It doesn’t take long, when you join a new organisation, to find out that you’re surrounded by work-to-rule muppets who don’t care what happens as long as they can start packing up at 5.24pm.
Which can be disheartening when you’ve had experience collaborating with passionate, engaged people who want to do their best for the common good.
So what do you do? Let them pull you down into the mire of petty feuding and fence-building that sees you spending at least an hour a day in your favourite toilet cubicle playing Star Realms because it gets tiring when you have to pretend to look busy along with everyone else?
Yes. That’s totally the best option, and you should go for it.
Nobody likes some jumped-up newcomer telling them to how make things better with a heap more work and very little reward. Everyone’s got their desk chair adjusted just how they like it, and plenty of padding around the bare minimum they need to do in order to scrape through to the next pay cheque.
(Don’t even try to tell them about the wonders of electronic banking – cheques are trustworthy, my friend, and we’ve used them since time immemorial.)
Sure, some of your new comrades might smile and nod politely as you talk them through the more efficient workflows and KPIs you’ve encountered throughout your storied career, and may even go so far as to fill out the Google Docs survey you’ve set up to find out what motivates them but, in the end, they all know the truth: you’ll fail or move on.
So unless you feel like packing up your desk and rolling the dice on yet another company with its own ways of doing things, induction processes and HR people to butter up, it’s time to relax. Take a leaf out of the magazine of everyone around you, and half-arse it all day every day.
Until it comes around to the end of your probation, and you realise all these workshy hucksters around you are on permanent contracts plus two strikes, while you’re not living up to the expectations they had of you when you were welcomed aboard, so you’re going to have to part ways but all the best in your future endeavours.
And hey – you’ve probably made some new LinkedIn contacts, right? Or at least a couple of Star Realms opponents.
