Everyone "needs improvement"
Yes, even if you're the top performer or you think you're the smartest person on your team.
On being the employee who “needs improvement”
101–110 of 198 posts
Re: On being the employee who “needs improvement”
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't stress how good the above comment is at dealing with this. As a long time manager, people that behave this way are a total joy to manage. Also, if you have a smartphone and your company uses slack, there is no reason to be unreachable, unless you are in a deadzone of cell reception or driving. But, if you practice the above, it shouldn't be an issue. For example, a post to #OOO: hey, running an errand for the…
Being unreachable during core business hours is definitely a huge problem from the perspective of the non-remote employee (me) who's in the office for the typical eight hours a day trying to get something done and being blocked by a coworker who's unreachable because they're remote. If you a remote worker, the onus is on you to never let the fact that you're not in the office become a burden on your coworkers. If you…
Lots of places offer flexible business hours, even for people coming in the office. Not everyone always takes lunch at the same time either. Even people in the office are not 100% available all the time. Your attitude towards remote workers seems unnecessarily hostile.
Re: On being the employee who “needs improvement”
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being unreachable during core business hours is definitely a huge problem from the perspective of the non-remote employee (me) who's in the office for the typical eight hours a day trying to get something done and being blocked by a coworker who's unreachable because they're remote. If you a remote worker, the onus is on you to never let the fact that you're not in the office become a burden on your coworkers. If you…
Lots of places offer flexible business hours, even for people coming in the office. Not everyone always takes lunch at the same time either. Even people in the office are not 100% available all the time. Your attitude towards remote workers seems unnecessarily hostile.
You're misinterpreting my post. At my current job we are flexible -- people come in and leave at different times, eat lunch at different times, etc. I'm not expecting everyone to be at their desks from 10-6 all day every day. That's why I said "core business hours". There's a difference between someone who is unavailable because they're off eating lunch and someone who is incommunicado for many hours at a time and impedes progress. I've seen remote workers drastically slow down progress by simply being unavailable while all of the non-remote workers are present and blocked on them for something. In theory an onsite worker could do this too, but in practice they don't simply disappear for hours at a time at the office.
Re: On being the employee who “needs improvement”
#104Leaving aside the clear miscommunication that led to the "needs improvement" state first, it seems to me the management did just fine after that: 1. They quickly and clearly told the employee of the problem. 2. They proposed a course of action 3. Their proposal worked (at the end they were happy with his work). It was not pleasant for sure (for both sides, I bet), but would it be worse to say nothing and terminate hi…
"1. They quickly and clearly told the employee of the problem."
As a general rule, if you wish to keep the employee, you should start with an informal warning that their behavior is unsatisfactory rather than a formal procedure.
Re: On being the employee who “needs improvement”
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't stress how good the above comment is at dealing with this. As a long time manager, people that behave this way are a total joy to manage. Also, if you have a smartphone and your company uses slack, there is no reason to be unreachable, unless you are in a deadzone of cell reception or driving. But, if you practice the above, it shouldn't be an issue. For example, a post to #OOO: hey, running an errand for the…
Being unreachable during core business hours is definitely a huge problem from the perspective of the non-remote employee (me) who's in the office for the typical eight hours a day trying to get something done and being blocked by a coworker who's unreachable because they're remote. If you a remote worker, the onus is on you to never let the fact that you're not in the office become a burden on your coworkers. If you…
I'm a remote worker and I'm sure it's occasionally a pain that I'm at the gym, or sleeping, or otherwise not responding on Slack or whatever.
However, like many remote workers I work in a distributed team across several time zones. So it's not just "he goes to the gym in the afternoon," it's more like one person leaves the office in one time zone in order to beat the traffic jams, while another person in another time zone has to pick his daughter up from school, another in a third time zone gets up really early but can't do night calls because of family life, and so on. Slightly wonky schedules actually give us more coverage in case of crises, and the only way we could ever line everybody up for the same work hours would be to fire half the team.
We manage it all pretty well by scheduling our meetings in advance, not being afraid to pick up the phone, taking ownership of our work, and having senior people in different zones who can help fix urgent problems.
(However I totally agree with the "need for trust" comment above. I worked locally before going remote in this job, and also in two of the three other remote jobs I had in the past.)
Re: On being the employee who “needs improvement”
#106I feel like many of the commenters here are missing the point of the post.
> My takeaway from pondering this today is pretty straightforward:
> Talk to your people. Don’t wait. Do it now, and never stop. If they are meeting expectations, thank them regularly. If they aren’t meeting your needs or the needs of others in the company, tell them now. Don’t wait until you find yourself identifying “patterns”.
and then a little later:
> If you can identify an incompatibility like this early enough, it doesn’t even have to be rancorous. Incompatibility happens. Nobody needs to feel like a failure over it.
When the author is relating his own experience, he's not saying there was no problem to be addressed. What he's saying is he thinks that situation (and many others like it in our industry) can be handled better, and he wraps up the post by taking about what some of those ways might be.
Re: On being the employee who “needs improvement”
#107(Using an alt account for obvious reasons)
One thing I wish that I had been prepared for out of university is that there is just a lot less feedback on how good of a job you're doing. Nobody grades your work and there is a skill to getting specific feedback on your performance.
Asking "how am I doing?" at a weekly or fortnightly 1-on-1 isn't going to get you anything useful. You need to ask someone you're working with directly and frame a question in terms of situation-action-?impact?. So "When you submitted that PR and I pointed out two cases that I thought could use additional tests, was that useful?"
Re: On being the employee who “needs improvement”
#108When I was 20, I was a lead engineer on a project with an upcoming deadline. There was a disagreement on how to implement something. As the lead engineer on the project, it was my job to break these "ties" so to speak, especially in the wake of a deadline.
I thought about and made my decision. When the next meeting about this disagreement occurred, I informed them of my decision. I expressed my frustrations in the decision in solidarity with my team (there was no perfect solution), but said we don't have any more time to budget for this issue.
I was calm, but assertive. I also express myself whilst talking by using my hands. Apparently, the older engineer was upset and informed my manager about my "tone". My manager was in the meeting and disagreed that my tone was bad and said it was up to me if I wanted to apologize.
So I did. Even though I felt I was perfectly fine, I apologized. The reason why I did was for team cohesion. If it means that I can work well with that engineer again and not have them hold something over me, I'll suck up my pride and apologize for something that I feel I didn't do.
Re: On being the employee who “needs improvement”
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being unreachable during core business hours is definitely a huge problem from the perspective of the non-remote employee (me) who's in the office for the typical eight hours a day trying to get something done and being blocked by a coworker who's unreachable because they're remote. If you a remote worker, the onus is on you to never let the fact that you're not in the office become a burden on your coworkers. If you…
I'm a remote worker and I'm sure it's occasionally a pain that I'm at the gym, or sleeping, or otherwise not responding on Slack or whatever. However, like many remote workers I work in a distributed team across several time zones. So it's not just "he goes to the gym in the afternoon," it's more like one person leaves the office in one time zone in order to beat the traffic jams, while another person in another time…
Distributed teams across multiple timezones is a bit of a different situation though; you're naturally going to be more asynchronous there, and the team structure will be different. All of my experience with remote coworkers has been on collocated teams with the occasional remote worker in the same timezone. I don't have any interest in being on a fully distributed team; I like being physically present with my coworkers and I tend to get depressed ("cabin fever") if I'm alone all day every day. I realize that that might work for others, but it doesn't work for me, so I'd never do it.
Re: On being the employee who “needs improvement”
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
This only works if your management remembers your status updates.
If you're worried about that, make them public. Middle managers are easier to get than programmers, so you may have leverage walking up the chain to your boss's boss.
You should be sending status updates to your team's email list anyway, not just to your manager, as they are useful to all of your coworkers. I can't even begin to count the number of times that, upon hearing in a daily stand-up/status report that someone was working on or was about to begin working on a specific thing, I was able to give useful direction on it that saved hours of work. Teams that go off to work in isolated silos don't have good velocity. Sometimes the five seconds it takes to say "Yeah I tried that approach already and gave it up, so I recommend Y" can save days. And this will come from your coworkers more often than it will from your manager, so always send status updates to the whole team.