a raise i was told that there would be no wage increases for the next 2 years for anyone in the IT Dept.Nonetheless i have been given 3 new european sites to administer remotely and after i discovered the state of them i advised a trip to them to sort them out, there is only so much you can do remotely.Any takers to what the reply was.

 

[KenCunningham]

Was it by any chance:

&quot;Where's Europe?&quot;

;-)

 

[SamBones]

What a GREAT thread! Better than reading Dilbert!

I have a &quot;score one for the little guy&quot; story!

Back in the 80's I worked for a bank that shall remain nameless. We used big DEC VAXes and VT terminals and all the other cutting edge goodness of the day. Of course the managers of our group had the window offices where they would wile away the day chatting about this or that between visits to our windowless world to verbally flog us into greater productivity. Well, one day my terminal stopped working, so the call went to get me a replacement. Of all the wonderous things, the one I got was a VT4xx which was a large full color terminal, much better that the lowly amber VT2xx and VT3xx terminals that the others and, more importantly, the managers, had.

I immediately made use of the color. It was a useful feature. I was supporting a global trading system and soon had alerts and errors displaying color coded by severity. Ok, I also had an animated race car for a cursor done in regis graphics, but it's these little, cost nothing perks that make the day just a little more bearable. It also had split screen and higher resolution and all kinds of little things to make me more productive. I was a happy little camper.

Well, one day, a month or two after my getting the monitor, manager T comes in and says, &quot;I'm going to be taking your monitor. I think I should have it because I talk to a lot of customers and it looks better.&quot; This was an insult because he didn't work with customers and just wanted the cool gear because it was cool. Nope, no one under him could have the cooler terminal. I told him I was working on some things and he could have it later that day.

Well, after just about five minutes with a small screw driver, I had the RS232 send and receive lines (2 & 3) reversed in the jack in my wall and in the adapter in the back of the terminal.

He came by that afternoon. To add insult to injury, he had me carry it into his office. I hooked it up. It didn't work. &quot;Uh jeez boss, I dunno, it worked when I unhooked it.&quot; I had to keep a straight face, but I had a great time suggesting that he check it and watching him get red faced, out of breath, and sweaty while he kept climbing his big ol' self down under the desk to check different ports. I suggested that maybe his serial port didn't support color (almost laughed out loud just saying it!). He had me take it back to my desk. I hooked it up and it worked fine.

He tried again with someone else helping about a week later, but they couldn't get it to work either. So it came back to me! It was the weirdest thing! It would only work for me! He would occasionally give me a very suspicious stare when passing some times, but I would just smile and wave and keep working away on my nice color terminal. some times I would even show him the little dancing man cursor, or the full color company logo cursor that I made. I knew it must have been killing him because he had no proof that I had done anything.

My only regret in the whole situation is that I wasn't there to overhear the call to technical support when he put in a request for a &quot;color serial port&quot;!

Sorry if this is a bit long, but it was fun remembering and I got on a roll!

If he reads this, I KNOW he'll know who it was! That's making my day right now!

Power to the people!

 

[KenCunningham]

Sam - good stuff!

 

[tcsd38]

more demotivations....
a. separate IT functions into hardware, software, networking, and let several departments have their own IT sub departments and let each one do it's own thing, without any central coordination, purchasing or planning
b. Allow the software dept to declare it won't support any but the latest desktop OS's,
and a very small set of applications they choose to support even though the majority of users do not use those systems yet.
c. Tell the networking dept it only does from the faceplate back to the router, then tell them they must setup the computers, configure them, install applications, test, apply ID tags, inventory systems, while telling them this is not going to keep happening.
e. Have a policy, but have exceptions for all but the lowest level person
f. Ignore your staffs suggestions, then hire outside consultants at x4 your staff's pay to tell you, what your staff already told you.
g. declare a site based management system where each site purchases whatever it
gets talked into by vendors, then let management have you tell them you won't support all they've purchased.
h.Give your department's staff projects, don't encourge cross communication, so they wind up stepping on each others' projects or advice.
i. give your staff projects to manage, change their priorities, move them off the projects, back on, then off and don't give them the authority to do anything without your permission
j. deny them the ability to purchase anything connected to their job, or the tools
they may need and if you decide on a rare occasion to allow it, have it take weeks to get it.
k. Threaten your staff with a department wide &quot;RIF-Reducation in Force&quot; if they all don't get a CCNA by a certain date
l. Really get into the &quot;need to know&quot; mentality, and buddy &quot;you don't need to know&quot;

 

[CitrixEngineer]

tcsd38 - That is all painfully true!!!

My present company has embarked upon the task of &quot;restructuring&quot; and &quot;streamlining the business&quot;. There are many other words and phrases that are being bandied about, with long-winded explantions of hideous complexity.

These explanations, after an hour or so of careful analysis, boil down to having as much meaning as the words they seek to describe. Consequently, the workforce has gone into &quot;mushroom&quot; mode (kept in the dark, yadda, yadda, yadda).

No-one knows what is really happening in the upper echelons, (one would suspect even the upper echelons), while long messages, punctuated by streams of exclamation marks spam our in-boxes, with tales of how well the business is doing, and how the restructuring is having such an impact, but we must all do our best to ensure it keeps going. Usually in terms of more hours, no overtime and more enforced &quot;creativity&quot; and &quot;team work&quot;.

This latter is presumably to pay for all the consultants who are instructing the business managers in the ways of &quot;Oozelum bird&quot; practices.

Twice-weekly &quot;Emergency, All-Hands&quot; meetings, lasting up to two hours, bombard us with more business phrases and long-winded meandering (although the word business has been replaced with another 8-letter word beginning with &quot;B&quot; by much of the workforce - who have taken to playing a form of Bingo...).

These meetings place the emphasis on how well the business is doing in a kind of Chinese water-torture or radio playlist manner. Any direct questioning in these meetings tends to be answered so vaguely as to be in the realms of side-stepping, and usually a joke is made when a particularly pertinent point is raised by an attendee.

My main complaint in all of this is that, as a technical person with a technical job, I'm not very interested in the fine points of the business - I only want the salient points, and I would quite like them in English, since a whole load of new terms seem to have entered the language of &quot;Businesseeze&quot; since I went to business college.

I'm not interested in how near we are to achieving our mid-term objectives if I'm not told what they are, and I don't really want to hear terms like &quot;tune and prune&quot;, &quot;slipstream new practices&quot; or &quot;leverage our existing successes&quot; without any reference to what they actually mean. There is, after all, no such verb as &quot;leverage&quot;.

I will, however, be doing everything I can to &quot;beverage&quot; in the interim. The Interim is a very good pub just across the road, BTW...

CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[KenCunningham]

Nice one CitrixEngineer - enjoy that pint (or two...). As far as this business verbiage is concerned, I am constantly reminded of Orwell and 1984 - after all, War is Peace, isn't it? Cheers!

 

[garwain]

Let's take 2 established systems that were never designed to interact with each other AT ALL, and merge them...

 

[KenCunningham]

And on a similar theme, let's re-engineer most of our systems but forget to consider the impact of feeders from external sources until two weeks before go-live.

 

[gurner]

employ a very competant Support engineer with promises of lots of onsite work, keep dropping hints of a pay review and then convienantly forgetting it when asked.

Over the course of a year send him out less times than you have fingers (and even then set IMPOSSIBLE targets for 1 days work)

Leave him rotting on a helpdesk for most of the year promising to employ another helpdesk person because 1 person supporting a portfolio of over 6000 customers is asking a bit much, then blame the lack of recruitment action of budget cut backs.

In the meantime there is another helpdesk guy BUT send him jollying all over the country even though he has over two years more experiance of helpdesk support of this VERY POORLY manufacturer supported database.

 

[Packetmaster]

Give your lower paid competent staff projects that your higher paid incompetent staff failled at. Insist that they make the Rube Goldberg system designed by the higer paid staff work. Tell lower paid IT staff their reward will be they get to do interesting work!

 

[japes89]

What great stories. I must admit I have to tell you this story and I do, really I do, wish that it happened to me but it actually happened to a friend of mine that worked at a mid-size company that was being bought out by another.....

as it turns out Mike ( named changed to protect the smart and thoughtful ) worked for Company A, a mid-size software company in Massachusetts around Rt 128. Company B came along to buy out the company and as these things often do, often merge the redundant groups and provide a lot of layoffs. HR was gone, Marketing was gone, IT Staff usually trimmed but in this case it was rumored to be cut.

Like many in these situations, work is tough to get done as most time is relegated to discussing potential effects on the department and finding info from those in the know.

As the fateful day came the friendly and close development staff that worked together for a number of years recognized that they ran the company infrastructure, no bones about it, sole ownership of passwords, root passwords, etc, etc, etc.

Management from Company B approached the development staff as a whole and presented their offer. Nothing. They were to document their usernames and passwords, locations of code and document archives and file systems, gather their things, and leave. B***s*** as I would be too, my friend Mike proposed to his group over lunch to leave, and leave nothing, no passwords, no way to maintain the current network, no way to get in and chnage passwords, nothing.

This may sound vengeful but you must understand that no attempt was made to find a common ground or mediation by Company B, Company A made every effort to ease the blow of Company B's takeover including having HR offer helpful ways to find other jobs, write up resumes, set up healthy severance. Company B hindered if not cancelled all that.

Mike and his 4 friends put their trust in each other and held out at home waiting, waiting for that call. And then it came, asking all 5 to come in for a negotiation.
Initially, the offer was to hire them back immediately, but smarts prevailed as Mike knew that once they walked back in, changed passwords as they were to be instructed, a pink slip would be shoved in their hand before they opened their first cold Coke ( thats fast ).

To make a long story short, 5 guys split one very very very healthy severance. They all suddenly went on vacation then started a new company. They are still friends to this day.

 

[garwain]

I am the root, mess not in my affairs, puny mortal...

tell mike if I ever meet him, the beer is on me!