What sorts of things bother you at work?

Specifically, what do other people do that bothers you?

Most of the people who email me do so with regards to one issue that bothers them and that’s favoritism directed towards other staff to the detriment of them (i.e. the person emailing me). In your work environment there are probably many things that could potentially bother you beyond favoritism.

I’m a pretty agreeable person I think and I suspect most people who know me would say the say but there are a few things that other people do at work that bothers me. Here are the big ones:

1. They show up to work when they’re sick. And they think that the rest of us will be impressed that they took one for the team and came in even when they were under the weather, sneezing and coughing away and most likely making the rest of us ill too. I used to work with a woman who routinely came in sick and made it a point of telling everyone loudly how sick she was and clearly thought the rest of the us would be talking amongst ourselves about what a trooper she was. There was talking behind her back alright but it wasn’t positive.

2. They take credit for other people’s work. You’ve probably worked with someone like this, too. The person who either blatantly takes credit for something they didn’t do – some managers are good at this as you may have found out – or who takes part in a group project by contributing virtually nothing but who is always available to ensure everyone else directs the credit in their direction.

3. The talker who gossips even when you’re busy and can’t take a hint that you don’t have time to talk. This person is the reason they need to build office doors with locks. This is the person who doesn’t have enough to do or who is simply lazy and keeps themselves busy by wasting your time.

These are the ones that bother me although truthfully #2 and #3 are ones I’ve experienced recently.

What bothers you about your workmates? What do you think bothers them about you?

Has your old job – the one you held and then got downsized from – been lost for good?

I recently read a career article in the New York Times that referred to how many job that were eliminated in the past 2 year or so during the global economic slowdown are jobs that have simply disappeared for good.

Many positions were eliminated and the work was picked up by other staff members who remained on board. Now it’s like the old staff members never existed in the first place and the remaining staff were doing the extra work all along.

Sometimes job get eliminated due to new technology or when jobs simply become redundant and no longer necessary but in tough times companies also cut head count and ask the remaining staff to pick up the slack.

I remember back in university when I worked at a milk processing plant part time, the company decided to eliminate jobs by essentially eliminating a particular job in the production department and having each machine operator do the job themselves for their own machines rather than having a dedicated person to look after that part of the process for all machines as they were currently doing. They ended up eliminating 2 jobs X 2 shifts so 4 jobs were lost in total and the remaining machine operators simply picked up the tasks for their own machines and had that added to their job.

I remember some managers at the plant thinking that it was going to be difficult to get the operators to do the extra jobs since they weren’t used to doing them and they worked in a unionized environment and this would undoubtedly cause some trouble since jobs were being lost.

I remember thinking that I didn’t think it would be a problem long term because pretty quickly people would forget that there used to be a dedicated person doing the job and they’d forget that it didn’t use to be part of their role. Plus, since it was a union environment, people switched jobs and eventually they’d have different machine operators who didn’t know the difference since the change would have happened before their time.

And that’s pretty much what happened. A few weeks after making the change, everyone had gotten used to the changes and the company probably saved themselves over $120K per year in wages for the 4 people whose jobs had been eliminated. The company got by with doing more with fewer staff.

About 1 year after that, they then replaced all their filling machines with new models that ran 33% faster and which enabled them to wring even more efficiency out of the staff.

Are you expecting a raise this year?

I recently read a story that polled people and asked them if they expect to get a raise this year and here are the results:

Yes 23%
Yes, they were frozen but now I should get one. 9%
Don’t know, my pay rises are not regular. 15%
Don’t know. 18%
No, I’ve already been advised by my employer that I won’t. 34%

The numbers that stand out are obviously both they “yes” and “no” responses although the “no” responses clearly outweigh the yeses.

You wonder how many of those people who answered yes didn’t get a raise last year too. Mind you, how many of those people who answered no didn’t get one last year either?

A few years ago when the economy was better, I recall getting resumes from people who among reasons, listed not getting a raise (or simply that they weren’t getting paid enough) as a major – or the major – reason for looking for a new job.

These days many of those same people might be happy just to have a paying job with or without a raise.