Savvas constantly pushes out this narrative that we’re this fresh, creative, and innovative company, yet we constantly re-use old, out of date, files in copyright “updates” to slash Business Plan costs. Our “award winning” platform is slow and honestly, a nightmare to navigate. If I were in high school, I’d dread using it more than school itself! Going back to innovation, we have this stagnant workforce that prefers “the way we’ve always done it” and is afraid (or unwilling) to make any kind of change – to the demise of innovation or even process improvement. Take math for example, instead of approving Google Workplace add-ons, we are forced to hack solutions with equations – for products going to students and teachers! If I got an image of an equation in a Google Doc, I’d be so frustrated trying to show my work in it when it comes off an image! I mean, we can’t even record meetings or use Google Meet features due to our Google Workspace tier, yet, we offer a full Zoom license, if the user needs this functionality (recording). I mean, Zoom is great, but isn’t it convoluted having multiple tools to do the same thing? What’s more, wouldn’t it be cheaper just to add-on this feature in Google than pay for a full Zoom license? I’m discouraged every time Bethlam makes comments like, “I know you’ve all worked very hard” or “incredible work this past {time period}” because I don’t think she grasps the personal impact to this “hard work”. It means working Sunday before the week to try and make Monday less chaotic. It means being asked to bring my laptop “if (I) plan to take time off in the next two months because (project tasks) are going to come in fast.” I’m not convinced that Bethlam knows (or even cares) that this hard work isn’t the result of hard, efficient work, but rather working long hours and off time. We have this ridiculous, unmentioned, mantra that “if you’re not in a meeting, you’re not working”. What precious free space I have on my calendar, I’m constantly defending because I’m asked (nay, urged) to go to meetings where I don’t say a word. People who work near me will comment that they heard me say “hi” at the beginning, but said nothing else. I refuse to “multitask” because I don’t believe that multitasking promotes productivity; in fact, I subscribe to the school of thought that it hurts productivity at the cost of one’s cognitive load. Most of these meetings are from PMO where they need to drive questions about things in projects that we’ve done year after year. As stated earlier, our propensity to avoid change or innovation directly conflicts with the notion that we need to meet about questions about process we refuse to improve upon (or change). In fact, some of these meetings, these decades long tenured colleagues of mine, act like they’ve never heard of this process or has never experiences “this problem” in their illustrious career and therefore don’t know “who to ask to fix it”. It takes half a dozen PMs to run the same five projects that I do, alone. Granted, I’m a piece of their projects, yet, I can manage doing multiple projects to their one and don’t need a single meeting to do it. I don’t need trackers that track trackers. I don’t need running meeting note files that span hundreds of pages. I don’t need to spend the first 5 minutes of every call taking attendance. These PMs focus more on taking notes in their meetings than actually driving the discussion to come to resolutions. Yet somehow, through their micromanaging behaviors, we still seem to always need things “right now”. Despite the fact that their entire job is to plan projects, we never seem to make any dates. And when my part comes up in the schedule, so many dates have already been missed that I’m forced to compress my timelines otherwise the building with burn to the ground. I honestly wish that we would actually put actions and deliver on what we’re saying: We’re innovative, but deny the use of tools to bring about innovation… We’re creative, but refuse to foster an environment for creative problem solving and stick to “the way it’s always been.” We work hard, but at the cost of employee mental (and physical) health to the point to micromanaging and burnout…
