Hi there,
I'm an experienced IT manager who's recently taken over another team. This team is not IT, more low/unskilled admin doing repetitive work.
When I joined there was a lot of issues around productivity and historical problems. I put metrics and workflows in place to address this and for about 6 months, life was good.
Unfortunately staffing issues and general workload has done a number on team morale and sadly they have, as a group, moved to stop doing a key task that makes up 10% of their roles.
The rest of the work is being done but this high visibility, low desire task is being left to grow and fester. Confronting the team, the answer is things are "too busy".
I'm trying to come up with strategies to fix this as well as working on staffing replenishment but I know that any attempt will be met with a group effort to ensure it fails to maintain the "too busy" party line.
Has anyone had experiences with this by any chance? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
It sounds like you're allowing "I don't wanna" as an answer to your request to perform a task. Gotta be honest, that's on you. You're the manager. You're accountable. You need to hold your directs accountable. In my opinion a manager's most important responsibility is helping his or her directs become as successful as possible within the company, but that entails doing what the company needs them to do, not letting them think about it and decide, "Nah, I don't wanna."
If it was me I'd have a meeting and be very out front about this being a problem, and we're going to deal with it right now. I'd field their comments and try to help them be part of the solution, give them some ownership, but "I don't wanna" is not an option. It needs to be done and that's their job, period. Otherwise they're managing you.
Submitted by baileyborough on 
Hi there,
Hi there,
I'm an experienced IT manager who's recently taken over another team. This team is not IT, more low/unskilled admin doing repetitive work.
When I joined there was a lot of issues around productivity and historical problems. I put metrics and workflows in place to address this and for about 6 months, life was good.
Unfortunately staffing issues and general workload has done a number on team morale and sadly they have, as a group, moved to stop doing a key task that makes up 10% of their roles.
The rest of the work is being done but this high visibility, low desire task is being left to grow and fester. Confronting the team, the answer is things are "too busy".
I'm trying to come up with strategies to fix this as well as working on staffing replenishment but I know that any attempt will be met with a group effort to ensure it fails to maintain the "too busy" party line.
Has anyone had experiences with this by any chance? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
It sounds like you're
It sounds like you're allowing "I don't wanna" as an answer to your request to perform a task. Gotta be honest, that's on you. You're the manager. You're accountable. You need to hold your directs accountable. In my opinion a manager's most important responsibility is helping his or her directs become as successful as possible within the company, but that entails doing what the company needs them to do, not letting them think about it and decide, "Nah, I don't wanna."
If it was me I'd have a meeting and be very out front about this being a problem, and we're going to deal with it right now. I'd field their comments and try to help them be part of the solution, give them some ownership, but "I don't wanna" is not an option. It needs to be done and that's their job, period. Otherwise they're managing you.