Micro-management is the bane of any office. It is contrary to a productive and congenial working environment. It forces employees to spend their time and energy on minute and petty tasks as opposed to what their actual jobs are. It pits "management" and "workers" against each other because of "management's" desire to check up on and nit-pick every aspect of how the "workers" do their jobs. It breeds mistrust on both sides, since "management" always suspects that the "workers" are not following the rules and the "workers" are always looking over their shoulders to see if Big Brother is watching. It is a waste of time, resources, and energy with no benefit.
We are professional people. We are attorneys. We show up to court when we are supposed to, and we show up prepared. We file our motions on time. We communicate with our clients whenever possible. If we did not, getting written up by the Boss would be the least of our problems. Much bigger problems would include being held in contempt by judges, being sanctioned by the Bar Association, having bad reputations in the legal community, and being sued by our clients or their families.
As none of these things have happened to anyone in our office, why the sudden need to audit how many breaks we take, our computer usage, and our telephone calls? Why should anyone care if we show up to the office 10 minutes late, stop for coffee and a bagel on the way back from court, leave the office at 4:40 so we can get to the bank before it closes, or surf the 'net when our brains are too fried to accomplish anything useful? According to the Boss, he has Information that the attorneys are not working 40 hours a week! This strikes me as amusing, or it would if it were not so asinine.
When I went to the office last Sunday, an attorney and a paralegal were both there at the time I was. When I go in this weekend to write 2 docketing statements, I expect to see at least one other attorney there at the same time I am. I can't remember the last time I left the office at 5:00. I defy anyone to prove that I don't put in my 40 hours!
The thing that bugs me the most about this is that the issue doesn't seem to be whether we are doing our jobs competently. The issue seems to be how much time we spend at it. And this is just ridiculous! It serves no purpose! The issue should be whether we are zealously and competently representing our clients. It should not be whether we are at our desks from 8 to 5 Monday through Friday. Why can't the Boss just trust that if we are doing are jobs correctly, we are putting in our 40 hours? This way, he doesn't have to worry about checking up on us all the time, and we can concentrate on our actual work, rather than worrying about whether he'll notice that we got back from lunch 15 minutes late.
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4 comments:
Oh my gosh! This is SO my life, too! And it's ridiculous! I TOTALLY know how you feel!
Have you ever observed that it's the people who kill themselves to get their work done--and to do it well--that seem to fall under this sort of scrutiny? Not the people who whine all day long about not wanting to be there or the people who are incapable of accomplishing anything.
No, no. It is the most productive workers who fall under such scrutiny, and do you want to know why? In my opinion, it is because Boss is on a control trip. Boss wants to feel like he is "Boss," and he is threatened by those on his staff who are actually better at what they do than he is at what he does. So instead of enabling his employees to succeed in their work, he overwhelms them with minutia so that then he can point his fingers at them and say, "Ha! See! I was right. You're not productive." And then Boss feels like he has a purpose in being there: Boss is there to "restore order."
Exactly! This is a relatively new phenomenon in our office, so my hope is that it will blow over. I'd imagine that how this came up in the first place is that someone told the boss that the attorneys were coming to the office late, or not working during business hours. Of course, one can't be in court and in the office at the same time, and there are times when one really just needs to escape the telephone for a few minutes. Of course, since the Boss has only about 20 clients, he may not know this.
After 30+ years in an academic bureaucracy, I still don't understand the perceived need to measure the "goodness" of a person's or a unit's work in some quantitative form. Back in the heyday of "Management by Objectives," there were checklists. Lots of checklists. Checklists of checklists. The more things checked off on checklists, the more "good" the employee, or the unit, or the department, was. This practice has fallen out of favor, mostly because people discovered that they could manipulate the "system" by rigging the checklists. So now the Big Heads want direct measurements that can't be rigged, whether or not they have anything to do with how well an employee does their job. In a way, their persistence looks almost noble: they continue to pursue their Holy Grail, totally undeterred by the inherent impossibility of quantifying a person's work. Look at baseball players, for instance: in spite of all the statistics (in 2004, Harvey Schmedlapp hit .355 against lefthanders in night games on grass after the 6th inning!) it's still almost impossible to predict how a given player will perform next year, or next at-bat. You would think that might discourage them, but no: on they march, more determined than ever to prove to themselves and each other whether the people they hired, they pay, and they supervise, are any good. Almost brings a tear to the eye, don't it? ;-)
Yes, the trust has gone from most of society and has been for a while. Of course, there are good reasons for micromanagement on an extremely small scale (if a worker has complaints against them, it might be worthwhile observing them, etc - I know that saved our office from a really horrible lady who needed to be fired (and who finally GOT fired thanks to micromanagement junk)). But on the whole, it means less work gets done. I'd go into the theories of power explanation behind micromanagement as I've studied it recently in some courses I'm taking, but it'd bore anyone to tears. Besides, your boss is correct. I'm sure he has information to prove that you all work MORE than 40 hours a week.
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