Meaningless Management Speak
The team had a meeting yesterday with our Operations Manager about what he expects from us in 2015 and i have never heard so much bull**** in all my life, he was saying that we 'have to be focused on the brand' and 'manage the customer's expectations' and see if we can 'add value to the fault' another was 'governence the issue'. I just wanted him to speak like a normal person and to top it all someone farted and it was stinking!:grin:
Does any other wosser encounter this meaningless nonsense?
Does any other wosser encounter this meaningless nonsense?
Post edited by zx1 on
The trouble with tribbles is.......
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But yeah I know what you mean manager speak is usually about 95% b*ll*cks.
I got the whole you will all be assigned workplans and everybody will be accountable if they don't get their planned quota completed nightly, everybody has to work on their own work. But for the last 3 years we've been focused on "TEAMWORK", the company even stopped referring to us as employees or Associates, and started saying "TEAM MATES". Get your own stuff done or else! But focus on teamwork? something of a paradox really.
The irony is I've survived through 3 separate phases of these workplans, and in the end they always end up scrapping them, because they cause way more problems than they solve.
Probably as usual I'll make a suggestion to a manager about what could be done to improve things, they'll say no that won't work. Six months down the line the same manager will throw my idea out there, and claim it as his own.
I called one of my managers out for doing this once, man I thought I was gonna get a write up or something worse :lol:
I guess it was made worse by the fact I let him get his big promotional speech out of the way before saying to him "Yeah I suggested this months ago and you told me it wouldn't work". They really don't seem to like having their shortcomings thrust in their faces, especially with my English accent these Americans think I'm being doubly sarcastic ;)
Also higher managers don't like you telling them what's actually wrong, I still think the reason I got demoted from night manager a couple of years back was cos' I told them exactly what was wrong. The problem there was the problems pointed to them rather than me. A group of higher management ran a 3 month long terror campaign on me to get me sacked but it backfired....haha dicks! I basically said to them why don't we address the visible problems rather than you piling more work on me and my guys to smooth them over instead. They didn't seem too enthusiastic when I suggested actually trying to resolve the problems, rather than trying to hide them from view every single time a district manager or company CEO type is in town.....They didn't like that either.
I think another reason I got demoted was cos' I was actually fair, they want you to be the biggest knob on the planet use scaremongering, act like a complete bellend, but when things are going well pretend to be best mates with the people you've been calling worse than sh*t....Not my style I wouldn't do it.
I hated giving pep talks, and spouting that motivational crap, trying to give incentives and stuff made me feel so f**king phony.
So basically managers are dicks, they are full of sh*t, but having been on the other side of being a grunt as well, I kind of feel for some of them. The manager who is the nice guy, but kicks off when things go wrong probably is a genuinely nice guy, and is probably feeling the squeeze from higher up. To dust off a clich? "Sh*t rolls downhill", the lower down you are the harder you get stomped.
Anyway that's a massive ewgf style page of crap that nobody probably gives a flying eff about but there you have it....I carry the weight yo! I carry the weight :lol:
I'm swamped in figures and targets, some of which are impossible to reach, i just want to do a day's work and go home, instead i get asked why i haven't reached x, y or z target and need to file everything. I need to analyse all this and explain why and it takes a lot of time, i didn't reach my targets this month, in fact my stats were rubbish and i was told that if there's no improvement by March i could be having to find a new job!:sad:
Must be Deadpan that works in the games shop? I know it's one of you sweaties ;)
Damn though! Just Damn! I feel your pain, I haven't worked in an office/admin/techy/business type environment since I was about 22 or 23 years old. Always thought I wanted to work in that type of environment when I was younger, but I lost interest in IT type stuff or even office jobs very quickly.
I don't think I could work even using a computer now, I sit in front of this one for an unhealthy amount of time.
It's strange when I was younger I never thought I'd like to do a hands on type job, but I find I'm scarily good at it, any physical type job I've worked I've always been really good at it. Given my small stature, and general skinniness I have no idea why? :lol:
B
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We argued with it comes in damaged we don't damage it on purpose.
Which usually gets met with all items pass a Q&A check before leaving the warehouse.
That may be so, but it doesn't help if the truck driver thinks he's Joe 90 :D
The worst culprits were upper management of local government. I have never met a bunch of yellow-bellied, ignorant, arrogant ****wits in all my life. If you wonder why your local council are useless at running most public services I can more or less guarantee it's down to idiotic managers making ludicrous decisions.
You couldn't pay me enough to work in LG again.
We also get this "brand awareness" rubbish too! The problem there is that they did have a brand, but management decided about 5 years ago to move away from that brand and have no rebranded us into something the customers don't want. Even though we can see instore that people aren't interested, head office are still pushing these changes through and asking us to "embrace the core values" etc.
I also hate the phrase "store associate/advisor etc" when we're just shop workers. My best job title was "store operations advisor" when I had a temp Christmas job for M&S several years back. my actual job role? I brought in the deliveries in the morning, put overs away in the warehouse and emptied the bins at the end of the day :lol:
I also hate "workshops" and in the mornings, we have a meeting to go over sales figures etc and instead of it being called a meeting or something sensible, it's a "huddle"
But nothing gets my back up as much as "drive" :-(
/Pedro
We made a 1% profit this month compared to this time last year, that means more hours for you guys yay!!!!
*...and now you're expected to cheer and clap like you give a flying f**k....hmmmmm...
I sorta twisted it to prove it made little difference and not everyone was "singing from the same hymn sheet" (aggh!).. and it was stuff we already did anyway.
if you are really bored, do what I used to do when I had to write reports 14-15 years ago about customers machine.. fill it out with total crud. e.g. instead of saying the hard drive was knackered. turn it into 2-3+ paragraphs etc.
well it got boring changing out departments administrators background pic when he went lunch every day e.g. kittens, puppies , anything pink etc.
sales / commision based was interesting , I was in service and doing upgrades (no commision).. but some of the sales folk were cut throat and also liked reading spec sheets and not knowing what things actually did. that company went bankrupt in the end after I'd left.
Between them they could cover my work, but there's certain things I can do way better, faster, and more efficiently than any other people there can, and I learned from past experiences not sharing your process with too many people is beneficial, as it leaves them screwed if you're not there.
I've had too many people pass off my ideas as their own and take credit for it, now I'm the wildcard, I do my work I stay quiet, but I watch the rest of them like a hawk. I know all their shortcomings, and all the things they struggle with.....All of which are simple duties I could perform autonomously if needed.
So yeah I am a little cutthroat and selfish when it boils down to it, but it's because I've been f**ked numerous times in the past. Self preservation and all that, especially as I live and work in one of if not the biggest capitalist countries in the world.
I literally feel if I show any form of weakness at work now my neck could be next on the chopping block, of course I could just be being massively paranoid, but I'm not willing to take that chance anymore.
Sounds like game of thrones. :-D
Bloody feels like it sometimes as well :lol:
That's probably intentional. Keeps everyone on their toes. Personally if I were in your position I would worry about what is going to impact your resume and quietly put other things as low priority. For example what responsibilities can you put down on paper and can you court enough favor in the right places so that if you decide to move on out and move on up you have some solid references to back you up.
Seriously, you moan about your place do often, I think it's time for you to stragergize your way up the ladder and then move to somewhere more favorable.
I found with managers that it's usually 40% front, 40% standing on the shoulders of those below them and 10% psychologically holding those back who could wind up as competition. Quite often they enter their roles totally inept, learn from mistakes fast and most importantly avoid blame. Then just as **** storm they created begins to whiff, they are onwards and upwards to a new and improved position elsewhere. I'm sure a lot of the time they get good references just because those they currently work for are glad to be shot of them.
I worked under a manager that was all jazz hands and buzz words. We would be called to meetings in which he would tell us to do what we were planning to do any way, and thus get the credit, or would re-assemble our intentions in a different order with a new name. Either way our original intentions became on paper his leadership and governance. As a result when he left, he got promoted in to a nice management position elsewhere.
(I've been dying to use that Phil-osophy for ages :-) )
Best one I've heard is
"Lets run that up the flagpole and see if the cat'll lick it!".
I think I spat my tea out. :lol:
"Lessons Learned", YOU messed up and are trying to push the blame on others.
that would be more fun if the boss just called everyone a bunch of faggots and said get back to work
"Mistakes were made". Really? By whom? it wasn't you by any chance?
I had a manager once but English wasn't his first language and he tended to get his business metaphors a little mixed up. Sometimes this had quite sinister results, including:
"We're dead in the woods"
and
"We need to shoot all our ducks"
Wouldn't you just know it, the one company who weren't obsessed with stats screwed my wages and hours about constantly instead, leaving me so skint that I couldn't stay there.
The place I'm at now does have phone lines but I'm not on them. I do data entry on night shift, when the lines are closed, and I told them quite specifically when I went for the interview that I didn't want to work on phones any more and that was the whole reason I'd gone for the job.
I once heard the phrase "Positive life-affirming outcomes for all our learners going forward." eight times in a 20 minute meeting. It was also interesting to be given five or six different things to make our 'primary focus' every week, some of which were mutually exclusive.
Everyone has a crap game inside them, let yours out!
Edit: Actually, maybe better not say that. It occurs to me now that wallpapering a pineapple would be very hard to do due to all the jaggy bits and so the particularly marketing-speak-inclined may take this to be a real phrase that refers to something extremely difficult.
All my friend does is sit in front of the couch when he's not working... I guess that will give a nice workshop
It was nothing like glengarry glenross thankfully, or in a way it was perhaps a little like it before the head office guy arrived. But I remember being stuck to my desk clueless, and no one knew who I was either till the third or fourth day when I decided to ask some of the Admin women if they wanted me to bring them a cup of coffee.