Bernie’s Ramblings

I frequently hear this - “Fill up your time sheet before xxx date because it affects the company’s billing to the clients”. Now, this is fine, looking from the company’s perspective. However, even though all employees know what is good for the company will eventually trickle down as benefits for them, usually in the form of higher pay or bonus, it’s still not as enticing and you’ll find employees are not 100% motivated to fill in their time sheet. Weekly reminder emails will still need to be sent out.

Fact: people are an emotional and self-centered lot. Given a logical and emotional explanation, people tend to react more profoundly to an emotional one, especially if it is related to themselves. Managers should capitalize on this to get things done. Rather saying how filling up the time sheet will help the company’s billing, an emotional reasoning would be something along the lines of how time sheet can improve a consultant’s review and visibility, by tracking the amount of work done over time and by filling them up by xxx date is useful because you’d still remember it.

Gets exactly the same thing done, but I bet if you pitch it the latter, it’ll work better. Try it.

Love it.

Here are 18 Ways to Stay Focused at Work. Simple and straightforward. One thing I’ve noticed though, a lot of these “how to”s really focus on IT oriented jobs, I mean it’s all about email, IM, listening to music (which assumes you’ll be sitting in front of a computer) and use shortcuts for frequently used programs. Is it because IT people tend to have problem focusing? Or is it because most jobs nowadays involve computers?

Something to think about.

It seems that managing knowledge workers ain’t that easy. Problem is, managers still don’t see this. They think it’s a stroll in the park when it’s more like jungle tracking in the Amazon. Just after the post about pitfalls of technical leadership, an article titled How NOT to lead geeks came to my attention. Again, issues highlighted really do connect with me, and based on discussions among friends, they are a common problem. Of course, that’s not to say bad management is alien in other fields, but I think geeks are less forgiving when it comes to incompetency (sorry if I ruffle your feathers). Working with computers where precision, speed and correctness is the rule, we just can’t stand bad managers :).

Really.
On a more general note, I just remembered a Harvard Business school article I got from their newsletter, aptly titled Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation that I’d love to share right now. It does hit all the nails on a more general note, listing out 3 key reasons (yes, just 3!) why people work. I’ll just quote the article:

• Equity: To be respected and to be treated fairly in areas such as pay, benefits, and job security.
• Achievement: To be proud of one’s job, accomplishments, and employer.
• Camaraderie: To have good, productive relationships with fellow employees.