Coping Mechanism

I'm starting to think that I'm just not cut out for staying in my job much longer. It's not the job, actually. I really like being involved with what I do. What's starting to wear me down is that there is almost nothing left that has to do with people, or job satisfaction, or with making me want to do a good job.

I could be a robot. I'm so tired of words being bandied around that haven't got a thing to do with people. It's words like 'workflow', 'protocol', 'process', 'infrastructure', and garbage like that. I used to be a part of a team that worked together on something, and we had to work together on this something once a month to continually produce new stuff to display on our something. And we DID work together.

We discovered problems. We hashed them out. We argued about stuff in weekly meetings. But ultimately, we all worked TOGETHER to put a plan in place to make things work. Now, a few people have moved round within teams (which happens), and suddenly, some of the new team members are more interested in tittle-tattling to their managers than they are talking to the rest of the team, and trying to work with the team in order to sort stuff out.

Gone are the days when we'd all approach a dodgy situation, and everyone would pipe up with an opinion, good or rubbish. And we all depended on each other's experience and savvy. And then we'd figure stuff out, and everything would fall into place. It would work. It was on time. We were successful. And we loved doing it.

Now, the only things that seem to happen is that people can only say why they CAN'T do something; why something CAN'T be accomplished; why something CAN'T be pulled back into a schedule and launched on time.

I'm so tired of it. I'm tired of people giving excuses as to why things can't be done. A year ago, we were delivering twice what we're delivering now. And granted, maybe people went a bit off piste with things occasionally. I understand that it can be dangerous when that's the norm. But CLEARLY what's happened is that all these processes and workflows and protocols and other corporate bollocks that gets spouted daily haven't made things better. Or more streamlined. Or faster/cheaper/nicer.

All they've done is ruin what was working well. The team isn't a team any longer. It's fragmenting. And what we're supposed to deliver is fragmenting as well. To borrow a phrase from someone I admire, we've adopted the 'labour economics of the call centre' right into our open plan office. Pretty soon it'll be about adhering to a script, as part of the 'workflow' we're adopting in order to create the 'infrastructure' that will guarantee the 'resource' we need in order to define the 'scalability' of the 'deliverables'.

Someone asked me yesterday if I were asked did I still want to work on this project, what would I say? And I answered 'no'. I said I wouldn't work on it if I didn't have to. Because suddenly it's not about us all working together to provide 'excellence'. What's been going on hasn't got bugger all to do with excellence. All I'm hearing is no, can't, won't, isn't. And ultimately, it's now no longer about people working together, using their brains and ingenuity and cleverness and experience, to do something really cool and great.

Now it's about being robots.