Slashdot Mirror
On Employees Educating Employers?
ramannoodle asks: "My employer currently makes many decisions that I feel would save them a lot of money by going about it in a different way. I have presented many of these ideas to them, but being the not-so-great sales person that I am, I feel in some ways that by voicing my opinion on these things, I am jeopardizing my standing with the company. Is it the right thing to do to continue educating my employer on issues they do not want to hear, but will save them money and just risk being one of the many unemployed honest IT professionals out there? Do I hide what I know from them by keeping my mouth shut and just doing what they tell me so I can keep my job and feed my family? It's a tough economy out there, and is it worth being over-enthusiastic about helping the company?" We touched on this issue for contractors, but what about actual employees?
Don't sweat it.
Just kick back, take the paycheck, and do what is asked of you. Do it well if you want satisfaction of a job well done, do it just well enough to avoid being fired if work is just someplace you go between 8am and 5pm.
Really, unless your job description specifically allows you to suggest and make improvements to processes (and the company culture is *clearly* open to such things), don't try to get into the inner circle - you'll only target yourself for the next round of cuts as 'that guy who's always being negative'. In my case, by suggesting other ways to do things, I was seen as 'negative', even though I didn't say 'don't do that!', merely 'you know, this way may be better...'.
Attain a state of Zen - You are an employee. They pay you to show up and do what you're told for eight hours a day. In exchange, they give you money. Nothing more. To try to attribute higher meaning or greater value to your job where none exists is just adding to your stress levels.
Why yes, I am bitter. But now I have experience, and I have attained Zen.
If this is the case, don't be so sure of yourself. If you're not the head of the IT department, I would either:
If you are the head of IT, then you should already have the ear of the highers-up, if it's not entirely your decision to make.
I suppose the simple answer is: Don't neglect the chain of command. If you're perceived as an uppity, out-of-line employee, it's going to overshadow your message.
You might want to see about building a network of support with others in your organization.
If you feel that your selling skills won't win over the decision makers, find someone else in the organization that shares your feelings, and have them help sell the company on your ideas.
A lot of times it is difficult to go at it alone, but with a network of support, you'll have people backing you up and raising the level of awareness.
Discuss your ideas with a smaller group, a make a game plan for bringing it up to management. Look for advocates, and someone to champion your cause.
If you can save money, or avoid problems the company should appreciate the efforts. Sometimes you just have to work through old-thinking.
If feeding your family is what's most important to you, then you've made your decision already.
In my opinion, if you briefly offer them the pros and cons of both your idea of doing things versus the way they want to, and they choose to ignore it, you've done your part. You don't have to force the issue and become one of the many honest but unemployed. You've given them alternatives, but haven't forced them down their throats. A brief mention is all that's really necessary.
The sad fact is, the way companies go about business decisions has lots more to do with upper management making "good ol' boy" deals that benefit important individuals (both within and outside the company) than technical merit, or doing things the best way for the company. Then there are the decision makers with huge, fragile egos that view any dissenting voice as a direct attack on them and some kind of ploy for power within the company(simply because they cannot conceive of any other reason anyone might disagree with them).
I was involved with a large-scale Oracle deployment at my last employer. I kid you not when I say trained monkeys could have made better business and technical decisions regarding this deployment. I protested in varying degrees of urgency, getting more vocal as time went on (and my hours per week increased). I very very nearly lost my job over it, and I was NOT being a butthole about it. I nearly lost my job because I was RIGHT, and pointed out that I had correctly predicted many of the failings and problems that arose as a result of stupid decisions. Even though I was (at least I thought) polite and professional about it, I was taken aside by my non-technical IT superiors and told to shut the hell up or I'd be looking for another job.
I wound up looking for and getting another job anyway, but the moral of my story is, no good deed goes unpunished. You must realize, especially in huge corporations, that things like these have nothing to do with technical merits or doing things the right way. Its all about power ploys and political maneuverings(sp?).
Styrofoam IS biodegradable, you're just impatient!
It sounds like what you really need to do is educate yourself. Pick up some books on giving presentations and selling your ideas, or maybe take a class at the local CC (Speech or Drama). Also, educate yourself on what you are pushing and the alternatives as well. You need to be able to answer any challengers.
Keep at it though, eventually they might listen. Or maybe the guy who mainly opposes your ideas will "seek opportunities outside the company". You never know.
I don't see how you can hurt your position by suggesting ways for the company to save money as long as you aren't being obnoxious about it. Absolute worst case scenario: your new communication skills will really help you out in interviews.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
If you do have some opinions on where the company should go, share them with your immediate supervisor or manager. Be prepared to answer questions when they get asked. Have at your fingertips and on your tongue tip the answers to the questions he is going to ask you.
If your supervisor is worth anything, he will give you the message his supervisors would give you. If you are able to convince him, then you have a shot at getting it all the way up. Besides, your supervisor will be better at getting the message sold than you would.
You have to get educated. You have to learn how to sell it. You have to have the facts to back it up.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
If you don't know the true motives of your employer, you just might end up looking a little foolish. Sometimes, from a business accounting perspective, it makes sense for the PHBs to do totally counter-intuitive things like hiring junior programmers or forcing people to use shitty computers because of how the balance sheets are categorized or how things are charged to the customer in a contract situation.
You might just insult them, too, by saying, effectively, "Your accounting system is shit. Let me show you how to do your job." Usually, people are adverse to being bossed around, especially when their methods are widely accepted in the industry, regardless of how inane they are. They might turn around and say, "Okay, you measure and account for the labor costs saved by upgrading everyone to a newer computer." Or, worse, if you do it in front of a customer, you just might blow the bosses cover!
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Unless you are working in a two-man shop your "employer" is not a single sentient being. You need to deal with humans in the organization and each person will have individual motivations.
You are unlikely to sell your dyed-in-the-wool MSCE boss on open-source if it means that you become the expert and he becomes redundant. The benefit to the corporation doesn't matter here. In most organizations you won't have much luck trying to go over his head, either.
Also, keep the "big picture" in mind. I've seen people decry the fact that their employers waste so much money on [paperclips, toner, servers] they bought at [big on-line megastore] when the paperclips are 20 cents cheaper at Joe's stationers and a new desktop is cheaper down the street at we-b-p-cs. Fine, but collecting all those prices, managing the paperwork for all those accounts, etc. is expensive. It's usually better to have a few good suppliers with decent prices and good service/return policies than trying to micromanage every purchase so don't try to convince the purchasing manager otherwise.
Having very little detail to go on in your post I can blindly offer one suggestion: a well-done pilot or example project completed while doing a good job with your assigned duties and presented carefully to the proper people can do wonders. I've seen this work brilliantly on many occasions.
For a large-scale example of this read "Sidewinder", the book about the development of the Sidewinder missile. The original task was to improve fuses for bombs but the engineers co-opted the project and developed the most spectacularly successful air-to-air missile in history.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
This may be a surprise to a lot of IT workers, but most people aren't as smart as they think they are, and most bosses are smarter than their workers think the bosses are.
Instead of approaching the problem as "My idiot boss is doing something that I know is stupid", try approaching it as "I don't understand why my boss is doing this. I should learn."
It may turn out that your boss learns something from you. If so, you win because the boss now has a higher impression of you.
Or (more likely) you will learn more about the situation, and possibly understand why the boss made the decision s/he did. In which case, you still win, because learning is a good thing, and because your boss is impressed that you care enough to learn more than just the bare minimum of your job.
Finally, don't confuse subjective with objective. Many decisions are not clear-cut, and come down to subjective "better" or "more important" criteria. If your boss' opinion of the relative importance of two things differs from yours, then you two can make different decisions even with exactly the same facts. All you can do in this case is to try to understand why your boss ranks things that way (because, referring to the start of this post, chances are that the person with more experience and more success in the field has a better feeling for "more important" and "better").
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
Every company I've worked for has not only accepted but expected employee feedback on processes, so I may not be the best person to be accepting advice from.
Having said that, I can tell you that it really depends on how they react. I wouldn't want to lose my job over it, so I wouldn't voice my opinion unless I knew it was well received. As others have said, you are being paid to match your job description and do what your boss says. Do your work, do an excellent job, but don't tread on another's turf.
Also be ready to study the process, completely, from start to end. There may well be good reasons for doing something backwards.
Don't annoy people by being smarter than them, and don't assume they will believe you right off the bat. If you phrase the suggestion in such a way as to suggest you got it from some other reputable source, they may be much more receptive than "The net" or yourself as "That kid in cubicle 3A"
I know you probably have the organization's best interests at heart (right?), but they may see you (honestly- some people think in these terms) as making a power grab, or brown-nosing. You may not be able to dispel these feelings, but if you lay out your case carefully, and explain things on a basic (but not too basic) level, they may not feel them so strongly.
Understand the process as much as possible
Understand the inefficiency
Understand the solution
Understand your audience (and how to explain all this to them)
Understnad that any ideas you put forth you may have to implement without slowing your current work
-Adam
I'm not unique in this, but have you looked at it from the other side? Perhaps it might help you, who is so much wiser than your supervisors (who, contrary to popular belief rarely get their job through the "Mel Cooley" route of being related to the boss) to look at things from management's point of view. (Side note: This is a point that seems to come up a lot in Ask /. -- it seems a lot of the IT people here are too busy being intelligent, patting themselves on the back for it, and showing their intelligence to actually THINK about what's going on!)
I own my own business. Before that, I worked for a few local small businesses. I've also worked as a teacher, with numerous students telling me they knew much more about what they had to know to do Algebra well than I did. The first time I was in charge of people was when I was a teenager, when I was directing and producing a 2 hour dramatic (and sci-fi based with special effects!) production to air on local cable TV. It seems easiest to make my point with an example from that experience. I knew the script forward and backward. If someone called out a scene number (w/ over 100 scenes in a 2 hour script), I could tell you what happened, what actors and props were needed, what set it was on, etc. - everything about it. I could also tell you what scenes came before and after, as well as what the last scene any actor, prop, or set was used and what the next one they were in would be. I had to know all this, since I had nobody to help with continuity. Many times actors would make suggestions they thought would make it better. At first I tried to explain ("No, we can't add a punchline for comic relief here, since we're building toward something more dramatic 2 scenes down," or "I know you look better in that costume, but in the last scene, you were angry and took off and you've been tramping around in the woods, with no luxeries for 2 weeks in July, so you can't wear the sweater that makes you look stacked!") to the actors why or why not something would work. I found that often they were too focused on their own performances (as they should be) to keep the overall view in mind. Often they would say a suggestion whould make their scene better or add personality to the character. After a while I had so much to do I couldn't always explain why I had to (or decided to) say no to many requests. Many times I nixed an idea because it would completely destroy a scene that was important to another character, only to hear an actor walk away, mumbling under their breath, something about just wanting a quality production. What they did not see, and often could not see without the exhaustive time I had put into studying the script before I had cast any of them, was the big picture. I wasn't against quality, but I couldn't have someone changing one scene when it disrupted the overall story.
I find that happening in offices all the time. In my company, the employees do not need to know why I make a decision. The point is it's my business, I'm in charge, and it's my job to keep the business running. I may go with a system that costs more today. Maybe I've got a good relationship with the vendor and know that in another month I'll be buying video equipment instead of computer equipment and they can get it for me for wholesale.
The point is that, as an employee, you don't know why management is making their decisions. It's not your job to know and it's not their job to tell you. When I hire a coder, his/her job is to write code -- and possibly to give advice (when asked for) on overall computer systems. Maybe what I'm doing doesn't make sense to them. It doesn't have to. It makes sense to me. Maybe I'm spending more now because it's a tradeoff and I'd rather spend a few thousand extra on a LAN and save three times that much next month on video equipment. Maybe I'm getting equipment from one dealer because I can barter with him and keep my net cost down. It's not my job to tell an IT person why I'm doing something. It's my sho
The problem is that most young turks only know one method of persuasion: pelting-hell-for-leather-guns-blazing-take-no-pris oners yadda yadda yadda. I'm a big boy, and I can listen to some snot nosed little pipsqueak tell in so many words me I'm a decrepit relic well past my sell by date and it rolls right off me. But I wouldn't count on most bosses being that way.
Adopting a little humility can do wonders for getting most higher ups to listen to you. For instance, do you really understand the whole picture they're they're working from? What are the things they are worrying about on a day to day basis? The things that make them look good or bad to their bosses?
Once you know this, you can relate your ideas to the things that are gnawing at the bosses guts. When he's off on one of his pet problems, you can say, "Y'know, I bet we could (insert boss's pet problem here) if we (insert your pet technology here); I know it sounds a bit radical, but we could do a quick prototype on the old server downstairs in a little time and see if it merits more consideration. I know we're really late on these other things, but it won't make much difference if it doesn't work out, and it could help a lot."
This will change his perception of you from your being an irritating one-note gadfly to a problem solver.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
My dad, after being the best engineer in one General Motors facility, had his job outsourced to Detroit where "corporate" could do it better, faster. He knew that when folks were designing a chiller installation on the second floor, it would violate the load per square foot rating for the roof (i.e. collapsed roof if you get it wrong). He also knows exactly how deep/where gas pipelines lay across some arbitrary field on a 2 sq. mile plant (i.e. dig in the wrong place and the big explosion hits the national news) [true story: they had the backhoe in the field when they discovered this mysterious pipe in the wrong place... hmmm?]
So it would go to stand that maybe they should listen to a man who knows the blueprints to the plant by heart, and where to find all these prints.
GM opened a formal "suggestions" program where they offered real prizes/points for projects that would save the company money. From ways to reduce the number of steps an assembler took to get parts (read: time vehicle sits at one station) to ways to reduce heating/air conditioning costs. The program worked really good and my dad says he submitted dozens of ideas. Of the dozens he submitted, they gave him point awards for, say, a dozen. Of those dozen, maybe four were actually implemented.
Why mention this here? Even in an organization with thousands of corners for improvement, they still don't listen well and implement even fewer of the things they actually get into their thick skulls. You are no different.
In fact, if you want to avoid tarnishing your reputation, make your first suggestion be the start of a similar suggestion program whose sole focus is awards go to those whose ideas save the company the most money for the least amount of work. Of course, the program only can last so long or the employees won't think about doing their real job. Prizes were given like credit card companies do their "spend money and get points" reward systems.
I told him not to do what I did.
I would, however, disagree with your characterization of what I did. As I stated, I was unfailingly polite about it, and did my best to be professional. That means quite specifically I did not shout it from the mountaintop. While my original post was indicative of my bitterness, I did my best not to show that in the various meetings I attended. I was much much more successful at doing that than many of the various department heads, etc. This entire project was extremely divisive, and detrimental to the company.
You make the same mistake that many of the ego-inflated bigwigs at the company I worked for did: that I wanted to be right, and my motivation for bringing this up was personal gain and making power ploys within the company. You think I did this so I could make myself look smart, and make other people look stupid. This is exactly the same mindset that most of the other folks had, and exactly the same mindset that resulted in the project being such a dismal failure. Everyone was so worried about their personal status within the company, and so worried someone would intrude on their personal domain that the entire project crashed and burned like a huge steaming pile of burning, well... you get the idea.
My motivation was very very simple. I wanted to decrease my workload. I had seen these types of deployments earlier in my career, and knew most of the pitfalls. I was working 45 or hours a week at the various sites I maintained, as well as about 10 hours more from home. With this project, that increased to 60+ hours a week onsite.
I was not screaming from the mountaintops that I was right, everyone else was wrong. I was bringing up points as the project went along that I recommended action X, and the accounting guy reccomended action Y. Action Y was implemented, with consequence Z, and consequence Z was correctly predicted by me. I did this in the vain hope that in the next phase, when I recommended action A, and sales recommended action B, and I predicted consequence C, that maybe someone would listen. You see, I was under the impression that it was my JOB to recommend proper technical courses of action. It is unfortunate that most people in business, especially the ones with a modicum of influence, can only conceive of a dissenting opinion as a vehicle to either build themselves up, or tear someone else down.
Being right but unable to get anyone to listen to you is - as the original post pointed out - *your* shortcoming, not theirs. Being able to influence someone is an art and is just as important as having the right answers.
Having to influence people, playing politics and making power ploys is the reason business (especially large corporations)is the scum-filled cesspit that it is today. Once you make your prime concern office politics rather than technical merit, you are a sellout, at least from the geekmind standpoint. Maybe the marketing guys might like you better, and invite you out to lunch or something. If that's what you like, and what makes your life rewarding, so be it. That did not work for me.
I am a network engineer, a very technical person, and have absolutely no patience with office politics and political games. I am an artisan, much like someone who makes fine furniture, I find it offensive when personal power plays (not legitimate business needs, mind you) take precedence over doing things right... My position with the company was NOT managerial, but was technical. Bottom line, I should not have been in those meetings. I was brought in because the VP in charge of all the facilities in my state did not trust the CIO to adequately consider the needs of our facilities, which were the test run for the deployment. This proved to be correct. I was in one of those unfortunate positions where I answered to both the VP of the local operations, as well as the head IT guy in the company - a rock and a hard place. And I was quite aware I did NOT have the disposition to play
Styrofoam IS biodegradable, you're just impatient!