Overthinking is an art form
I don't know what it says about me that I am suddenly tempted to spend money on Dreamwidth just so I can get a bunch more icon slots. I have a ton on my permanent account on LJ, but cross-posting goes from DW to to LJ and not the other way around, so I have to go manually "fix" icons in my LJ entries after I post, since the ones on my DW don't always quite reflect what I want to convey. I talk myself out of it each time, because it's not like I am a regular user of either service anymore, and I am trying to be less, well, spendy. It definitely would not be a good use of my money.
Anyway, it was kind of a long day at work and one that wasn't quite as productive as I would have liked. I'm struggling with having to structure my days entirely on my own. I'm actually more productive on days when I have back-to-back meetings because I know I have to fit my work in around them, whereas if I have my days entirely "free" to work as I see fit I kind of flail around. I am kind of stressed about it all, because this feels like my *one shot* at proving my worth at work before my manager comes back from maternity leave and shoves me firmly back in the "incompetent" box. I have resigned myself to the fact that she is never, ever going to like how I work, and is forever going to think me a nincompoop who can't find her ass with both hands and a flashlight. So I am determined to show my (current) bosses just how fucking awesome I am so that she can't sabotage me in the future. It's not the only reason I want to do a good job, of course, but I can't lie and say it isn't an important factor in why I am doing what I'm doing.
I am trying (and mostly failing) to be kind to myself about this. It's a brand-new kind of work for me, after all, and it's ridiculous to think that I would nail it 100% right out of the gate. OTOH I only have until the end of July, so I can see the sand in the hourglass trickling away inexorably. I'm also stressed out because all the employees are now depending squarely on me to get their pay on time (well, their extra-duty pay, their regular pay is automated, but still!) as well as for direction on most things. I have a lot of responsibilities but very little power, and it's a delicate balancing act. Luckily my current bosses are supportive, but they either aren't too familiar with the work I have to do or else aren't very hands-on, which means I am having to figure most of it out on my own and just kind of muddle through.
Currently I am VERY behind on managing my inbox. My job depends a lot on my staying on top of emails, and after a massive crisis in late November I fell behind and not only never caught up, but kept falling further behind. I did a push today and got it from over 600 emails to just over 350, and if I do another push tomorrow I think I can get everything filed where it needs to go. I just need to not let the feelings of panic/overwhelm rule my decisions on that front, which is kind of what's been happening. Self-sabotage at its finest--I could be a case study, frankly.
Honestly, I was handed a job that is a bit of a shit show. My section has been critically short-staffed for years, with an incredibly high turnover rate of employees. When I was hired seven years ago I was one of the most junior people there, and most of the employees had between 10 and 30 years of experience. Now *I* am the most senior employee there barring one guy (he's a whole other kettle of fish anyway) with 13 years of total experience in the organization and 7 years in my current section. After me, the next most senior employees have four years of experience. Hell, even my manager has only 5 or 6 years of experience in the organization.
The loss of corporate knowledge has been enormous in the past five years. In 2015 we got "restructured" and they cut 8 positions and re-trained the rest of us to do two jobs. Then they slowly cut our operational support and our admin staff, reasoning that we (the telecommunications operators) could do the admin and operational support stuff in "our spare time," even though we now had doubled our workload. Between the massive overload of work, the cutting of support staff, the high turnover of operators--which means experienced operators spend a huge chunk of their time training new employees (who end up leaving inside of two years) and burning the candle at both ends--and constantly shifting operational priorities, the employees are all at various stages of exhaustion. It's not great.
The turnover rate is somehow even worse at the management level. The current director, who is only there in an acting capacity, is my *tenth* director in 7 years. We've been joking for years about the Director's office having a revolving door, and the comparison is an apt one, unfortunately. It's unlikely the current guy will get to keep the role, either, because even though he's very good at it, and has the experience and knowledge, he's too "junior." He's an inspector, and the job is meant for someone in a superintendent position. There are a LOT of existing superintendents out there who will want this job once it becomes available, because people use my section as a way to cap off their careers--it's a position that carries a lot of prestige. This is how we got in trouble to begin with, quite frankly: people viewing the position as a political move and not actually caring if the section does well. The net result is that the section has not been served well by people who not only didn't have a clear, long-term vision for us, but in many cases actively didn't give a shit about us beyond how the title looked on their CV.
So I've been given a temporary position that is in complete disarray. My first manager retired in January 2018, and his job was given temporarily to a woman who had never even had supervisory experience, let alone managerial experience. She had no idea what she was doing and was too proud to admit it, and she torpedoed morale and fucked up so many things I could spend a month listing them all and still have subject matter. She actually burnt out, because it's really hard to pretend everything is fine when your whole job is on fire, and there were several months in which we had no manager. A few of us applied for the position, and the current manager got it and started at the end of January 2020, by which time we already knew she was pregnant and slated for maternity leave in August. She left right at the end of July and my friend/future roommate KK took over as interim manager until the end of October when she got her new job.
So the position hasn't had anyone in it for more than six months at a time since late 2017. Things have piled up, small fires didn't get put out two years ago and so are now fully entrenched and crackling away. My current manager left without giving KK much to work with--I had mistakenly been under the impression that she'd spent a week or so doing "pass on" with KK to bring her up to speed on everything that was going on, but KK later told me that wasn't the case at all, and that she found herself having to figure things out on her own. The thing about KK is that she is the most breathtakingly competent person I have ever met: her brain seems to be naturally organized, she is highly analytical in her thinking, and she's got an incredible talent for doing the equivalent of playing 3D chess but with work things. She is the kind of person who can intuit how computer software should be used to maximum effect and understands instructions the first time around--often without needing to ask questions. (As an aside: She was first in line for the manager position and turned it down because she knew it would be terrible for her mental health (and she was right), but she later told our bosses that if she'd known the current manager was going to be offered the position she would never have refused.)
KK spent two weeks doing "pass on" with me before she left, bless every bone in her body. Even so, that was not enough to teach me everything I need to know about the job. Hell, a lot of the stuff I am having to learn on the fly is stuff she doesn't know anyway. (I know, I asked.) I feel like I am reinventing the wheel every week because the long-time manager--the one who retired in 2018--did absolutely NO legacy planning. He did the job for 20+ years but just kept all the knowledge in his head and never passed it on. We begged him to write things down, but he was constantly running around and putting out fires and he just never seemed to get around to it, so now there's a ton of stuff that he "just knew" needed to get done that keeps cropping up and biting us in the ass because we're not aware that it's even a thing.
My plan therefore, such as it is, is to write things down every time I find myself reinventing the wheel or "discovering" a Thing That Must Absolutely Be Done On This One Date Every Year Or We Risk Shutting Down Half the Operation. I am considering trying to make up a OneNote notebook of instructions, because OneNote is useful and searchable, but I am not particularly good at using/organizing OneNote, so it's a bit of a daunting task.
I am also in cahoots with the overworked administrative assistant. I had a two-hour meeting with her today (it was supposed to be one hour but we got carried away with our planning and things), and we have decided to ask for an extra body to help us clean up the shared drive. Friends, the shared drive is a MESS. It has hundreds of files, many of which haven't been touched in 5-10 years, and over the years because there was no established organization and all the content was just created ad hoc there is no rhyme or reason to any of it. Information is scattered everywhere, sometimes the same kind of information (human resources stuff, for instance) is saved in 3-4 different places under different-but-similar names. There's no consistent naming convention for folders or for files, and it's just... a disaster. So my goal is to cure that shared drive of its chaos, tame the beast and make it manageable.
Another of my grand plans is to standardize the employee evaluations for the public service employees (PSEs) who work for our section. If you're a Civilian Member (CM) like me, then there are very specific criteria/competencies against which you're judged for your yearly and mid-year evaluations. We've only had PSEs for a short time, however, and even though I've been asking for a standard way to evaluate them ever since they arrived (in 2017), that has never happened. I offered to do it, but the interim manager at the time (the one who was especially terrible) dismissed me out of hand and insisted that she and the director at the time were going to do it and no one else should touch it. Predictably, nothing happened. Anyway, yearly evaluations are going to be due at the end of March, and I am determined to get this done by the end of February so that the supervisors can have clear criteria and the employees can know where they stand. Right now the fact that we don't have standardized criteria is actually leaving us wide open for grievances if ever an employee doesn't agree with their evaluation, and that's such an unnecessary risk, frankly, it's ridiculous to leave it unaddressed. It's a relatively simple fix--simple but not easy.
Somewhere in all of this I also want to make my director keep his promise to have us actually do training practices for what we call an "activation." That is, if there is an emergency on a national scale, we "activate" my section and turn into a crisis centre. The current problem is that because we have so many really new and "green" operators, I worry that if we have a real emergency before we've had a chance to do some drills, it will make everything so much harder than it has to be. Train how you work and work how you train should be the motto, and we haven't trained in an embarrassingly long time.
Anyway, I have LOTS of plans, very little time in which to get them all implemented, and in the meantime I am struggling just to manage my inbox. So, you know, it's going well. :P
That ended up a lot longer than I intended, but at least I've written down some of my work plans in a more explicit way. I think next on that list I should break down the plans into proper, accomplishable steps with proper deadlines and everything. Maybe I will do that.
Tomorrow, however, I shall return here and post my resolutions. Some of them are also about work!
I hope you're all keeping as well as you can. I've gone back a couple of weeks reading journal entries, and it looks like everyone is having a hard time. People have gotten sick, people have died, people are feeling more alone than ever. I see you all, and I am sorry you have to hurt this much.
*hugs to all* This entry was originally posted at https://mousme.dreamwidth.org/1454071.html, where there are currently
comments. Feel free to comment wherever you'd like!
Anyway, it was kind of a long day at work and one that wasn't quite as productive as I would have liked. I'm struggling with having to structure my days entirely on my own. I'm actually more productive on days when I have back-to-back meetings because I know I have to fit my work in around them, whereas if I have my days entirely "free" to work as I see fit I kind of flail around. I am kind of stressed about it all, because this feels like my *one shot* at proving my worth at work before my manager comes back from maternity leave and shoves me firmly back in the "incompetent" box. I have resigned myself to the fact that she is never, ever going to like how I work, and is forever going to think me a nincompoop who can't find her ass with both hands and a flashlight. So I am determined to show my (current) bosses just how fucking awesome I am so that she can't sabotage me in the future. It's not the only reason I want to do a good job, of course, but I can't lie and say it isn't an important factor in why I am doing what I'm doing.
I am trying (and mostly failing) to be kind to myself about this. It's a brand-new kind of work for me, after all, and it's ridiculous to think that I would nail it 100% right out of the gate. OTOH I only have until the end of July, so I can see the sand in the hourglass trickling away inexorably. I'm also stressed out because all the employees are now depending squarely on me to get their pay on time (well, their extra-duty pay, their regular pay is automated, but still!) as well as for direction on most things. I have a lot of responsibilities but very little power, and it's a delicate balancing act. Luckily my current bosses are supportive, but they either aren't too familiar with the work I have to do or else aren't very hands-on, which means I am having to figure most of it out on my own and just kind of muddle through.
Currently I am VERY behind on managing my inbox. My job depends a lot on my staying on top of emails, and after a massive crisis in late November I fell behind and not only never caught up, but kept falling further behind. I did a push today and got it from over 600 emails to just over 350, and if I do another push tomorrow I think I can get everything filed where it needs to go. I just need to not let the feelings of panic/overwhelm rule my decisions on that front, which is kind of what's been happening. Self-sabotage at its finest--I could be a case study, frankly.
Honestly, I was handed a job that is a bit of a shit show. My section has been critically short-staffed for years, with an incredibly high turnover rate of employees. When I was hired seven years ago I was one of the most junior people there, and most of the employees had between 10 and 30 years of experience. Now *I* am the most senior employee there barring one guy (he's a whole other kettle of fish anyway) with 13 years of total experience in the organization and 7 years in my current section. After me, the next most senior employees have four years of experience. Hell, even my manager has only 5 or 6 years of experience in the organization.
The loss of corporate knowledge has been enormous in the past five years. In 2015 we got "restructured" and they cut 8 positions and re-trained the rest of us to do two jobs. Then they slowly cut our operational support and our admin staff, reasoning that we (the telecommunications operators) could do the admin and operational support stuff in "our spare time," even though we now had doubled our workload. Between the massive overload of work, the cutting of support staff, the high turnover of operators--which means experienced operators spend a huge chunk of their time training new employees (who end up leaving inside of two years) and burning the candle at both ends--and constantly shifting operational priorities, the employees are all at various stages of exhaustion. It's not great.
The turnover rate is somehow even worse at the management level. The current director, who is only there in an acting capacity, is my *tenth* director in 7 years. We've been joking for years about the Director's office having a revolving door, and the comparison is an apt one, unfortunately. It's unlikely the current guy will get to keep the role, either, because even though he's very good at it, and has the experience and knowledge, he's too "junior." He's an inspector, and the job is meant for someone in a superintendent position. There are a LOT of existing superintendents out there who will want this job once it becomes available, because people use my section as a way to cap off their careers--it's a position that carries a lot of prestige. This is how we got in trouble to begin with, quite frankly: people viewing the position as a political move and not actually caring if the section does well. The net result is that the section has not been served well by people who not only didn't have a clear, long-term vision for us, but in many cases actively didn't give a shit about us beyond how the title looked on their CV.
So I've been given a temporary position that is in complete disarray. My first manager retired in January 2018, and his job was given temporarily to a woman who had never even had supervisory experience, let alone managerial experience. She had no idea what she was doing and was too proud to admit it, and she torpedoed morale and fucked up so many things I could spend a month listing them all and still have subject matter. She actually burnt out, because it's really hard to pretend everything is fine when your whole job is on fire, and there were several months in which we had no manager. A few of us applied for the position, and the current manager got it and started at the end of January 2020, by which time we already knew she was pregnant and slated for maternity leave in August. She left right at the end of July and my friend/future roommate KK took over as interim manager until the end of October when she got her new job.
So the position hasn't had anyone in it for more than six months at a time since late 2017. Things have piled up, small fires didn't get put out two years ago and so are now fully entrenched and crackling away. My current manager left without giving KK much to work with--I had mistakenly been under the impression that she'd spent a week or so doing "pass on" with KK to bring her up to speed on everything that was going on, but KK later told me that wasn't the case at all, and that she found herself having to figure things out on her own. The thing about KK is that she is the most breathtakingly competent person I have ever met: her brain seems to be naturally organized, she is highly analytical in her thinking, and she's got an incredible talent for doing the equivalent of playing 3D chess but with work things. She is the kind of person who can intuit how computer software should be used to maximum effect and understands instructions the first time around--often without needing to ask questions. (As an aside: She was first in line for the manager position and turned it down because she knew it would be terrible for her mental health (and she was right), but she later told our bosses that if she'd known the current manager was going to be offered the position she would never have refused.)
KK spent two weeks doing "pass on" with me before she left, bless every bone in her body. Even so, that was not enough to teach me everything I need to know about the job. Hell, a lot of the stuff I am having to learn on the fly is stuff she doesn't know anyway. (I know, I asked.) I feel like I am reinventing the wheel every week because the long-time manager--the one who retired in 2018--did absolutely NO legacy planning. He did the job for 20+ years but just kept all the knowledge in his head and never passed it on. We begged him to write things down, but he was constantly running around and putting out fires and he just never seemed to get around to it, so now there's a ton of stuff that he "just knew" needed to get done that keeps cropping up and biting us in the ass because we're not aware that it's even a thing.
My plan therefore, such as it is, is to write things down every time I find myself reinventing the wheel or "discovering" a Thing That Must Absolutely Be Done On This One Date Every Year Or We Risk Shutting Down Half the Operation. I am considering trying to make up a OneNote notebook of instructions, because OneNote is useful and searchable, but I am not particularly good at using/organizing OneNote, so it's a bit of a daunting task.
I am also in cahoots with the overworked administrative assistant. I had a two-hour meeting with her today (it was supposed to be one hour but we got carried away with our planning and things), and we have decided to ask for an extra body to help us clean up the shared drive. Friends, the shared drive is a MESS. It has hundreds of files, many of which haven't been touched in 5-10 years, and over the years because there was no established organization and all the content was just created ad hoc there is no rhyme or reason to any of it. Information is scattered everywhere, sometimes the same kind of information (human resources stuff, for instance) is saved in 3-4 different places under different-but-similar names. There's no consistent naming convention for folders or for files, and it's just... a disaster. So my goal is to cure that shared drive of its chaos, tame the beast and make it manageable.
Another of my grand plans is to standardize the employee evaluations for the public service employees (PSEs) who work for our section. If you're a Civilian Member (CM) like me, then there are very specific criteria/competencies against which you're judged for your yearly and mid-year evaluations. We've only had PSEs for a short time, however, and even though I've been asking for a standard way to evaluate them ever since they arrived (in 2017), that has never happened. I offered to do it, but the interim manager at the time (the one who was especially terrible) dismissed me out of hand and insisted that she and the director at the time were going to do it and no one else should touch it. Predictably, nothing happened. Anyway, yearly evaluations are going to be due at the end of March, and I am determined to get this done by the end of February so that the supervisors can have clear criteria and the employees can know where they stand. Right now the fact that we don't have standardized criteria is actually leaving us wide open for grievances if ever an employee doesn't agree with their evaluation, and that's such an unnecessary risk, frankly, it's ridiculous to leave it unaddressed. It's a relatively simple fix--simple but not easy.
Somewhere in all of this I also want to make my director keep his promise to have us actually do training practices for what we call an "activation." That is, if there is an emergency on a national scale, we "activate" my section and turn into a crisis centre. The current problem is that because we have so many really new and "green" operators, I worry that if we have a real emergency before we've had a chance to do some drills, it will make everything so much harder than it has to be. Train how you work and work how you train should be the motto, and we haven't trained in an embarrassingly long time.
Anyway, I have LOTS of plans, very little time in which to get them all implemented, and in the meantime I am struggling just to manage my inbox. So, you know, it's going well. :P
That ended up a lot longer than I intended, but at least I've written down some of my work plans in a more explicit way. I think next on that list I should break down the plans into proper, accomplishable steps with proper deadlines and everything. Maybe I will do that.
Tomorrow, however, I shall return here and post my resolutions. Some of them are also about work!
I hope you're all keeping as well as you can. I've gone back a couple of weeks reading journal entries, and it looks like everyone is having a hard time. People have gotten sick, people have died, people are feeling more alone than ever. I see you all, and I am sorry you have to hurt this much.
*hugs to all* This entry was originally posted at https://mousme.dreamwidth.org/1454071.html, where there are currently
comments. Feel free to comment wherever you'd like!