81–90 of 153 posts
Just here for ideas. One of the things i always felt would make my life easier as an employee is if I knew my manager's way of working. Like does she value speed over precision, how early in ideation can i approach her for feedback, and so on. Probably makes her life easier too if we knew what she wanted. You learn that in office through iteration and a lot of casual chats - where you get to know others - but how do…
What you write, weekly summaries would be a 100% no-go for me. I like to work but I don't like management overhead, that's what machines are for. Also daily meetings would absolutely be non-tolerable for me. There are better alternatives that don't involve waste of time video communication.
I want to just work and not deal with co-workers or anything around or in between. Are we there to have a coffee chat or to work ffs? (overdramatic reaction)
Honestly, if I heard about this during the hiring process I'd see it as a red flag. Especially the photos.
I once had this terrible VP who was a horrible micromanager and an all around a-hole. For every weekly meeting he'd go around the room forcing people to share what they did on the weekend. It was under the guise of "team building" but it was really him just being the type of person who'd later use your personal stuff against you. It was very possible that you'd say something and he'd immediately see that as a red flag and your career progression is over in that org.
I share my personal life with people at work that I trust. I don't trust everybody on my team and I've never trusted everyone on my team at any of my jobs. I can trust somebody to do a good job with their deliverables while not trusting their motives outside of that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am one of the most senior members of the team I am in. I receive around 50 to 70 mails per day (on a slow day). Most of them corporate noise from the mother ship. I still need to at least skim them as sometimes parts or single mails are relevant. Also there is a barrage of mails from the different projects I am onboarded onto as an expert for specific topics. So I need to take a close look at these and see if there…
Seems like your place of employment have a bunch of cultural and work process issues to sort out, to be honest. The diary entries are supposed to replace other forms of communication - not be an addition. My place of work strive for autonomous teams within specific business domains. You describe yourself as kind of a bottleneck, as things are expected from you in various projects, via email no less. We’re facing comp…
The place and direct team not - the corporate mothership probably. It would be easy if I could at least filter out (internal) spam via sender addresses, but the sender address is a central one for ham as well as spam.
> You describe yourself as kind of a bottleneck, as things are expected from you in various projects, via email no less.
I am in part a bottle neck - in part just the consultant that is being onboarded into projects for specific questions, but as the probability is high that in the future there will be additional requests in my specific domains I am not rolled off these projects and therefore receive all client/project based "global" communication - even if my contribution is one hour every half a year.
So yeah. This is an interesting way of putting strain on my inbox.
> I see it as replacing tones of emails and meetings. I would love this. Would probably not work with my specific job - even if it could work for a lot of people in the place I work at.
Being a function across different teams makes this unpractical for me - but not for others.
Having worked remote for more than 10 years I feel most of these rituals as imposed after the pandemic by the managing layers and people obsessed with work culture. I accept any non mandatory activity and might participate sometimes. But boy, I hate that my week is filled with meetings. At previous full remote positions meetings were the exception and all communication happened either on IRC or hipchat/slack. And tha…
I get great joy at socialization by working with people. It is something I've come to discover about myself, and I am not alone. And "work" doesn't have to include a job, but "working" with people on a sports team, or doing renovation at home or any other thing where we are working together to do something. Many other social things people like to do just doesn't do it much for me, although I've gotten better at it as the decades have passed.
It's not that I don't like leisure activities, it's just that my leisure activities are largely solo: video games, reading, tinkering on projects, etc.
So I'm starting to get really annoyed at this idea that "work" is something orthogonal to socialization, when I think the opposite is more true. Connecting with people I work with is important, and I am not alone. Nor do I think I'm in the minority.
You think it caters to people that just want to slack off. I think what you are describing creates a work environment devoid of joy and humanity. Working is not anti-human, it is a fundamental component of humanity.
One of the rituals on my team that has stuck for years is an hour block every two weeks for the team to simply talk. No plan, no forced games or activities, only conversation. It gives us a chance to learn about each other freely. No discussion (within reason) is off the table; we talk about anything from food to astrophysics.
Unstructured conversation has been the only thing that consistently keeps people excited that it's on the calendar. It's a chance for everyone to see the authentic side of their teammates and learn who they are.
Blood sacrifices and invocations to see who can summon the cutest and fiercest beast. You show your demon to the camera and get votes on it and on the chants you did to bring it from the depths. At the end of each sprint. Remote orgies to appease the gods of nature and ensure a good deployment. Everyone wears traditional handmade masks for anonymity and we only do it if all tests are green, obviously. Every three mon…
> Previously we tried more traditional stuff like fire walking but we had to stop doing that one because a guy in another team wasn't careful setting up the coal and then HR banned it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ tbh I found fire walking to be overrated. Onboarding is really difficult and, as a consequence, the Kanban board just doesn't paint a full picture for new staff during their first weeks. And the ritual has to happen late at ni…
> - Posting once a week about what I did for fun over the weekend, usually with photos. Honestly, if I heard about this during the hiring process I'd see it as a red flag. Especially the photos. I once had this terrible VP who was a horrible micromanager and an all around a-hole. For every weekly meeting he'd go around the room forcing people to share what they did on the weekend. It was under the guise of "team buil…
Our fully remote 10 person team has a very brief daily standup, and 20 minute standdown. We also have a biweekly demo to which we invite leadership. I sent out an anonymous survey recently, and everyone wanted to keep doing each element of this, and thought it was very beneficial. People also said they wanted more planning, more pair programming, and more context given in people's standup/standdown updates. Only one…
You plan to have everyone fly somewhere for a week, every 8 weeks?! Wow. Really glad I'm not on that team.