The Former Micro-Managed One Man IT Field Guy
My last role had a very nice small team of people that could share a pool of knowledge, tasks & abilities.
Manglement shuffle & the new head tosser decided that the team of four in our remote location could become two teams while remaining one team, one half covered the Government stuff, the other commercial clients.
He was constantly looking for ways to fudge the figures so that we were engaged 100% of the time in work to make him look good. Then would berate us for doing exactly what he asked when his bosses noticed. Along with exact routes taken to marry up with the mileage claims per job. Much more time was spent calculating the shortest to take & the longest to enter into the 3 different systems.
The Government team suddenly got very very very busy, me & my partner got to sit in our unit & await deliveries that might deign to show up sometime between 10.30 -14.00 twiddling our thumbs.
Then he left & I was lumped into the sitting around all day twiddling thumbs or being berated by emails from different CRM's & bosses for:
Not being in the unit to receive parts, because I was out fitting the parts that came late in the previous day (Over one four day period I was spending all day traveling to & from remote sites in different directions on for different customers sites, without actually setting foot in our unit at all).
Prioritising one repair & wait for the parts to arrive after complaints by one CRM, while receiving complaints from other ones that I wasn't dealing with their calls.
GPS tracking was about the only thing that Uncle B** hadn't managed to put into place (Above his pay grade), though he loved to monitor what jobs we were booked into, a man that stated he was so busy, but he actually went looking for ways to increase his workload by micro-managing & ensuring we weren't trying to wring a extra few cents on our expenses claims.
Well I can say it now - I turned up each day at the unit at the expected time of deliveries, rather than sit all day in a freezing or in summer fly infested, while sewer gas leaked into the unit & buggered off after the expected window for deliveries closed. Morning phone conferences were taken from the bed or bathroom. Repairs were scheduled for times that suited me once I had the parts, because Uncle Ben insisted on strict adherence (on paper) for a 7.5 hour day.
I'm now in a much better IT role I do a full 8 hour day mostly behind a desk, I'm left to get on with things my own way & I'm much more driven & have a much greater sense of job satisfaction as a result.
New company manager & Director of IT want to push me deeper into things & I'm hungry for the challenges.
Trust & respect in a job is a two way street, though tracking can be a necessary evil in some cases.