Lost on phone

I used to have an engineer in my team who was on the phone most of the time during work hours, for a considerable period of time. Concerned fellow is either talking on the mobile phone or the desk phone continuously. At that point in time we were running extremely tight on the project schedule and there was enough work to make the team sit in the office almost late every day.

This particular person, even though is on phone all the time, was regular in the deliverables for almost half the project period. But that fellow’s time log pointed to extended work hours every day. That had an effect on the project cost because of the late night cab usage and stuff. Project management had an eye on this, but we thought the person may be having some personal issues and were OK with spending few extra bucks for transportation.

Time passed by and we hit a point where the deliverables started slipping. Discussions related to that during project checkpoint meetings always lead to a conclusion that the current work is difficult and needs more time as pointed out and requested by our fellow. I used to be OK with that argument initially, but as time passed by, I (and most of the team members related to this work) started realizing that there is something wrong and that fellow’s productivity has gone down.

Image source: http://www.wackystock.com/details/4971-female-customer-service-representative-talking-on-phone-and-using-computer-clipart-by-dennis-cox-at-wackystock.jpg

My analysis of the situation was that the reason for the productivity loss is stress because of continuous extended work hours, that too sitting alone in the office. But then the root cause of the stress pointed to the productivity loss in the normal office hours because of the telephonic conversations. Obviously, whoever may be the engineer and how much ever strong they may be, a context switch will obviously lead to great productivity loss; especially in tasks like software programming.

I discussed about this with my manager and he also was sort of agreeing to the analysis. But we were wary of discussing this with that person, since it may lead the fellow to defensive reaction. Things were manageable, so we left it. Time passed by, multiple deadlines were affected adding more and more pressure on all the sides leading to increase in the already bad stress. Because of the delays in previous deliverables we were not a position to approve that fellow’s vacation as well.

Now we reached a point when things literally stopped moving front even though that fellow is trying to be in office for prolonged hours. I had to act, so one day I caught up with that fellow, discussed the situation and had to advice about the stress analysis and the root cause for that as per our thought process. That’s it, since the timing was already late and the mental stress is so much that the concerned fellow was totally upset about the advice, and about how an engineering lead can ‘tell’ an engineer not be on phone in office hours (WHAT!!!!). That fellow was not at all happy to hear my viewpoint, and started reacting in defense. But the performance only gone down day by day.

Finally we had to pull in some extra efforts from the other folks and get the project moving towards the end. When I think about that today, I feel that was a genuine analysis and a conscious advice. But that fellow was somehow not ready to accept that advice and limit the telephonic time, leading to a total failure. If only that fellow had given a little thought on the fact, rather getting too emotional about getting such an advice from the boss, things would have come back to normal and would have been good for everybody. From my end, I could have counseled this issue a little early. But anyways it was a conscious decision by me and my boss, not to react on that immediately.

The realization is in line with the theory, management is about making decisions, and there is nothing wrong or right about it. Some decisions turn out to be good, and some turn to be really bad. There is not silver bullet solution for this and this is what management life is. Some may think you are really good and some may think you are a real moron, may be that’s the reason why some people stay away from management roles.