How Are Things at Work? I'm So Glad You Asked

Recently I entered the late-twentieth century at work: I was gifted a Tableau licence. Tableau is a data visualisation tool, basically a slick pivot-table and pivot chart program: the graphics are sharp and there’s a wider range of calculations available than Excel offers. And it doesn’t re-format graphs every time you change the underlying pivot table - Excel users will understand how valuable that is. It’s fast and organises a heap of charts way better than scattering them around on a worksheet. It’s a wonderful tool for analysts who do what I do.

At the moment my supervisor is a mid-level manager, rather than the ‘Head of’ I’m used to reporting to. She has chronic but low-level insecurity about her continued employment, so she thinks she needs to look as if she’s doing lots of things and taking lots of initiatives. In vain would I tell her that as a Head Office staff officer, she’s as secure as a) her ability to be seen to be bringing in business, or b) her ability to handle crap for her supervisor. Busy doing stuff is a nice-to-have in the good times, a point she doesn’t understand, but her predecessor did.

And somehow Tableau wound up on her busy-doing-stuff list. Which is exactly where it doesn’t belong. Because in and of itself, it reaps not, neither does it sow. It’s a better basket for carrying the corn, or perhaps, a better pair of sandles for walking over the field.

In the part of the business where I work, they are interested in two things: a) meeting their numbers; b) handling the crap that gets sent down from above. When we’re below budget, everything is judged by one criteria alone: will it get the business back on track? (You may think that everyone is business thinks like that, but in service departments, they don’t, and in analytical and strategy departments they never think of these things.)

This leads to extreme blinkers: if it doesn’t help the managers get done what they need to get done to look good against their targets, they simply aren’t interested. Dealing with the alternative reality of the company’s monumental bureaucracy takes up all their brain space, and they have nothing left for the real world. Consequently they have no interest in background knowledge, context and the broader view.

And then along comes my supervisor, asking for the benefits of using a souped-up pivot table, where ‘benefits’ means ‘something that people would think is useful, when they don’t give a crap about anything except making excuses for last week’s sales, improving next week’s sales, and progressing their projects’.

Um. No. Not going to happen. The only benefit to them is that it makes ‘more compelling’ Powerpoints they send back up the line when the high-ups ask silly strategic questions. Which, since that ‘compelling’ makes it look like we all know what the heck we’re talking about, is a helpful contribution to everyone’s job-retention. But of course, this is the one benefit that cannot be said aloud.

So my supervisor is looking to me to provide reasons that don’t exist for something that shouldn’t be discussed at that level anyway. (Tableau isn’t that expensive. If I wanted £100,000 for some of the fancy SAS visualisation tools, sure, I’d want a case as well.) Does that sound like something I can do? Or she should be doing?

That’s one reason I feel uneasy. I’ve got a supervisor who can’t read the politics very well. Still, she goes into bat for me at appraisal time, so I have to keep her happy.

The other is the thought of having to deal with the bureaucracy, with the incomprehensible online forms, sequences of web pages, questions that are written in a secret code that looks like English but really isn’t, and that require far too much background reading to deal with. And which end by sending my request for approval to a chain of people I’ve never heard of. Nobody understands this stuff, because there’s nothing to understand: it’s a series of ritual incantations: chant the right words in the right sequence and you get what you want. Get anything out of place and nothing happens, or you get refused and have to chant it all over again. And when I give up and have some priest talk me through it, it always turns out that the system wasn’t really designed to cope with the type of request I’m making.

If I’m not looking at data about customers and processes, I don’t feel like I’m doing the job I’m supposed to do. The bureaucracy can eat up all the time I give and ask for more. That’s not what I want to do.