Management Bits and Tips

One of the outcomes of the reading of a book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (by Guy Debord) is the possible evolution of feelings of a corporate citizen where the last stage corresponds to a spectator:

ECHO

Enthusiasm
Confusion
Hating
Onlooking

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Some employees do not like their office space or complain privately when streamed (bit). If you happen to be one of them justify this misfortune as having a free office (tip).

You can’t get a nice office for free. Certainly, if you want to have a good office you have to pay for it. Alternatively, employ the novel BYOOS method: Bring You Own Office Space.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Reflecting on my old software engineering days I remember working for one of the biggest software factories in Russia and noticing IE windows on workstations when I was passing by. Then working for one of the biggest software factories in telecommunications domain I noticed the same screens whenever I entered engineering offices. People there obviously had plenty of time for browsing, reading and typing (not in some programming language of course). At that time I started calling them Process Parasites and their relationship to a team and an organization as Process Parasitism which (paraphrasing Wikipedia definition) is: 

a type of symbiotic relationship between an employee and an organization in which one, the process parasite, benefits from a prolonged, close association with the processes in the organization.  

What kind of benefits a process parasite gains? Obviously one benefit is time: free time to do whatever a parasite wants or needs but irrelevant to business goals. This especially happens when there are process inefficiencies and underplanning of resources.

One manager reading this post noticed the curious similarity between the word “website” and the word “parasite“.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -