hwend
Registered
I really appreciated the latest "In Conversation with Jeff Irby", especially the section he was talking about burnout and work quality (around 20:36 into the conversation). I could so relate to this part based on my experience. To paraphrase/quote:
"There is a good amount of burnout out there because of the higher demand on people. I think part of what accelerated this burnout has been this 24x7 connectivity through Blackberry, iPhone, and now iPads. There has become this creeping expectation that you are responsive 24x7 and then people behave that way and then they set this behavior. What happens then the workload continues to cascade and people get extremely busy. I will tell you that my biggest fear about this, and where we are at in the world today, it can be noticed that the quality of the work and the quality of the thinking is going down. It is definitively being affected. Because if you don't take the moments, take a couple of minutes and think for a second before you take that next action. People won't say this out loud but basically if you read and watch the work products that are moving they will tell you they don't have the time to think about it. And the pressure and these deadlines and the commitments to move the ball forward, and hit the quarterly earnings, and all this, I think it is really impacting the quality of work and the accuracy of the work and the quality of thought. While the people are really busy I am not necessarily certain that it is getting us to where we need to be. Whether where ever your department is or what your goals are. I find I spend a lot of time with people just getting them to stop and think about why they are doing what they are doing and then what what would be the next best action to take."
This is so true based on my experience at work. Working in support we have a lot of fire drills and I think do a good job taking care of things during the crisis and a lot of folks go above and beyond for our customers. However, what I find missing is, after the crisis is over, to take the time and to reflect what happened, and take appropriate actions to not be in the same situation again or identify what we could do better the next time something similar happens because everyone is busy catching up with work or handling the next crisis. I have started a number of projects I am driving based on my learnings but in general, as a whole department, I don't think we do a good enough job to really address the underlying problems which frustrates me a lot. Especially if we keep talking for years about the same problems and, in my opinion, we don't put in enough effort to fix the underlying problem that potentially created the crisis in the first place so we can avoid the next crisis. I feel we start projects to address some of the issues and then the next crisis, or next shiny thing comes along that is suddenly very important, and 90% of the projects we started don't ever get finished. Curious if other Connect members have similar experiences and what you have been doing about it.
"There is a good amount of burnout out there because of the higher demand on people. I think part of what accelerated this burnout has been this 24x7 connectivity through Blackberry, iPhone, and now iPads. There has become this creeping expectation that you are responsive 24x7 and then people behave that way and then they set this behavior. What happens then the workload continues to cascade and people get extremely busy. I will tell you that my biggest fear about this, and where we are at in the world today, it can be noticed that the quality of the work and the quality of the thinking is going down. It is definitively being affected. Because if you don't take the moments, take a couple of minutes and think for a second before you take that next action. People won't say this out loud but basically if you read and watch the work products that are moving they will tell you they don't have the time to think about it. And the pressure and these deadlines and the commitments to move the ball forward, and hit the quarterly earnings, and all this, I think it is really impacting the quality of work and the accuracy of the work and the quality of thought. While the people are really busy I am not necessarily certain that it is getting us to where we need to be. Whether where ever your department is or what your goals are. I find I spend a lot of time with people just getting them to stop and think about why they are doing what they are doing and then what what would be the next best action to take."
This is so true based on my experience at work. Working in support we have a lot of fire drills and I think do a good job taking care of things during the crisis and a lot of folks go above and beyond for our customers. However, what I find missing is, after the crisis is over, to take the time and to reflect what happened, and take appropriate actions to not be in the same situation again or identify what we could do better the next time something similar happens because everyone is busy catching up with work or handling the next crisis. I have started a number of projects I am driving based on my learnings but in general, as a whole department, I don't think we do a good enough job to really address the underlying problems which frustrates me a lot. Especially if we keep talking for years about the same problems and, in my opinion, we don't put in enough effort to fix the underlying problem that potentially created the crisis in the first place so we can avoid the next crisis. I feel we start projects to address some of the issues and then the next crisis, or next shiny thing comes along that is suddenly very important, and 90% of the projects we started don't ever get finished. Curious if other Connect members have similar experiences and what you have been doing about it.
