to ask if you have people in senior positions at work who come up with policies but don't think about the practicalities

Oh no, this NEVER happens in the civil service.

..........

Best one was 25 years ago, when computers were networked with cables and took forever to update.

Some bright spark in head office decided it was time to "go green" and therefore all power had to go off at night. Including the 1,000 or so desktop PCs.

We advised against it (with reasoning) but no, ideology trumped reality.

3 weeks in, and everyone was taking about 2 hours to log in, as 1,000 PCs hammered a server for updates and security credentials etc. Sounds fun, but imagine getting in at 9 and not starting till 11. With the same amount of work.

Plus a sudden spate of PC failures as power supplies started popping on startup.

No one ever worked out the saving, but the cost was into tens of thousands of pounds. Obviously the person that dreamt it up had to have a bonus and a promotion.

Even at the time I wasn't quite as convinced by greenie types as some. Nothing in 25 years has really changed that.

Oh we had one recently where they set loads of timelines on things like replying to emails etc. It's a great idea. If only they provided us with sufficient staff to actually meet these wonderful timelines!

My favourite was when I worked for a huge organisation in an open plan office. We all did the same job but worked individually. People wore headphones either to take calls (rarely, maybe once a week) or listen to music. It meant the office were generally very quiet so taking calls was easy and you could have a meeting at a couple of desks so no room booking etc.

on a rare visit someone senior was having a fit at the headphones and banned them on the spot. Quick policy that meant you had to pass some kind of test to use headphones. It did get funny when 6 months later work rate had dropped because of all the time people had to spend trailing to meeting rooms, finding quiet spaces for calls and no one was interested in the passing the headphone test. We all got a big row and they brought in loads of people to research and implement improvements.

I think it's called having "vision". Pitiful, really.

Definitely been there! My current boss is great, luckily. But the universe owed me one!

Of course. They're far too busy and important to ask anybody who actually knows what they're doing if their Great Idea (TM) could work.

I can only assume that the wads of money that have been thrown their way muffle the sounds of an entire tech team suddenly crying out in terror and then suddenly silenced by threats of outsourcing to a company that doesn't know what they're doing at all but will absolutely trash everything else to try and make them impossible to remove once they're in.

It really does illustrate that some managers really shouldn't be anywhere near projects. I worked for a major bank back in the 90s (HO in another country) and we had a major year long project to transfer our operations to their mainframe. LM and I flew over there numerous times to explain my job, took the relevant legislation and everything. Not to worry, they said, we'll build you something on the system that'll be as good. Come the transfer to our branch (without testing, I might add, which gave us all the cold shivers) did the promised system exist? did it buggery. And this was a job in which being able to pull off consistent and accurate data was vital.

We had a wrap up dinner a few months later with HO and asked with wide eyed innocence why the system hadn't been implemented. And the answer?

'We didn't think you needed it.' Despite months of explaining exactly what we did need, they didn't believe us.

Oh yes , NHS worker here
Also the initiatives launched and left to hang

Yep, I was. Ops Director would come up with all sorts of pointless/unworkable plans, process and ideas and would say "you are the Senior Manager in the unit, go make that happen".

Not a chance mate, so I quit and went to another section in the business in a non-management role. I couldn't listen to the twat a minute longer.

OMG all the bloody time. My job is to make it into something achievable and affordable and then make it happen. Surrounded by dicks the majority of this time.

I am all for being a team player - but I do think about the practicalities very quickly

Me too, because I'm the one doing the job and having to make any new system work. But that's being negative, apparently.

I work in a state agency, back in the day it was small enough that everyone had experience and oversight of operations.

As we got bigger we made sure every project team has representative from the admin/operation staff.

They don't attend every meeting but are brought in to "brain storm" at critical points.

It saves so much time, and I believe it helps maintain a better work environment as people see in reality what others do.

This is honestly teaching all over. Senior leaders introduced a 'Shout Out' system- to avoid letting kids wander off to the toilet or saying they're going see the first aider and then bunking off, you email a 'shout out' and someone from our student hub team will come and do a welfare check. This way children aren't unsupervised, and anyone who genuinely needs to leave lesson can do so.....except the hub team consists of about 8 people and there are 1500 pupils in the school. We're basically shouting out into a void!

Well yes, I work in the public sector so they're called the government.... The people making the huge decisions and legislative changes have never done the job or even worked in the organisation

This exactly! I gave up trying to point out the flaws in some of the Big New Ideas when I was accused of being negative and not embracing of change. Large part of the reason I left my last department.

Yep HMRC is rife with them

My last work place developed a system where staff could shadow a senior member of staff for forty hours over a 12 month basis to help them gain experience to gain promotion. However it was then revealed that this would actually mean 40 additional hours over a 12 month period as they expected it to be done on top of normal hours. They were so shocked no one took it up they held an emergency all staff meeting to make sure everyone understood the scheme.

Yes, same here.

Lots of communication and feedback sought from the entire team.

yep
we had an initiative at work a few years ago to propose improvements.
what happened was that departments pushed activities to other departments to make their lives easier.
it ended up in an all company bun fight.

I work in the Civil Service. My last department was awash with senior leaders who had 'brilliant' ideas that made fuck all sense but those of us at the bottom (customer facing so bearing the brunt of the criticism) had to somehow make it work. Said senior leaders would then snap up promotion and sod off elsewhere, presumably using their shit ideas as examples of how great they were. Current department is much better, thankfully.

In my workplace we have an optional Monday morning working group. During this time we discuss upcoming policies and trial them, feedback and adjust before making it a company wide policy. It's brilliant

It also seems to be a feature that the people who have to make new systems and procedures work are the only ones who don't get to be involved in the planning.

Yes, I think this is common in workplaces up and down the country.

If you're really lucky, when you point out an issue you are accused of being negative.