Melancholy and Mismanagement

As of today, and apart from trying to take Yellow Mountain and Marmalade to market, I work part time as a cleaner. It’s not glamorous work, waking up at an unsociable time to take on two hours of strenuous activity each morning for the aforementioned National Living Wage (which I’ve suggested we better distinguish from the actual Living Wage by referring to the latter as the ethical wage; Martin Lewis, of MoneySavingExpert.com, recently accused George Osborne of stealing the name as would clearly appear to be the case). So, for £7.20 an hour, I do a couple of hours cleaning every morning, and I don’t mind that at all.

No, the hours aren’t great and the pay is simply the legally mandated minimum, but a little activity each morning is a great way to exercise the mind. In those two hours of uninterrupted activity, I can think about my development work and the directions I’m travelling there and elsewhere; I can plan and mentally solve problems that may have been troubling me. It’s a nice respite from the more mentally taxing work I do during the day (perhaps counterintuitively, a little time off is very good for productivity). There’s little to the work that’s worthy of complaint; that which is stems directly from truly abysmal management.

But before I discuss that, let’s roll back the clock a moment and discuss the conception of Marmalade or, more accurately, of the idea from which it grew. That too is a story of mismanagement; in that instance, of an overbearing approach to micromanagement.

At that time, I was working with two companies on the same project; the first were excellent to work with but the latter, who had commissioned the project, had had a manager who demanded a very fine level of control. The two organisations each utilised a different time management software, a different chat software and a different project management tool. The latter organisation had laid out instructions for using these tools which, among other terms, mandated that notification sounds be left on in chat at all times. A fine term to impose if your work demands immediate knowledge-sharing or sudden changes in activity, but the chat software chosen for the job had only one channel — the global chat — and communication was demanded constantly. Despite being a hundred miles away, alone but for a puppy in my home, it felt like working in an overcrowded and over-noisy office. To add to that distress, this project also coincided with my pursuit of payment from a separate client mentioned previously.

The mashup of demands on me at that time, of the lack of due payment for other work and near-constant necessity for activity updates wore away at me until I just… snapped.

I hadn’t known severe depression for ten years — not since I was 15 and it was more easily dismissed as teenage angst. I regressed into melancholy, thinking daily about suicide; not as a serious consideration but as an impulse, as a compulsion of thought. But worse than the compulsion to think of self harm (even if one never acts on it) was the purposeful isolation of myself. It drew me to close up and become uncommunicative. Ironically, a demand for greater communication had driven me to silence. The following months were not good for me. Something, I thought, has got to be done.

And so I envisioned my ideal management system: something less fragmented than other practices, something which allowed a great level of detailed assessment but that didn’t interfere with workers’ happiness, something which appropriately allotted communication spaces such that we don’t wind up with that overcrowded office problem… and knowing that it was possible, I set out to make it. Marmalade isn’t everything I envisioned yet, but it gets closer all the time.

Back to today, I don’t think that I’ll ever let issues of overbearing management get me down again. I’ve come through that and better know how I’d handle the situation now. Perhaps I’d regale my employer with this story, cite other examples and studies which demonstrate that my feelings are not in isolation, and say, “let’s find a solution that gets the best out of both of us”. Our mutual goal is productivity; we do that a disservice by not communicating our needs as employers and as employees, and by not finding solutions which work for all of us.

I have thought recently that perhaps this cleaning job, and the company who offer these services, would be best managed under the franchise model. As it stands, our manager is actually 200 miles away, we find ourselves without adequate cleaning supplies and I still haven’t signed a contract. The manager promised to be up this week with supplies and a contract, but now promises to be up the week after next as she’s off on holiday soon. Other staff have brought cleaning products in from home, and I stand apart in objecting to the idea because we’re paying consumer prices for supplies that aren’t our obligation and there’s no promise that we’ll be reimbursed; indeed, I’m told that this has happened before and employees weren’t reimbursed then either. But complaints to the management don’t lead to quick action, and a lack of action begets complaints from the client not to the company but directly to the cleaning staff. Unhappy with being berated, supplies have been brought from home.

The contract would be a more easily solved problem; online signing services already exist and are easily utilised. This company, I feel, are straying behind the curve: not utilising the tools they could to better manage long-distance contracts. But these issues combined indicate to me that this really would be better managed by a franchise-like business model. Give the staff here autonomy over the contract, to take their own pay directly and count payments to head office as an expense of the small subsidiary. Give them wholesale contacts to replace their own equipment and materials, and access to a software to easily manage all of this and communicate with HQ.

Seriously, hire more software developers or purchase some of the awesome tools they’ve made this decade. Don’t be satisfied with Microsoft Excel; instead, find a carefully tailored solution that lets you expand your business with novices at the helm. Expert management is in short supply; digitise it, distribute it and let’s make management easier.

Alas, these words may fall on deaf ears here, where we’re barely able to communicate with management as it is. But it’s an idea worth thinking about.

Under-management and over-management may be unique problems, but their net result is the same: decreased happiness and productivity. It’s too common a problem to go unsolved, but I believe that the right tools can provide everything that both cases need: detail, not at the cost of additional strain to employees or to managers. In essence, a comfortable level of communication for everybody.