How to respond to "Being busy isn't an excuse..."

[mrstea301]

The company I work in has had quite a lot of staff leaving over the last year, for various reasons. The recruitment process hasn't been dazzling - they basically don't want to pay the required salary for the level of experience that they want. However, in the meantime, all of the workload has shifted onto the remaining ha doers.

As a lot of the work is time-sensitive, this has meant that standards have slipped - people have got twice as much (or more) work to do in the same amount of time, with many people working over their contracted hours in order to ensure that clients have their needs met.

There have recently been some discussions with the board (who in my opinion, are not addressing the root causes of the issues) who are taking the stance of "being busy isn't an excuse for standards slipping / things not being done" what is the best way to respond to this? I find it really frustrating and feel like anything I can say sounds like an excuse.

“Yes it is, Board”.

Maybe not an excuse, but it is a reason!

Not and excuse, a reason!

Urgh, that sounds like a shitty company. Hope you’re job hunting!

In the meantime, I’d shift the problem back to your manager/ the board / whoever. Ask really clear questions -

‘I’ve got 20 widgets to make today, but usually I could only make 10 in this time. Do you want me to do them in a rush which might mean X happening, or shall I concentrate on 10 good ones?’.

If they still tell you to do 20 perfect ones you know you’re working for idiots who you can’t win with.

Either standards slip or work load needs to drop, it’s impossible to maintain both.

And remind them regularly how short staffed you are and ask when new staff will be in place.

In my firm we have a saying, along the lines of - you can have a job done quickly and well but expensively or a job done slowly and well but cheaply but you cannot have a job done quickly, well and cheaply.

It's not about excuses. All business output (high, low, good, bad) has one or more contributing factors and it's in the Board's (and business') best interests to understand those factors. Otherwise, strategic decisions are being made without the full set of data.

If you carry on working over your contracted hours to get the work done then there's no incentive for them to recruit well.
I know it's really hard to actually stop doing this though. I'm toughening up now after years of being taken for granted & being asked to do extra work because I'm good.

Short of sending them “confused question mark guy” meme, I would put together a one-page memo bullet-pointing:

• Number of staff employed on X date
• Number of man hours this was equivalent to
• Number of staff who left during X-Y period
• Number of man hours now available p/w
• Amount of overtime p/w on average now worked
• Other evidence

Really break it down, factually rather than emotionally, how many hours short the team is due to leavers, and how much extra work is being put in

Is that message being conveyed to you verbally, or via email? If via email then you have the opportunity to return a careful answer in which you specify the key points. To me these would be:

Please confirm whether you would prefer for us to prioritise quality of work or speed of work. It is currently not possible to maintain both to our preferred standard, due to lack of staff.

If you want to pad it out a bit, maybe use the following:

• no-one wants standards to drop or time lines to slip.
• currently we have a shortage of staff to do the work.
• the available staff are managing double their normal workload.
• in order to keep projects moving at reasonable pace, standards have fallen in some cases.
• in order to maintain standards, more time would be needed, and hence cause more delays.
• please let us know how you'd like us to proceed, given the constraints of our current working situation.

The top sentence could be returned verbally too, I guess... Good luck!

Either you do it to high standard and less gets done or you do it to low standard and more gets done. They can't have it both ways.

My workload is too high. My managers don't listen either. I've started declining all but essential meetings and missing deadlines. Tough. Their choices not mine.

Tell them you can complete the work they want you to complete, or you can complete some of the work to a high standard.

Me too. It's depressing. I used to love my job. Now I'm doing two people's jobs after the didn't replace someone. Expanding portfolio, and looming further cuts. All whilst lauding efficiency programmes that heap yet more work onto the people who actually have to implement the changes.

I hate that line. Its not that being too busy is an excuse.

Its that refuse to take the require steps to ensure people have an appropriate work load. Too much work and too little staff means a drop in standards.

Its not excuses. Its facts. You need clear hard figures to show the work is not doable. Comparing it to another period.

They are unreasonable. You cannot expect the same level of output and quality with fewer staff unless something else significant has changed - process, technology etc.

I think this is where you need to highlight the reduction in resource and request clarification on priorities. Something has to give, so they need to decide what what is going to be.

This annoys the hell out of me. You’re employed and paid to do 40 hours of work. Then they expect you to work 50-60 hours because they’re too greedy to employ enough staff to do the work. The result is that people end up quitting. Nothing you can do except quit yourself! Teaching is particularly bad for this.

Being busy isn't an excuse for slipping standards of course not

Standard slipping as a result of Being overworked is however normal and a sign of a stressed workforce whose performance is likely to continue to decline with people going increasingly off sick

i would go with what @Immunetypegoblin has wrote. I have been with companies like this where there is no light at the end of the tunnel no matter how many hours you do. Yes you can say you are busy however you need to back it up with facts to prove it. Like yes i am busy , i have x, y and Z to do, this will take me x amount of time and i have prioritized this for the following reasons. If you want me to do something else this will have to pushed out etc, and agree this with the management team. We had one particular team who kept harping on about resources time etc, it was like a broken record but we saw that no one was bringing improvements requests etc or providing concrete data on things so every time we heard no resources the eyes were rolled and management paid no head to them. That being said that team leader has left and we have a new one now, yes we they got more resources but before that we had projects for improvements etc presented to us and the valid reasons why these resources were needed. Yes we have had delays and standards of work slipped but as these new resources were implemented we slowly saw the improvements and a year later the team are a different team.

Thank you all so much for your responses, I was starting to feel like I was going mad!

I'm definitely keeping en eye out for a new job, although now dithering between moving elsewhere or considering a complete change!

I'm not working lots of unpaid overtime either! Paid only and as little as necessary to keep things ticking over. I feel that if you're working hours of unpaid overtime, then you're hiding a problem.

I'm just a bit gutted to be honest. When I joined this company a few years ago I was so pleased, it was a great company to work for, but it feels like that is disintegrating quickly. And no one is paying attention to the warning signs.

They will probably only address it when it really goes tits-up.

I was once interviewed for a job where the woman who'd left had clearly been doing the equivalent of at least two roles for not that much money.

I turned it down as despite me telling them this, they were inflexible & refused to take it on board. Since then, whenever someone (always a woman) I know is burning out, I ask them what would happen if they left & it's invariably they'd need to recruit several people. All this cost-cutting comes back to bite someone... best not be that one...

Seriously I'd just look for another job.
I had a boss who used to ring me at 5 minutes before going home time to make sure I hadn't gone home a second early even though she knew I'd worked right through lunch.
Other days she's ring 10 minutes after going home time and tell me if I hadn't gone home on time I clearly wasn't managing my time well.
I decided to leave, she was a moron.

Well, it bloody is an excuse so tell them that. Cannot stand attitudes like this. People are contracted to work X number of hours. If there are not enough people working in those hours to get the job done they need to hire more people.

I doubt you'll win here. Look for a new job.

This sounds like a sinking ship OP, its time to look elsewhere