Work

ProDarwin wrote:

92CelicaHalfTrac wrote: At your job, if you notice that something could be improved on, or that it's blatantly broken... Do you do anything about it? Or do you just turtle down and make it work even if it means horrible inefficiencies and greater cost to your company? Do you work small business, or a huge corporation?

Yep. I try. It's hard. I work at a place where the momentum of existing procedures and stubbornness of those involved makes it VERY difficult to implement improvements. Usually this means I am forced to "turtle down" as you say. It sucks. It berkeleying CRUSHES motivation and morale.

At my last job, the one that I left, the mantra by everyone around was "don't try to change anything, it won't matter." It crushed me, and I hated every second of it. This was a place of about 12 employees.

At my new job, if I see something that could be improved or needs to be slightly more efficient, I usually just do it and report that it was done to my boss. MUCH better. We have just under 100 employees.

Guess who didn't even get an interview, nor even a "Dear John" letter again this time around?

Yep.

Don't know how much more of this place i can take.

Milton Waddams: [muttering] I could set the building on fire.

In my experience, the best thing to do in a situation where your soul is crushed and you feel that you are prevented from making a positive difference is to find another job.

90% of the time the problem is with the company, not you. Unless you are the CEO, changing your own behavior won't help.

ProDarwin wrote:

92CelicaHalfTrac wrote: At your job, if you notice that something could be improved on, or that it's blatantly broken... Do you do anything about it? Or do you just turtle down and make it work even if it means horrible inefficiencies and greater cost to your company? Do you work small business, or a huge corporation?

Yep. I try. It's hard. I work at a place where the momentum of existing procedures and stubbornness of those involved makes it VERY difficult to implement improvements. Usually this means I am forced to "turtle down" as you say. It sucks. It berkeleying CRUSHES motivation and morale. I work for a small business, part of a larger business, which is part of an absolutely gigantic corporation. 90% of the hurdles are local to me (in the small business, not parent company imposed).

I am feeling this right now. The company I work for is way behind in the documentation on how to build our system. I am trying make up a bill of materials for each of the systems we sell. The problem is one we didn't have enough engineers to document our system, two our sales guys kept selling stuff we didn't have so we had to be constantly developing new stuff and not documenting it correctly and three there is no link between the sales numbers and our drawing numbers...

The company I just recently "separated" from was a stubborn company, too. I was low man on the totem pole, so I was booted when I brought up the issue with the client directly in a focus meeting with him.

The irony is that he was looking for the information I gave him, but I was supposed to be all rainbows and unicorn farts around him. I told him exactly what he wanted to know and we discussed how to fix it. The ball was rolling to fix the issues when my old company decided that it was bad to have someone with some common sense that was willing to be a straight shooter with someone that probably has a private jet.

And that's why I'm in business for myself now.

I guess Im in a similar boat - crazy, irrational, nonsensical, who-the-hell-does-this type-of-thing stuff goes on where I work. We sell stuff we make - so we are a sales,/logistics/manufacturing company all wrapped up in one. The company is a smallish one - seasonaly we bloat up to maybe 200 people, but thats 75% temps. In the slow season (about 5 months) we have maybe 45 full timers.

The company has experienced growth, every quarter, for the last 7 years, so things are going pretty good....for the ones sitting on top. The inefficiencies and lack of organization are a load burdened by the bottom of the food chain here...little direction and even less management have become not just a nuisance, but a serious roadblock preventing much further growth.

But thats why this is a great place for me...The President of the company is VERY interested in moving the company forward. He just hired a new VP of operations - this is a brand new position. His task is to get the production component of the company poised for growth - a prospect not currently possible because of the lack of organization.

My position as an analyst in the sales and inventory team is also new - created this past July. I moved into my role and was quickly able to grab up the "low hanging fruit" because I wasnt burdened by a "This is how weve always done it" mentality. I just came up with creative solutions to some of he bigger problems in my dept (what I was hired to do) and implemented them, not only netting immediate results, but logically highlighted critical issues and was able to put concrete numbers to the benefits of solving them. Being able to provide this kind of info to the upper mgt was very novel here - most people would just complain, then put in he extra work to make he broken system limp toward a passable result.

As a result of my work and creative approach, Im already being promoted, and being given my own "Direct Report" (read: minion ) whose function is going to be to take the solutions Ive implemented and maintain the processes so I am free to take on more "Strategic Objectives (read: keep fixing all this broke e36m3).

Basically, even though this whole thing is effed, being creative and finding ways to make it better has actually put me into a better place. Its kind of refreshing - this is obviously a privately owned company. Most of my background comes from a major worldwide corporate conglomerate. Those types of places make gross inefficiency the norm, and crush your soul if you step out of line. Getting out from under that weight has been the best choice Ive ever made (dont tell SWMBO I said that).

Maybe not taking anymore of this is exactly what you need 92 - Get yourself something else lined up and pull the trigger. Chances are you will be muuuuch happier.