Having seen overworked operations staff in several organisations throughout my career, reducing stress and having a healthy culture seem to be key improvement factors regardless of organisation size. (This goes for many roles.) If you consistently can’t accomplish everything you need to accomplish in 8 hrs/day – given a full-time situation – you are clearly understaffed and this should be resolved ASAP. There are many other stress reducers, such as many weeks of paid vacation per year, great salaries, clear areas of responsibility, structured interviews on the work environment (not the same as performance reviews!) etc.
It seems like many “normal” organisations are under the delusion that they need to operate under the, literally, military conditions you describe. This “get it done yesterday” mentality can kill the morale in any organisation and especially operations people will take the hit, because they are expected to tie all the bits together. What you describe as “never really quite off-the-clock” is super-dangerous and leads to burnout.
If you have worked in different organisations with vastly different cultures on these issues, it seems wild that any organisation wouldn’t prioritise the well-being of their employees, when it so obviously also improves the quality of the work.
A common excuse is that some roles or types of work “are just like that” but when people doing that work start talking to others doing it elsewhere it often turns out not to be the case. It’s a matter of culture. I know this from experience in software engineering – one company I worked at had a “no death marches” rule to explicitly counteract a common unhealthy bit of culture at many software companies.
I can’t think of any specific links or such but I can tell you more: I may not go so far as to say it’s the norm in Sweden, but it’s definitely common to have an annual “utvecklingssamtal” (personal development discussion) and it’s often combined with salary negotiations. Personally, I think these two discussions should be separate.
Good organisations use this opportunity to gather a lot more knowledge than what is related to performance. In particular, it can be a way to have an open-ended discussion about the work environment and what improvements can be made. For example, improvements in the physical environment (it’s too cold, too dark, chairs and desks are annoying etc.) or improvements in mental environment (Monday meetings are too long, people ping on Slack too often, my colleague is always late for meetings etc.)
Usually, you would fill out some form with prepared questions beforehand and try to standardise this to use over several years to get a sense of improvements made, i.e. asking the exact same questions every year and to everyone. In other words, combine an open-ended part with a very structured part.
If it would help you a lot more than the above, I could probably dig up some old such documents from previous employers, although I would have to paraphrase them rather than share them directly due to privacy and/or intellectual property reasons.
The Navy has “command climate” surveys that are mostly “independent” of the current officers-in-charge. A poor showing on such a survey resulted in the removal of a captain I know ;).
Having seen overworked operations staff in several organisations throughout my career, reducing stress and having a healthy culture seem to be key improvement factors regardless of organisation size. (This goes for many roles.) If you consistently can’t accomplish everything you need to accomplish in 8 hrs/day – given a full-time situation – you are clearly understaffed and this should be resolved ASAP. There are many other stress reducers, such as many weeks of paid vacation per year, great salaries, clear areas of responsibility, structured interviews on the work environment (not the same as performance reviews!) etc.
It seems like many “normal” organisations are under the delusion that they need to operate under the, literally, military conditions you describe. This “get it done yesterday” mentality can kill the morale in any organisation and especially operations people will take the hit, because they are expected to tie all the bits together. What you describe as “never really quite off-the-clock” is super-dangerous and leads to burnout.
If you have worked in different organisations with vastly different cultures on these issues, it seems wild that any organisation wouldn’t prioritise the well-being of their employees, when it so obviously also improves the quality of the work.
A common excuse is that some roles or types of work “are just like that” but when people doing that work start talking to others doing it elsewhere it often turns out not to be the case. It’s a matter of culture. I know this from experience in software engineering – one company I worked at had a “no death marches” rule to explicitly counteract a common unhealthy bit of culture at many software companies.
“structured interviews on the work environment”
I’d be interested in hearing more about this. Any links or documents that you could share to point me in the right direction?
I can’t think of any specific links or such but I can tell you more: I may not go so far as to say it’s the norm in Sweden, but it’s definitely common to have an annual “utvecklingssamtal” (personal development discussion) and it’s often combined with salary negotiations. Personally, I think these two discussions should be separate.
Good organisations use this opportunity to gather a lot more knowledge than what is related to performance. In particular, it can be a way to have an open-ended discussion about the work environment and what improvements can be made. For example, improvements in the physical environment (it’s too cold, too dark, chairs and desks are annoying etc.) or improvements in mental environment (Monday meetings are too long, people ping on Slack too often, my colleague is always late for meetings etc.)
Usually, you would fill out some form with prepared questions beforehand and try to standardise this to use over several years to get a sense of improvements made, i.e. asking the exact same questions every year and to everyone. In other words, combine an open-ended part with a very structured part.
If it would help you a lot more than the above, I could probably dig up some old such documents from previous employers, although I would have to paraphrase them rather than share them directly due to privacy and/or intellectual property reasons.
The Navy has “command climate” surveys that are mostly “independent” of the current officers-in-charge. A poor showing on such a survey resulted in the removal of a captain I know ;).
That helpful, thanks for providing the context. No need to dig through old documents; I think I have a rough idea of it now.