Develop a story in your organization that helps explain issues that need to be addressed.
The director of my working centre is a "perfectionist". Besides the work of event planning and content developing, he also have a great interest to in-charge the art work design of the promotion materials. Each semester, we should prepare one 20 pages booklet, five folded pamphlets and several A3 size poster to promote our activities.
Two years ago, I was assisted the programme officer to finish these great promotion materials. Because the director did not have enough time to design at the office hour. The programme officer and I could only work for the content for the booklet and prepare tones of photos and wait for the director to adjust or redo. that means we should work overtime!
The director had many ideas about the color, fonts, word style, photo and icon size, etc.. We should adjust and print out many copies of the materials for him to rethink and decide which one is better. Unfortunately, design can not be a high productive work for him. Normally, we should use one to two weeks to formalize all the booklet, poster and pamphlets. Generally speaking, we should work in this style till ten or eleven p.m. and wake up early for next normal day work in these period. Actually, I don't feel good to work at this style.
Overtime should be a big problem to a healthy organization, sustained overtime will lower productivity at normal working hours and increases fatigue levels. If overtime is required, I think overtime system would meet the needs of the organization. Employer can calculate the overtime hours and reward through payment or time-off. Therefore, employees can use the "reward" to arrange their personal life and feel better and be happier.
Two years ago, I was assisted the programme officer to finish these great promotion materials. Because the director did not have enough time to design at the office hour. The programme officer and I could only work for the content for the booklet and prepare tones of photos and wait for the director to adjust or redo. that means we should work overtime!
The director had many ideas about the color, fonts, word style, photo and icon size, etc.. We should adjust and print out many copies of the materials for him to rethink and decide which one is better. Unfortunately, design can not be a high productive work for him. Normally, we should use one to two weeks to formalize all the booklet, poster and pamphlets. Generally speaking, we should work in this style till ten or eleven p.m. and wake up early for next normal day work in these period. Actually, I don't feel good to work at this style.
Overtime should be a big problem to a healthy organization, sustained overtime will lower productivity at normal working hours and increases fatigue levels. If overtime is required, I think overtime system would meet the needs of the organization. Employer can calculate the overtime hours and reward through payment or time-off. Therefore, employees can use the "reward" to arrange their personal life and feel better and be happier.
In my organization, there is a team who is in charge of designing promotion materials such as designing programme brochure, programme banner, advertisements in newspaper, electronic database email, etc. I think it is better to pass the related work to the team since they are familiar with these kinds of work. They can easily produce quality booklet in an effective and efficient way as they have the required software and would not affect the workload of the admin. staff as well as their quality of work during day time.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your sharing alec! I agree that overtime working is a serious problem which affect the working performance of employees. It would reduce their motivation and make them feel tired of works. In the concept of organizational learning, time of reflection is necessary for staffs because it is the best way for them thinking about how they improve their working performance. With working performance can be improved, the whole company would be benefited because productivity would be increased as well. If no time for doing this, staffs' performance would be remained no change because they won't have time to think how to improve their works.Therefore, I think that it is important for staffs doing it.
ReplyDeleteVery understand your saturation, cause I always need to OT in IT field before I came into academic organization. It is one of the way to harm our health and make us easy to doing wrong especially when we are very tired. For me, I had experience on removing a very important database when I am very tired, just because I press one wrong key! My supervisor almost wants to kill me.
ReplyDelete