Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Motivation? It Pays The Bills...

I fully accept that I am not alone in working in challenging surroundings.

All too frequently I find myself struggling with the cultural differences of some of my international colleagues, disappointed at how difficult it is to make my seemingly valid opinions heard, or more recently, utterly astounded and the issues considered to be most important to the future of our business.

Unfortunately for me, I have a reputation for not being afraid to speak up (I like to think tactfully) when I believe something is wrong. Where in the past such behaviour was nurtured and encouraged, we are now fast becoming an organisation who storms ahead based on knee jerk reaction and with little regard for the people managing the business nearer to the coal face. We left that behaviour behind 10-12 years ago but it is difficult to draw the fine line between being someone who thinks he has some ideas worth sharing and being the gobshite who thinks he knows it all.

After a wave of redundancies and an order book far quieter than many of us can remember, you would have thought it appropriate to start pooling the resources of the management teams and formulating a strategy to secure our company a place in the future. However, it has been decided that we should tackle this by getting everyone to move offices again. After all, it's been almost a year since the last one.

Cue weeks of disruption, lost telephone and PC links, disorganised workstations and general frustration. Everyone is being pissed about because someone on high has decided to put the music back on while we all run around in circles, quietly hoping that a seat will still be available when it stops again.

Unfortunately, the harsh truth is that we all have to be grateful that we are in work at all. Deep breath and count to 10... again.

If you're lucky, amidst all this sort of nonsense something comes along to cheer you up and this video received from one of my colleagues did just the trick this morning - with apologies to the politically correct brigade out there...

2 comments:

delcatto said...

It's an excellent video which has had me chortling out loud.
I thought it was only in public services that we had managerial numpties. i.e. Activity of any sort equals progress, hence the popularirt of wankers in senior positions.

delcatto said...

Sigh...popularity...it's early.