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.
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.
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
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