This picture is worth a thousand words. Commissioner O’Malley is bowing down to a manager but yet I wonder how many cases he actually cleared. The stressed out employees of this office should have been given the accolades but I can’t find them anywhere in this picture. This is SSA management in a nutshell. Push the employees hard and try to meet the goals whether it’s quality work or not. SSA is considered one of the WORST agencies in government by employee surveys and no amount of public relations spin can alter that perception.
While I agree with your premise the employees deserve the recognition not every member of management sits back. Some of work full day reception. Full day phones. Full claims loads. Do iDIBs. Etc.
In some offices management might help out but one has a better chance of finding Bigfoot than finding a supervisor call numbers. Employees are supposed to be knowledgeable on all aspects of the job. Why should management be exempt from doing light work? What happened to leading by example? Is it appropriate to have lengthy supervisors meetings when there is sixty individuals in waiting area and office closes in twenty minutes?
I agree. 20 Years ago, we still had some managers and supervisors who would answer the phone, work reception or do the mail. Once, when our office was so short handed we couldn't see straight, our cluster district manager came over and worked our front reception window for a week straight. Did a halfway decent job of it, surprisingly enough. My most recent office manager used to do windfall offsets for one of the employees that was incapable of doing them (though, in that case, it was more a convenience for management as they didn't have to deal with demoting the employee, who never should have been promoted in the first place). However, the manager did do the work.
That said, most of the other supervisors and managers I know now consider this type of work to be beneath them (I actually had an OS a few years ago that told me those exact words while at the same time having the gall to explain that, yes, I really needed to continue to work 18 hours of overtime a week to get things done). And, most of them couldn't do the work anyway as they don't maintain any technical skills whatsoever beyond reading a WAC list.
This picture is worth a thousand words. Commissioner O’Malley is bowing down to a manager but yet I wonder how many cases he actually cleared. The stressed out employees of this office should have been given the accolades but I can’t find them anywhere in this picture. This is SSA management in a nutshell. Push the employees hard and try to meet the goals whether it’s quality work or not. SSA is considered one of the WORST agencies in government by employee surveys and no amount of public relations spin can alter that perception.
ReplyDeleteLike 9:54 said this is SSA in one picture. All about the numbers. Get the beneficiary out the door, off the phone, and get that clearance.
ReplyDeleteWhile I agree with your premise the employees deserve the recognition not every member of management sits back. Some of work full day reception. Full day phones. Full claims loads. Do iDIBs. Etc.
ReplyDeleteIn some offices management might help out but one has a better chance of finding Bigfoot than finding a supervisor call numbers. Employees are supposed to be knowledgeable on all aspects of the job. Why should management be exempt from doing light work? What happened to leading by example? Is it appropriate to have lengthy supervisors meetings when there is sixty individuals in waiting area and office closes in twenty minutes?
DeleteI agree. 20 Years ago, we still had some managers and supervisors who would answer the phone, work reception or do the mail. Once, when our office was so short handed we couldn't see straight, our cluster district manager came over and worked our front reception window for a week straight. Did a halfway decent job of it, surprisingly enough. My most recent office manager used to do windfall offsets for one of the employees that was incapable of doing them (though, in that case, it was more a convenience for management as they didn't have to deal with demoting the employee, who never should have been promoted in the first place). However, the manager did do the work.
ReplyDeleteThat said, most of the other supervisors and managers I know now consider this type of work to be beneath them (I actually had an OS a few years ago that told me those exact words while at the same time having the gall to explain that, yes, I really needed to continue to work 18 hours of overtime a week to get things done). And, most of them couldn't do the work anyway as they don't maintain any technical skills whatsoever beyond reading a WAC list.