update: my new team thinks they’re incredibly overworked, but they actually do nothing

Remember the letter-writer whose new team thought they were incredibly overworked, but they actually did nothing? Here’s the update.

I wanted to send an update as many of the commentators had requested one. I was the person who wrote about the team that spent all their time reading books and organizing their record collections, and yet kept insisting they were Really Very Busy.

Alison’s advice was spot-on — I was only there on a temporary basis, so I decided to just enjoy the madness as a casual observer before I went back to my permanent role.

There was a lot of discussion in the comments as to why the team was behaving the way they were, and some of the commentators had great insights. A couple of things that might provide context:

– The job that the team does is the sort of job that would have genuinely been quite demanding in the days before smartphones. Without giving too much away, the basic task is supporting colleagues in the field (imagine police officers or the military). So things like iphones, Google maps, and group chats have taken a lot of those tasks away, and the people in the field are now broadly very independent from the people in the office. So I think maybe some of the team’s attitude was a hangover from the old days?

– We work in an industry that’s usually very competitive and fast-paced. A few people in the comments wondered if that might have something to do with it and I think on some level it did (it was almost as though they thought they ought to be busy, without considering whether they actually were).

– It started to become apparent after a few months that it was management which was significantly adding to the problem. They were OBSESSED with coverage — bringing in four workers when one would do, refusing leave requests because two out of 20 people were already off, etc. It actually got really depressing because I started missing events in my personal life just to be dragged into the office to do nothing, on the basis that “we won’t cope without you.” I really think that management hold a lot of responsibility for the current situation, as the team seem to be feeding off that “coverage anxiety.”

One thing I did appreciate was it gave me a lot of time for my own projects. I worked on several pitches for things I really wanted to do, and was successfully given a lot of opportunities in the wider company.

But aside from that, the really big thing was that it helped me get over my work anxiety. I’ve been guilty in the past of not setting the right emotional boundaries — the mindset of “I’m lucky to have a job,” as opposed to “money is exchanged for goods and services.” Working somewhere that I really didn’t care about helped cure me of that. I started putting my career ahead of my job and focussing on what would help me succeed in the long-term, as opposed to just working hard for my boss. De-centering my job from my career has completely changed my life — and for that reason, I’m very grateful for my time with the Team That Work Forgot!

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