When rules get in the way of work

I can't say for certain if this is a good or bad thing, but one thing that really annoys me about work is how managers like rules especially when something goes wrong (no matter how benign).

Just a few days ago, I made a small mistake that basically killed a sample. I opened a bottle of resin a little to close to one of my samples and unfortunately it squirted on to the sample, thus ruining it. Fortunately I had a spare sample to replace the ruined one. I figured that I would just make a mental note to not do that again.

Since these samples I am working on are being passed through a manual labor processing line, I naturally reported in on the little mishap and informed the people in charge that I'll be replacing the sample with another equivalent one. Apparently that wasn't enough.

Management type people aren't involved first hand with what is going on, so when I told them about the problem, they weren't necessarily satisfied that I just replaced the sample. They wanted some action-plan to thus prevent this kind of problem from ever happening again. The first one manager suggested to me was what about having a rule where you should open the bottle at least 1 meter away from the sample. Seriously.

What turned out to be a small mistake which could be remedied by having the sample put on a shelf nearby for when I open the bottle, I ended up having to spend a few hours taking photos of the work space and writing a power point presentation with a play-by-play of how some resin got splashed onto a sample. Bloody waste of time in my opinion, where as I could be off doing some productive work instead.

I sort of feel for these managers though, it seems that because these guys are in a position of power (perhaps?) that they have a need to get actively involved in making decisions or that they are involved some how in getting something implemented (albeit from a sort of distant kind of manner). Honestly, sometimes they should just learn to stand back and let the front line people deal with the problem instead.

The problem with the need for counter-measures and loads of preventative rules (though I would not say that they are all bad) is that it gets in the way of getting real work done. This is actually one blaring weakness when it comes to wanting to get work done. The best managers that I have worked for are the ones that do their best to shield us from dealing with all these annoying rules and simply let us have our way (within reasonable means of course). Because when I have to start following a gazillion rules to reduce errors that happen on a 1 out 100 probability that suck up my time, it becomes a pain in the ass to get anything done.

The ironic thin instead is that one of the guys that I am working with now has decided that it would be much better in our interests to just not report small problems and deal with them ourselves instead of wasting our time taking photos and writing up reports of benign events, which probably won't add up to brownie points on a performance review.

The moral of the story? Don't report small issues, just successes. Though it might not be how things should be setup, it's just more "cost effective" for people like me working in this kind of environment.