No Work is Best Work
This is an older story I hope I haven't posted before.
I was working at Widgets International in their Order Entry department. Widgets would come in for repair, I would type them up and move them along. One step in my process required me to flag for Quality Review any repair that had a significant enough complaint. This is a step I rarely followed. Why, you may ask?
In my first month working there I flagged maybe three orders out of several thousand. I was told that I was flagging too many. Turns out that Quality Review screens and pre-flags all the repairs they want to look at before they even come across my desk. My flagging orders was a waste of time. My time if the order was already flagged and Quality Review’s time if I flagged an order they’d already determined they didn’t need to see. So I stopped.
Then we got a new manager, <PERSON>. <PERSON> was hot to make her mark on our team so she reviewed our process and decided that we should be more active in flagging orders for Quality Review. I explained to her what I explained to you in the previous paragraph, that there was no point in our flagging anything. 245
<PERSON> refused to believe me and insisted we follow the process. <sigh> Okay, <PERSON>. So we started flagging more orders.
Two weeks later, <PERSON> tells us that the Quality Review team has come to her in a panic because of all the orders we were sending to them and could we please stop sending so many. I go back to not flagging anything and everything goes back to normal. <PERSON> is happy that she made an impact and Quality Review and I are happy to dispense with the extra work <PERSON> created.
A couple years later we get a new manager, <PERSON>. <PERSON> was brought in because the team had recently expanded. We went through the same song and dance with <PERSON> that we had gone through with <PERSON>; <PERSON> wanted us to flag more orders for Quality Review. The new team members nodded fearfully and went along with it; <PERSON> was not a pleasant man. We senior team members rolled our eyes, agreed, and started making bets on how long it would last this time. I bet a week but continued on my merry way notflagging orders.
A week later (called it!), <PERSON> tells us that the Quality Review team has come to him in a panic because of all the orders we were sending to them and asked us to stop sending so many. With the information from the QR team, <PERSON> singles me out. He tells my team, “<PERSON> is the only one who isn’t flagging too many orders. The rest of you should be like <PERSON>.” No Work is Best Work. 588