Time in Motion

bartelbe

Jillanddy said:

bartelbe said:

Jillanddy said:

bartelbe said:

There are allot of managers/trusting types on here. Me, I am a cynic and look on such on a study as a potential bomb about to go off. Your employer may well be looking to make cutbacks and seeing who they can get rid of.

My advice is, if you know in advance when this study is going to happen, make sure you have plenty of work on that day. Better to appear busy and indispensable, than someone who is dead wood or can handle more work for the same pay.

You clearly don't really know anything about how these studies work, because if they were that easy to fix, they would serve no useful purpose. And you also know very little about management if you think that managers aren't cynics as well.

Managers aren't all "bad" or "evil", but being a good manager doesn't mean that managers get to only make nice decisions that employees all like. I am currently having to manage staff reductions which are being forced on my teams, against my will, because (a) there is no money to pay their wages and (b) MY management refuse to consider any other alternatives despite the fact that in my opinion reducing staff will lead to significant further financial risk. The one thing that I have partly in my control here is the method of reducing the staff, and I have managed the whole exercise without a single redundancy or loss of pay or terms. Because I care and because it was the right thing to do. 

Managers have managers, and they have managers, and then there are more managers - it is not as easy as saying that "managers" have control over everything. And whilst I do disagree with my own managers decisions in this matter, it is also true that there is no money to pay the wages. There might be other cuts elsewhere that would, in my opinion, be wiser - but no cuts anywhere in anything is not an option. 

Yes, there are bad managers in places. There are also bad employees as well, and it also happens to be managements job to, as you put it, "get rid of them". And if cutbacks are necessary, or efficiency needs to improve, why on earth would any employer choose the least productive employees over the most productive???

You make my point for me, managers have to sometimes sack people. Why you have to do it is irrelevant. from an employee point of view. So when an employee deals with a manager like you, they should be careful. It doesn't matter how friendly you appear to be, any information given to you could one day be used against the employee.

As for Time and Motion studies, they were originally developed by a man called Frederick Taylor. He claimed he came with the idea when working at a pig iron factory and used such methods to improve their productivity. Tiny wee problem, it was all a lie, complete non-sense. His methods didn't improve productivity in that factory in the slightest.

Didn't stop business and management courses teaching his non-sense. In fact management is full of fads, woo and utter bulls**t. Modern equivalent are complete non-sense like Lean Startup and AGILE. Cult like non-sense, which incompetent managers buy into and inflict on their poor employees.

Even if such management and consultant fads work and they don't. Managers often abuse and misuse such ideas to go on a power trip or get rid of people they don't like. Britain is full of incompetent useless managers, the thriving woo consultant industry proves that.

And you continue to make my point for me - you obviously have an unreasoned hatred of all managers, a completely bigoted view of any form of management, and convenient view of facts based solely on your opinion. Nothing in life is ever so clear cut as you want to make it. I could just as easily point out that "Britain is full of incompetent workers and workshy individuals". There is plenty of evidence to support that view too. It would be no more accurate than your own though, because yes, it describes some people people but it does not describe the vast majority of them. But by all means continue to hold your bigoted view. I am sure it will make you feel secure in the knowledge that management really are out to get you. 

No I have a realistic view. It doesn't matter how friendly management appear to be, it is still a professional relationship and you shouldn't let you guard down around them. Interests of managers and subordinates don't align. There is a reason they say it is lonely at the top. As you have admitted yourself, one day you may have to fire members of your own team.

If you can't accept that reality, then you really shouldn't be in management.

bartelbe

BrassicWoman said:

If there is a belief that managers are generally without merit, the workers can propose to be a self managing team, thus saving a salary.

Of course management aren't without merit and self managing teams are a very bad idea. The problem in Britain is we have very poor quality managers. You only have to look at the country's productivity figures to realise that.

Before all the managers here blame workers, they aren't the problem. Look at the car industry, for years British managers couldn't run a car factory to save their lives and blamed the workers. Then the Japanese came in and using the same British workforce, ran the most productive car plants in Europe.

So why can foreign managers get British workers to perform well, when British managers can't?

Jillanddy

Then the Japanese came in and using the same British workforce, ran the most productive car plants in Europe.

Yes they did - supported by massive grants and freeport type arrangements that were ultimately paid for by taxpayers. In other words the workers paid their employers to have jobs, then produced goods to place profits in another country at their won expense. When those incentives were no longer available the manufacturers upped stakes and moved to Europe. 

You really do have a warped world view that everything is the fault of managers and nothing to do with workers. Clearly no amount of common sense or actual facts will get in the way of that, but it's fairly obvious that there is a huge chip on your shoulder. Never been promoted then? I wonder why.

bartelbe

Jillanddy said:

Then the Japanese came in and using the same British workforce, ran the most productive car plants in Europe.

Yes they did - supported by massive grants and freeport type arrangements that were ultimately paid for by taxpayers. In other words the workers paid their employers to have jobs, then produced goods to place profits in another country at their won expense. When those incentives were no longer available the manufacturers upped stakes and moved to Europe. 

You really do have a warped world view that everything is the fault of managers and nothing to do with workers. Clearly no amount of common sense or actual facts will get in the way of that, but it's fairly obvious that there is a huge chip on your shoulder. Never been promoted then? I wonder why.

Sigh, I didn't say it had nothing to do with the workers but you cannot deny that the same British workforce that many managers condemned as workshy and useless, staffed the most productive car plants in Europe.

It is laughable to claim this was down to Japanese plants getting public money because BL and other British car companies were bailed out and propped up with public money for years. Yet their British management were never able to make those companies successful.

Face reality, Britain is a country of low quality managers and with a reward for failure culture at the top.

Thrugelmir

bartelbe said:

DontBringBertie said:

The sort of people who hate all kind of management are usually the ones who either lack the ability/ambition to get in to management themselves or think a management job is easy just because they’ve watched other people do it.

The reason I view management with such contempt, is in my experience they are basically useless. 

It is Better to Try and Fail Than Never to Try at All. It seems all you do is try, try, try, and never get anywhere. You have to keep trying to succeed. If you are too afraid to try, you will always feel like a failure. 

TBagpuss

bartelbe said:

DontBringBertie said:

The sort of people who hate all kind of management are usually the ones who either lack the ability/ambition to get in to management themselves or think a management job is easy just because they’ve watched other people do it.

Lot of outraged managers here. The reason I view management with such contempt, is in my experience they are basically useless. One truism from my working life, is the more competitive the industry, the less management and admin staff there are. Companies in competitive markets can't afford to have the dead wood.

Alas the opposite is true in the public sector, the place is infested with admin staff and management. God knows what they do all day. Since I am the poor sod who has to implement all their bulls**t I can tell what they don't do is make public services more effective and efficient.

Or to put it another way, the better the managers are, the fewer of them are needed. 

Which is also generally true of workers in any kind of business. If you have good, effective managers you tend to end up with good, effective people working for them. And getting rid of the dead wood is part of what an effective manager does, in order to enable the organisation to function more efficiently. 

If you have poor managers then you are more likely also to have poor / ineffective or disruptive people working under them, because problem behaviours are less likely to be addressed or managed.

A good employer has nothing to fear from an effective manager