Sorry for the format, mobile poster.
I just had this exchange with my bosses regarding a few processes within our company. I work in tech support and troubleshooting, basically when your PC or laptop goes bad, it’s up to me to diagnose, test, and if necessary, order a part for it. Nothing special. However, I’m brand new at this company, and have since begun asking questions and pitching ideas to help us 1. Become action-oriented instead of reaction-oriented – if your laptop is coming to me and I already know the battery is dead, I shouldn’t need to test the battery, I should just be able to order a replacement so that it’s already here when the laptop is here and fixed in 24 hours, not days/weeks. And 2. More preventative measures oriented – I fix the problem but identify a part that will be bad in the future, just order a replacement now instead of when it’s back here in a week.
The conversation I had with my various bosses, paraphrased, is simple:
“We understand what you’re trying to do, and it is logical, and makes sense, and makes everyone from you to this company look good. However we don’t want to because we refuse to spend any more money than we have to. Why spend money on a part that MIGHT go bad? Maybe it won’t for another few months?”
“Or weeks,” I countered.
The answer was more or less “yeah but you don’t know that for sure do you ” mixed with “that’s a problem for future us lol”
“Also we don’t see that it costs less money on shipping to repair PCs all at once, one time than several times, because
“And lastly”…and this is the one that just irks me…”if you fix everything too fast then there won’t be anything for you to do for eight hours a day, we have to keep you busy! so we WANT you to troubleshoot the same device over and over again instead of one-and-done because what else are we paying you for! 🤣”
So basically my company is not just purposely inefficient because they’re cheapskates, they’re also trying to make more busy work to make sure everyone remains gainfully employed, I guess, like they know this job involves a lot of “if there’s nothing to do there’s nothing to do” and they’re ACTIVELY TRYING TO FORCE THERE TO BE SOMETHING TO DO. And when I pointed out how fast I can Troubleshoot and repair damaged ir defective parts, I got some mealy-mouthed answer that was like “thank you for being so efficient and hard-working but also kinda like chill lmao ”
So be a hard worker. But not too hard.
Adding insult to injury I caught one of my team leaders in the smoke pit afterwards and he kinda leaned in and outright admitted this is why they always hire the 18-24 year old apprentices who don’t ask questions and don’t try to be movers or shakers, just clock in, do their hours, go home, leave in 3-6 months. There seems to be a lot of this in my European country…
I just needed to get that off of my chest real quick. Pretty sure this is how you crush innovation.