Tips on playing 'the game' at work

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By this I mean, making yourself seen to be good at what you do, reliable, pro-active etc. Generally a good employee. I'm not talking about faking it, but as most people know sometimes just doing your job well is not enough to impress the people high-up. How do you make sure that your manager's manager knows you're a good employee, for example?

Case in point. I recently had a review meeting, thought things were going swimmingly, had just come off a big project whcih went really well, had come back off of nightshifts onto days and was settling back in. Lo and behold the feedback I got was not good at all. I need to make myself 'seen' more (ironic since I've been working nights), I need to be seen as more pro-active, I need to be seen as being able to handle stuff that people throw at me. The problem is, I do Reading between the lines he was essentially telling me to play the game a bit more. Send more emails, copy him/others in, socialise a bit more (as opposed to running around doing the work, lol). The ironic thing was after the meeting he gave me a payslip showing my 28hrs overtime in the past month...

So anyway, without going off on one. What can I do to remedy this? I've now taken to being one of those annoying people that emails about everything (when a phonecall is quicker), copying others in 'just in case'.. but what else can I do? It's hard because my job is technical and I'm running around (I don't have a desk) competing with a lot of people that sit at their desk all day with nothing to do other than send email upon email.. and socialising if they're not busy

What do you do to play the game?

 

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mrbell1984, I don't work in IT. Unfortunately I do work in film/TV where appearances are everything! In layman's terms I support our editing/grading suites so I spent most of my time in them making sure things run smoothly. It's all behind the scenes. The people I work with 90% of the time are the operators who need me on the end of the phone to deal with stuff. They're sitting in the suite with the clients so time is of the essence. I won't get emails, it'd be a phonecall. I'm not so involved with our schedulers/admin people who are always on the emails etc.

getting on in a job is 20% knowing what you're doing and 80% making sure everyone else knows it.

And this is what I learnt in that meeting!

What's ISO9001?

 

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oh I see, so what is your day to day tasks ?

A bit hard to explain, really. It's a lot of media/data management now, but my technical skills really lie in working with film of all types, telecine (scanning film) and VT (videotape operations -- the basis for post production facilities). I prep media for jobs (whether it's film, tape or data), ensure the equipment is ready, timelines setup for colourists so they can just sit down and do their job (and schmooze the clients). Sounds lame but obviously there's a lot more to it.

Sounds quite easy - do you go to meetings? Do you say anything in these meetings? Do you question what your colleagues/managers say?

Don't really go to meetings to be honest! I am still quite a junior level 'officially' and am really there to make life easy for the colourists/operations people.

So what have you done to improve your job in the last year? Why do you have to work so much overtime just to do your job? Can't you be more efficient and work just 9-5/5:30 and not have to put in so much overtime?

TV/film is notorious for working long hours. I've seen editors leave at 3am and be back in for 9am for another client-attended session. I've even been doing nightshift and seen an editor leave at 5am. And yes he came in the next morning! The work dictates the hours, really. That last month I was working on the rushes (overnight) for a feature film. This means everything they shoot that day gets developed at the lab, then comes to us and we transfer it to videotape to send onto the editors to start cutting with. The thing with this is they could shoot 20mins of footage that day, or 5hrs of footage that day. That literally dictates our working hours, it's all about flexibility. Going home at the end of a 9hr shift is simply not an option if there's work still to be done. That's where you end up doing silly hours.

I agree with the rest of your post though