How to Avoid the Monday Surprise

This past weekend was a nice, lazy, long summer weekend. The Labor Day weekend typically marks the end of summer and the end of summer vacations. People get back into their regular routines.

But it was a long weekend, so you’d figure nothing would happen at the office over the weekend – right? WRONG!

I occasionally check my work emails from home. It is nice to be able to see what I might need to deal with right away, and what can wait for a while. It is also good to be able to check my schedule and see if I have any meetings first thing – so that I know when to be at the office (we have flexible hours).

The problem with checking your work emails from home is once you look, you work. I may log onto my work emails thinking I’ll spend five minutes or less reading them. But then you get into responding, looking up information, writing a report – before you know it, that five minutes has turned into three or four hours.

So, I have been avoiding my work emails at home. But this past weekend I got hit big time with some work whammies which I would have been better prepared for, had I simply checked my work email.

The first whammy was the resignation of a long-time employee in the marketing department. Anyone who reads this blog often knows that the marketing department is mis-managed. They blew their budget last year AND this year, they never seem to be around when you need them, and although they often work from home, nothing ever seems to really get done.

The marketing executives are also quite loud, and not very “corporate.” Although they rarely spend a whole day in the office (usually they are in around one or two in the afternoon, and gone well before four o’clock), when they do come into the office, the make enough noise to ensure everyone in all the neighboring office buildings knows. They come in laughing, wailing, talking big and loud with booming voices more appropriate for a beer-swigging party than the cubicle confining office environment.

I’m surprised others haven’t resigned under their form of “management.”

Still, when someone has been with the company for many years (the person who resigned has been with the company for over 15 maybe 20-years), it is big news when they decide to call it quits.

It is even bigger news when that person resigns during a fire storm of furry caused by her bosses.

We send out a weekly newsletter to the whole company – all 100-plus staff and the almost 800-strong sales force. In the newsletter we issued last Friday, we ran a piece on a new marketing initiative.

We had never heard of this new marketing program, so we ran it by our vice-president. Our vice-president gave it the go-ahead, said it was fine.

I get a chewing out by the vice-president of compliance and finance, and the CFO for running the piece, because the marketing program had not been approved at an executive level!

The vice-president of compliance and finance and the CFO later apologized for their hastily written emails, as we had done what we should have done – checked with our executive – our vice-president.

Turns out, our vice-president just rubber stamps anything the marketing department throws him, without consulting the other executives.

Still, I would have known all of this as it was happening – over the weekend – instead of being broadsided by it bright and early Monday morning. All I had to do was check my email.

Oh well – so much for technology making life simple.

I’m off to check that work email.