I make it clear that if my team is working overtime, I’ve failed.
Bingo!
This was my attitude too. If anyone has to work late or weekends, it was a failure in resource allocation, which is a management function.
The only exception was if people had to get on late night calls with people in other timezones, in which case they were expected to take the equivalent time off at their own convenience.
Another easy win is bullshit agile daily standups. I made them twice a week, and no longer than 15 minutes and only to cover potential blockers, not status reports. That alone made everyone happier. In one case, the team finished a project that had been languishing for three years in three months and shipped it out.
My last boss totally fucked up my daily stand-ups. I suggested them because, when I started, I found most work wasn’t consistently tracked or even discussed. My boss’s management style was panicking about everything and panic working while raging that no one else was also panicking about everything (spoiler: I also learned department turnover was high, can’t imagine why), so I was trying to help implement any organization whatsoever. She quickly turned my 10 minute stand-ups into 1-1.5 hour slogs where each team member had to give an update on each of their projects, despite having earlier logged it all into the project tracker I created.
By far the worst micromanager and least competent person I ever worked for.
My coworkers and I were having issues getting any information from another team to do our job. Since we had a set deadline to finish the work, I set up a Monday/Wednesday meeting schedule to extract the information we needed from that team. My boss and the other team’s boss turned it into a two hour update-fest with us and the other team updating our respective bosses, with both teams in the meeting. So fucking pointless, and so far away from what that meeting was supposed to be, it is truly astonishing we were able to get anything done.
Oh and the other team stopped providing the information we needed to finish when our bosses converted our meeting to update-fest.
Bingo!
This was my attitude too. If anyone has to work late or weekends, it was a failure in resource allocation, which is a management function.
The only exception was if people had to get on late night calls with people in other timezones, in which case they were expected to take the equivalent time off at their own convenience.
Another easy win is bullshit agile daily standups. I made them twice a week, and no longer than 15 minutes and only to cover potential blockers, not status reports. That alone made everyone happier. In one case, the team finished a project that had been languishing for three years in three months and shipped it out.
It’s really about respecting people’s time.
My last boss totally fucked up my daily stand-ups. I suggested them because, when I started, I found most work wasn’t consistently tracked or even discussed. My boss’s management style was panicking about everything and panic working while raging that no one else was also panicking about everything (spoiler: I also learned department turnover was high, can’t imagine why), so I was trying to help implement any organization whatsoever. She quickly turned my 10 minute stand-ups into 1-1.5 hour slogs where each team member had to give an update on each of their projects, despite having earlier logged it all into the project tracker I created.
By far the worst micromanager and least competent person I ever worked for.
My coworkers and I were having issues getting any information from another team to do our job. Since we had a set deadline to finish the work, I set up a Monday/Wednesday meeting schedule to extract the information we needed from that team. My boss and the other team’s boss turned it into a two hour update-fest with us and the other team updating our respective bosses, with both teams in the meeting. So fucking pointless, and so far away from what that meeting was supposed to be, it is truly astonishing we were able to get anything done.
Oh and the other team stopped providing the information we needed to finish when our bosses converted our meeting to update-fest.