My experience would be that people generally have Ugh fields around tasks which no-one on the team likes (e.g. report writing). I can’t reassign such tasks without being unfair to the people who are dealing well with such jobs.
I would agree that mentioning to a manager that you’re finding something aversive is basically fine as long as you’re more looking for support than reassignment (although this might be different in different fields) and that a manager should encourage that.
As an example one employee found that people constantly interrupted him and this made getting into the flow of report writing super hard so we blocked off a day a week to allow him to catch up without interruptions.
I guess to some extent it’s knowing what’s possible in your context and knowing how flexible your manager is able/willing to be.
>I would agree that mentioning to a manager that you’re finding something aversive is basically fine as long as you’re more looking for support than reassignment.
I agree with this. Managers can do some productivity/performance coaching and find ways to help employees, although as an employee I wouldn’t want to be the one who required the MOST help, unless I was brand new. And “help me find a way to work around this problem” is going to come off a lot better than “please reassign this because I don’t wanna.”
Hmm, I guess maybe I am more lucky. It has happened reasonably frequently to me that someone gets an ugh-field around a task that some other person doesn’t find stressful (examples: organizing spreadsheets, calling businesses, having meetings, writing long explanatory blogposts).
But I do agree that reassignment is definitely much less frequent than just talking through whatever is aversive and usually one can find some other solution to the problem (in my experience pair-programming or pair-writing is often pretty successful here).
While I can see that there are plenty of people who don’t like report writing and would rather prefer to do other things, it’s not my model that most people have ugh-fields around them (that it’s very painful to think about doing the task).
Is your model of people different or are you overgeneralizing the term?
My intended point was that if one person has an ugh-field around something then it is often a generally unenjoyable task. Although other people don’t have ugh-fields around the task, it still seems unfair (and would likely lead to bad team dynamics) to reassign it to someone else who merely dislikes the task.
My experience would be that people generally have Ugh fields around tasks which no-one on the team likes (e.g. report writing). I can’t reassign such tasks without being unfair to the people who are dealing well with such jobs.
I would agree that mentioning to a manager that you’re finding something aversive is basically fine as long as you’re more looking for support than reassignment (although this might be different in different fields) and that a manager should encourage that.
As an example one employee found that people constantly interrupted him and this made getting into the flow of report writing super hard so we blocked off a day a week to allow him to catch up without interruptions.
I guess to some extent it’s knowing what’s possible in your context and knowing how flexible your manager is able/willing to be.
>I would agree that mentioning to a manager that you’re finding something aversive is basically fine as long as you’re more looking for support than reassignment.
I agree with this. Managers can do some productivity/performance coaching and find ways to help employees, although as an employee I wouldn’t want to be the one who required the MOST help, unless I was brand new. And “help me find a way to work around this problem” is going to come off a lot better than “please reassign this because I don’t wanna.”
Hmm, I guess maybe I am more lucky. It has happened reasonably frequently to me that someone gets an ugh-field around a task that some other person doesn’t find stressful (examples: organizing spreadsheets, calling businesses, having meetings, writing long explanatory blogposts).
But I do agree that reassignment is definitely much less frequent than just talking through whatever is aversive and usually one can find some other solution to the problem (in my experience pair-programming or pair-writing is often pretty successful here).
Maybe I need to be more heterogenous in my hiring!
I hadn’t heard of pair-writing but it sounds like it could work well in my context.
While I can see that there are plenty of people who don’t like report writing and would rather prefer to do other things, it’s not my model that most people have ugh-fields around them (that it’s very painful to think about doing the task).
Is your model of people different or are you overgeneralizing the term?
My intended point was that if one person has an ugh-field around something then it is often a generally unenjoyable task. Although other people don’t have ugh-fields around the task, it still seems unfair (and would likely lead to bad team dynamics) to reassign it to someone else who merely dislikes the task.