Micro Managing

[Bubba Grizz]

My boss has started to micro manage our timesheets. Before I could just put that I was on the phones for 9 hours but then she started wanting more. So I added what she suggested and that was fine for about a month and now she wants even more detail.
Seeing as how I can't really put down that I have been watching movies and surfing the net as time killer between calls and expect to keep my job, I need to come up with a bunch of things I can put on the timesheet. I want to accumulate a nice list so I can rotate in different things every day. I can't have it where I am cleaning my desk or something like that all the time. Especially when my desk is always a mess.

I leave it to you to build that list for me. I am a quiver in anticipation to see what the vault can provide.

[Truant]

put that you took a shit between calls.

Bet she quits asking for so much detail after that.


(don't really do that btw)

[Morgrym]

Give us your line of work so we have something to work off of.

Personally, I would have a sit down with your boss and let her know how you feel about having a micro manager looking over your shoulder. As long as you are productive, that is all that should matter.

[Funkmasterr]

Give us your line of work so we have something to work off of.

Personally, I would have a sit down with your boss and let her know how you feel about having a micro manager looking over your shoulder. As long as you are productive, that is all that should matter.

I agree.

The big thing at my job right now is "metrics" and measuring every little thing. The funny thing is, the people analyzing the data gathered need to actually know what is going on to truly do anything worthwhile with it, and I'd say from my experience, 85% of management at the VP level or above (the people that care about these damned numbers) don't have a sliver of a fucking clue what the people they are measuring do day to day, nor would they even understand it if it was explained to them.

Rant done, I'll try and think of something for ya, who knows, I might be needing it soon too!

[Bubba Grizz]

I work a support desk for an accounting firm that is more of an all in one kind of company. We do your HR, Networks, Accounting, and all that other kind of stuff. Basically, helpdesk for about 1000 people. Lots of network and workstation issues.
My boss and I get along very well so it isn't a spiteful kind of thing I am trying to do and I can understand where she is coming from. During summer hours we pretty slow but tax season we are insanely busy. Should it ever come down to actually having to justify my time I really should have some details that they can chew on.

[Midnyte_Ragebringer]

Get used to it. Micro managing is the result of promoting people to management positions who don't belong there. They get promoted based on seniority, quotas, nepotism, or being great workers. None of those things makes a great manager. It's the same reason why things like Six Sigma have been invented. It's very infuriating, I understand how you feel.

[Winnow]

9:00-9:30am - ate a sausage
10:00-10:20am - cheese break
11:25-11:59am - water cooler Packer chat

That takes care of the morning.

[rhyae]

9:00-9:30am - ate a sausage
10:00-10:20am - cheese break
11:25-11:59am - water cooler Packer chat

That takes care of the morning.

You forgot to mention the packer polka.

Tell her you spend a lot of time cleaning viruses off the network, if she asks who is downloading them, blame someone you don't like.

[Hesten]

Remember to put in paperwork, we had our boss suggest that same idea, untill we did it for a month and made sure to type in the 5-10 min between each case covering the paperwork that came with his idea. After seeing 5 people use aruond 8 hours a week on unneeded paperwork, he dropped the idea.

At the moment i got a time registry system that are SO slow that it take around 90-120 min to fill in 3 weeks, if you had stuff apart from the normal hours. We HAVE told our boss what she is paying us for, but we gotta live with it

Same goes for paychecks, as long as they continually fuck up the paychecks so we NEED to double check it in detail and compare with our time sheets, we do it during work hours. At the moment, around 1/3 of my paychecks have been correct, in 18 months. A coworker of mine have not had a correct paycheck yet. Personally i was up having them owe me over 2000$ due to they being fairly incompetent at it, and having to check 4-6 months back every month and find out exactly what they paid and didnt pay and mess up each time took 2-3 hours at month when it was worst.

[cadalano]

Personally, I would have a sit down with your boss and let her know how you feel about having a micro manager looking over your shoulder. As long as you are productive, that is all that should matter.

as long as you are on salary- that is correct



is the problem a lack of productive things to do, or no desire to be productive?

if the former, find shit to do.. ask your boss that you need downtime projects to work on

if the latter.. then i'd imagine generalized shit that would come from people who have no idea what you do is the exact kind of stuff that screams "i just made this shit up to fill in the time slot". Do you ever do anything other than take calls?

[Winnow]

Tell them you're a people person damn it. You deal with the people so that the engineers don't have to.

office space

[Canelek]

Get used to it. Micro managing is the result of promoting people to management positions who don't belong there. They get promoted based on seniority, quotas, nepotism, or being great workers. None of those things makes a great manager. It's the same reason why things like Six Sigma have been invented. It's very infuriating, I understand how you feel.

Pretty much sums it up! Most of us have had the displeasure of reporting to these 'managers'. I am pretty lucky now, as I report to East Coast, but I have been in your shoes before!

Something about a technical certification (MCSE, etc) and an MBA just CLASHES.


Some things you can use:

Technical Analisys & Research
Information sharing with colleagues
Proactive maintenance
etc
etc

[Truant]

Actually, log your time sheet on your time sheet...because they are making it so meticulous that it will take up enough of your time.

[Zaelath]

Meh, for people that preach they have a strong work ethic, you have a lot of jobs with a lot of downtime.

My fulltime position in the US was lucky to have 16 hours work a week, and the bosses fucking *loved* me because projects got done instead of being an excuse as to what I was doing all day (which was actually surfing VV and reading digital books)

The impetus here is they know you're slackers, and they want to work out exactly how slack so they know how many to fire. With the ideal number of employees being (number of hours work) / (38 hour work week) rounded up to the nearest slacker.

You just have to make sure you're not the biggest slacker in the bunch, and you get to stay.

[Winnow]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR7HDERBCQE

[Siji]

More and more companies are cutting back severely and/or shipping jobs out of the country. Therefore more managers are being forced to justify the headcount under them. My most recent boss has been doing the micromanaging thing lately as well - but as annoying as it is, it's a lot better than looking for a job in a crappy market flooded with hig1hly qualified people.

In other words, find a productive way to fill your time, while you can.

[Deward]

Learn a programming language. That can take up lots of time. Summers at my job are dead as hell. I would be surpried if I actually worked 5 hours a week. Luckily I don't get micromanaged. I do a lot of programming though so I can always turn a 20 minute job into a 2 hour job.

[Soreali]

Research your position.. by "research" i mean, read VV.. thats what I do.. I'm on phones all day (helpdesk) so when its dead, i'm on the web "researching" stuff. Issues you've had that day, wierd things you heard about, stuff like that.

[Xatrei]

http://lifehacker.com/399792/track-your ... ego-bricks

[Truant]

http://lifehacker.com/399792/track-your ... ego-bricks

That's really clever and I dig it.

[masteen]

Already mentioned before, but always list the time you spend doing administrative shit. When I was working tech support, there was a spell when they wanted us to keep a time record. Aside of time actually spent working, I would list "Time spent annotating case," as well as "Time spent annotating time record," usually in 10 and 5 minute blocks respectively, unless I'd done more (like attaching a visio I'd made or a network topo I had the sniffer generate). You'd be amazed how those 15 minutes per case can add up.

[Winnow]

Learn a programming language. That can take up lots of time. Summers at my job are dead as hell. I would be surpried if I actually worked 5 hours a week. Luckily I don't get micromanaged.

With five weeks of vacation each year, I'd probably work harder if I had to. It's doubtful I'd find another job that would give me that much vacation right off the bat. Remember to delegate your responsibilities as much as possible to other people.

Best commercial ever:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hKWM5Z1zds

[laneela]

Spreadsheets (tracking reports, etc)
Documenting calls (elaborating on the documentation you did while on the call)
Research
Organizing computer files
Making lists/memos to organize yourself

[Midnyte_Ragebringer]

Learn a programming language. That can take up lots of time. Summers at my job are dead as hell. I would be surpried if I actually worked 5 hours a week. Luckily I don't get micromanaged.

With five weeks of vacation each year, I'd probably work harder if I had to. It's doubtful I'd find another job that would give me that much vacation right off the bat. Remember to delegate your responsibilities as much as possible to other people.

Best commercial ever:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hKWM5Z1zds

One of the most honest commercials ever.

[Spankes]

I would argue that your boss is managing you, not micro managing you. Micro managers micro-manage everything. They don't trust anyone to do anything right and are always looking over shoulders. It sounds like your boss doesn't do that typically so they have, obviously, found an issue with performance (with you, in the department, or whatever) and are looking to fix it. The reality of it is that people waste too much time at work (myself included) and billions of dollars are wasted on people surfing the net. Lots of people can do their job in half the alloted time once they get the hang of it. Companies see this, downsize and then give people double the work to fill their 40 hours and then people frown on the big bad corporation.

Anyway, short story long, without knowing anything about your company i dunno. But, what if they are looking to downsize (it is a rough economy after all) and are looking to see who is not productive or proactive? Keep that in mind when you are filling your forms up with all useless shit that everyone is suggesting.

[Kilmoll the Sexy]

I would put everything down in the filler times as training. Pick some stupid certification that the company also might find beneficial and list it as training for that cert. Keep a window up with some type of software training for that cert to pop up anytime the manager is nearby.

[Funkmasterr]

I keep hearing people talk about how bad the economy is and how scarce computer related jobs, and jobs in general are.. It's just strange because there are plenty of jobs in MN ranging from grocery bagger to computer related jobs..

Our economy isn't in nearly the condition some people are implying.. People hear someone on the news/wherever say that oil prices are gonna keep going up and our economy is getting bad because of it (or whatever the reason is at the time) so they stop spending their money and start acting like something is wrong with the economy. If people would just continue on with business as usual until they needed to make a lifestyle change, we wouldn't have some of the issues we currently do..

[Boogahz]

It may not be that bad where you are, but it is in places with massive layoffs. Thousands of people with the same type of work experience are all applying for the same jobs.

[Spankes]

Our economy isn't in nearly the condition some people are implying.. People hear someone on the news/wherever say that oil prices are gonna keep going up and our economy is getting bad because of it (or whatever the reason is at the time) so they stop spending their money and start acting like something is wrong with the economy. If people would just continue on with business as usual until they needed to make a lifestyle change, we wouldn't have some of the issues we currently do..

Given that I haven't worked since feburary, I respectfully disagree. And, while I am sure I could get a job tommorow somewhere I would take about a 70k pay cut from what I made last year to do it. Thankfully, I saw it coming and planned accordingly.

[Siji]

The economy is suffering because people aren't spending money they don't have and they don't have that money because they're not replacing their 60-100k a year jobs with 7/hr grocery bagging jobs. Gotcha.

[lmnt9]

It may not be that bad where you are, but it is in places with massive layoffs. Thousands of people with the same type of work experience are all applying for the same jobs.

Which means if you are slacking in the least, you may be looking at the axe, because there are tons of qualified people looking for your job.

[Bubba Grizz]

We just did some hiring and the applicants we got were mostly asshats. Some were over qualified and we knew that they are going leave as soon as they can find something better. We aren't looking for short term people, if we were we'd get them from a temp place. Any truly qualified people for this job probably wouldn't want to take a pay cut to work here. But overall the idea that there is always someone able to replace you is valid and semi frightening. I'm not worried at this point.