Comments on: Learning or Working?

By: Wolfram Arnold

Wolfram Arnold — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:40:09 +0000

In keeping with observations, the fact that employees feel so compelled, driven (or perhaps even coerced) to constantly check email may point to another organizational problem altogether.

I personally find that development organizations who overly rely on email have bigger problems.

Sure there are things that happen and require quick responses, that’s why IT staff carries pagers.

But does the success or failure of a product really hinge on getting back to people within the hour when they send emails?

Have you ever spent a day at work reading and writing email all day and leaving in the evening with the feeling of not having accomplished anything at all?

Sending email begets email. Sending more emails begets more email. Sending a lot of email responses quickly begets an unmanageable flood of details nobody can keep track of anyway.

If email is in the critical path to your project success, you have a problem.

By: Jacob Karma

Jacob Karma — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:11:08 +0000

I was amused by your post. Why are you so calm? I would be raging mad by now with all this ‘twitter’ mentality of the people in the classes your run. I have a similar problem when I’m involved in retrospective meetings after a sprint. The team members just sit there like sacks of potatoes or fiddle with their phones. They think ‘attending’ is all they need to do. I hate that mentality.

By: Jack Vinson

Jack Vinson — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 02:27:55 +0000

You could always NOT invite comment from the people who haven’t participated.

By: Paul Dewey

Paul Dewey — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:57:57 +0000

Your sentiments apply to the workplace as well. We spend a lot of time on teleconferences– I wish I had a nickel for each time someone says “Sorry, I was on mute” (I did not know listening made so much noise!?!) or the mea culpa, “Sorry, can you repeat that?”. Our company tried to launch a “Be here now” campaign to address this, but ironically, I think most weren’t listening.

By: Dwayne Phillips

Dwayne Phillips — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:16:35 +0000

I was in an internal class recently (one run by our company, in a company building, learning a company-proprietary method of doing something). No one had a laptop computer as that was not permitted in the room (security regulations), but people did have cell phones, iPhones, etc. all those neat phones with the keyboards).

About 1/5th of the class was constantly running out of the room to do something. I mean literally RUNNING out of the room as if there was a fire. They were working on a hot proposal were needed to answer an important question or two.

I doubt that they learned much in class. They were not permitted to do so by their managers. It is odd that managers would pay money for someone to attend training and then prevent them from learning. That, however, is the way it goes with many managers. It is obvious that they are checking a box when it comes to training their employees. They really don’t care anything about training.

Too bad.