Spoke up at Team meeting and now I regret it

[mommydragonn]

I have been in a role for over a year. The dept has two functions - operations and admin. I do 75% admin and 25% operations. Admin is fairly consistent and can keep one busy throughout the day. Additionally admin staff have to do tenders.
There are many staff including myself who do not take lunch breaks.

There are staff in team who do 95% operations and 5% admin. They are assigned Tenders, but may choose not to do these as operations supposedly gets busy. But I do find that they have time to take long lunches and plenty of catching up breaks during the day. Operations staff also tend to depend a lot on admin staff to complete tenders etc although they have worked here for +3 years.

There are a lot of systems enhancements going on mainly relating to admin and admin staff are constantly being reminded to implement these. The point I made at meeting was that operations staff should also move in line and implement these for their admin portion. I mentioned that with systems enhancements happening, the whole team should be able to move forward but the pressure of implementing new systems disproportionately falls on a few.

I regret saying anything now because I do understand the background of team set up. Manager is of operations background. 90% of talk in any given meeting is relating to operations. He seems to have a more favourable attitude towards Operations staff. He asks only them to fill his yearly review. He never pushes them to learn new skills. He will often assign a task relating to their admin portion to me. He replied in the meeting that he can easily separate the two. Which makes it clear to me that he is biased in his thinking and sees staff split into two categories although on paper we have the same job titles and pay scales.

So I have probably pissed my Manager off . I have probably also upset the operations staff as one of them said they can't do more than their operations portion. So spoke up and gained nothing.

Well I would prefer my operations staff to work on operations rather than help to implement new admin systems. But you are allowed to make suggestions, there is nothing wrong with that and I am sure it hasn’t pissed anybody off.

There’s very rarely an immediate gain from speaking up.

That’s doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it

I would disagree. Operations is "sexier". It sells the service and looks good. It does sweet FA without the admin that enables it. But the admin is so often overlooked and seen as less important.

Well done for speaking up. I can't tell you what YOUR manager thinks. But I know what I'd think - here's someone with a view of the big picture, worth some investment in, they might go far.

Any manager worth their salt would take feedback from staff.

Mine though takes everything as a challenge and takes it very personally. I hope your manager is more objective.

It is irrelevant which role is sexier and indeed whether operations can function without admin. It is an admin implementation, so I would expect admin to be working on it. You can substitute “admin” for any department. As I already said though, I still don’t think there was any harm in making a suggestion and I can’t see why anybody would be upset about it.