Do you enjoy the corporate environment?
- Thread starter shifty_uk
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Man of Honour
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Glad to hear you've noticed an improvement and didn't have to stick it out too long. It's amazing how much of a difference there can be within an organisation and also how much better it can feel at work which is important considering you'll probably be spending the 35+ hours a week with these people.
Associate
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I work for a big company but to be honest don't recognise the issues in the OP. Sure we have meetings but that's usually because they are needed 
. Maybe i've just been sensitised to it and am becoming one of them! 
. Maybe i've just been sensitised to it and am becoming one of them!
Man of Honour
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Well funny you should say that, that is the main reason why I jumped out of the gentle simmering fondue set, into the the fire that is a large FTSE100 environment to get my corporate fix. I adapted to it really well, as I did what I needed to do, achieved what I needed to achieve and got a heck of a lot of training and ended up where I am now in a rather fantastic job.
So small companies do have their joys of being less stressful, and less back stabbing or definitely less politics, but at the same time they can be claustrophobic and a little hindering to prospects and future development.
Man of Honour
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I work for a big company but to be honest don't recognise the issues in the OP. Sure we have meetings but that's usually because they are needed
Don't worry - I often have to facilitate meetings - so I'm probably the pariah of corporate-ness!
Sounds like badly implemented Agile processes with some visualisation walls, swimming lanes and WIP limits.
I work in an environment where the above works. Morning standups around the wall are extremely valuable, referring to it is valuable. But what is most useful about it is being able to point to it when people come over and ask why XY and Z are not done yet.
It's funny you should say that - I actually put a paragraph about this in my original post but decided to delete it. The 'respectable global bank' I'm in at the moment has daily rubbings of boggies over the toilet cubicle walls and generally a smearing of **** around the toilet seats. Out of all the places I've worked, these toilet facilities are by far the worst I've came across, even though they're decently constructed and cleaned every couple of hours.
Goes to show, no matter how high up the social ladder you are, there's still animals. I feel pretty horrible for the cleaners who do a very good job.
I think the problem with evaluating business cases is that is would appear very few people have the skills and experience to do it effectively/efficiently. Despite having some knowledge of some of the principles through academia I certainly don't, and neither seemingly to many other (intelligent) people I've worked with. I've seen plenty of endeavours get very bogged down and take months to get off the ground - costing a fortune in man-days simply getting a project to a position where the senior management will approve it. Quantifying the value a change will bring can be very time-consuming and in some cases you could argue that if an organisation can't make a good fist of evaluating a business case it would be better to just crack on with things rather than wasting resources on something they can't execute properly. I'm not suggesting it shouldn't be done, just that there is a scarcity of people who can do it well.
That said I do think one area that many organisations could easily improve on is implementing processes to re-evaluate business cases during the course of a project. In the vast majority of cases where I see a project approved it will run to conclusion or only be stopped when there is a major failing uncovered or some external event influences it. The irony is that as a project progresses it should make it easier to evaluate the business case as you know more and more about the feasibility, potential benefits and costs, yet there is often no commitment to do so.
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The sad thing is that, until the late 1990s, HP was one of the most ethical corporate players. I was there from 1985 and we had "corporate ethics" and the "HP way" drummed into us. How quickly it all fell apart!
In public sector and my boss holds a meeting at most once per year and even then says it's too much
Great boss.
Sounds like a terrible boss to be honest. Mine has 1 on 1 meetings with me every 6 weeks so they know what I'm up to and I know what the department is aiming to cover in the next 6 weeks. That's not wasted time, compared to every other job I've had I'm vastly more effective because I now have a boss who's organised and takes an interest in what we're doing. A very rare thing in the NHS.
Also never worked in any company or public sector organisation with such a low absence rate, well under 0.5% when our NHS target is 4%!
Yes meetings can be unproductive, but only if those chairing them are %%$£ at their job.
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Caporegime
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Are we unironically using the 'those in Management' thing here? I can't tell; it's like listening to a typed version of The Young Ones but less funny. This goes for all of the other threads where 'those in Management' are being blamed, too.
My salary and professional wants are currently being met by a Bank - I work for them so this is a Good Thing. I cannot relate to the OP's, uh OP, in any meaningful way other than to guess that is strictly temporary/agency work and he will get treated like that by mostly everyone in mostly every profession or area of employment.
My salary and professional wants are currently being met by a Bank - I work for them so this is a Good Thing. I cannot relate to the OP's, uh OP, in any meaningful way other than to guess that is strictly temporary/agency work and he will get treated like that by mostly everyone in mostly every profession or area of employment.
I don't know how people can do it... over the wall means, well, you can imagine... its wrong! I use to love being able to speak my mind in General Motors...
Stelly
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I work in IT for a bank where everyone is on about STATS every 5 seconds.
Its more quantity then quality so they would rather have you close 30 password resets a day than fix something that will take you 2 hours.
We've just been put over to a new phone systems not because its better or the old one was broken, but just so they can see how many calls we pick up
Hopefully wont have to put up with it for much longer..
Its more quantity then quality so they would rather have you close 30 password resets a day than fix something that will take you 2 hours.
We've just been put over to a new phone systems not because its better or the old one was broken, but just so they can see how many calls we pick up
Hopefully wont have to put up with it for much longer..
I have a 1-2-1 with every member of my teams every 2 weeks, it lasts maybe 20mins and is highly productive. I know about them, their job how they are getting on and feeling. Sometimes it devolves into chatting about computer games or TV shows.
It is highly valuable, they know that I think about them as more than WorkerUnit03 and they know me better. The amount of potential problems that I have been able to nip in the bud is incredible. Without regular 2 way communication with every employee, tiny problems fester and escalate.
