Nugget 3: Office working is far more productive than remote working when dealing with human interaction, but its a mistake to assume it can be maintained at that level forever.

Explanation:

Even before the pandemic, there was a debate over office working vs. remote working and the thing is that both of them are productive in their own way, but after 5+ years of hard remote working and learning to deal with it on a large team scale I think I’ve reached an epiphany.

Day to day working is more efficient from home, you can actually get on with working, you  are actually more productive in completing tasks (providing you actually spend the hours working that you would in an office) as there are far less distractions, Plus there is the absence of Lost time from travelling, but that doesn’t mean that home working is always more productive. For example workshops or large meetings particularly those that involve forms of conflict are far far more productive in person, as sales people have known forever.

But one thing that seems to have been forgotten, particularly by older generations of senior managers is that this kind of productivity cannot be sustained day after day after day, so in my opinion the new hybrid working model is the best, I personally go in for one day a week on a Monday to kickstart me into the work mentality.

But also I have seen the one week workshop where everyone comes together to solve a major goal, get tons done and deliver massively finish with a senior manager saying that we should work like this all the time and this is why being in an office is better,

NO! it’s not, everybody is mentally shattered, such work should be consider a sprint, and while its attractive to think such a pace can be kept up, it cant and should be used now as a usefully times tool to resolve issues or reconnect humans with each other

Sorry if this nugget got turned into more of a rant but it’s something I feel quite strongly about at the moment.

Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.

Nugget 2: If everything is urgent then nothing is urgent

Explanation:

I don’t know why I’m even explaining this, it even appears in Disney movies for heavens sake but still it seems to be needed to be said, 

You cannot have everything be high priority. It’s just stops things from being delivered, For every given set of tasks you have a limited set of resource, grow up and assign a set of priorities, Yes we know that you’re getting pressure from above, but the point of being a manager involves managing priorities, Don’t chop and change them, manage expectation, Don’t over promise and you will get better deliverables! (I sure as hell am guilty of this and often have to have a stern word with my self for rolling over and just wanting to please)

Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.

Recently I rebuilt this blog and noticed many things that I had learnt in the past and had since forgotten, and since I am in a new type of role at my new client  I thought I would start writing down all the bits and bobs that I am seeing and dealing with from a senior management point of view, this is while I still retain the twin view points of “doer” / Tech and Manager  

All of these nuggets have been thought of many times by many people, and no doubt they exist in a thousand books on the subjects of project and man management, but they are new to me and I’m finding them by trial and error as I interact with two worlds

I would like to make massively clear that these are not from any one company or any one industry, it is accumulated stuff I have picked up working with clients big and small, with people good and bad over the last three decades of corporate life.

Nugget 1: you can’t run teams at 100% and then ask “surges” of them

Explanation:

If you have a set of teams that you’re constantly pushing to “go go go”, “now now now”, and running them at full speed you CANNOT then on top of that add things that have to be done TODAY, what you’re doing is giving them impossible goals (which produces a constant feeling of failure in the people under your care), burning them out and damaging their opinion of you, as handling or “Managing” these situations IS YOUR JOB.

If you cannot control the surges (say its part of your industry that they happen e.g. retail at xmas) then you have to run at a lower % utilisation for the none crisis times.