Work Channels: Agree or Disagree?

[Shu]

I'm not sure how many of you have to deal with this, but I was wondering if you like the decentralized work channels or do you prefer directly talking to whoever you wish in your company.


1)

Do you like having to go through your manager in order to ask a question to another person of a different department?

OR

Do you like having the option to go up and ask whatever you wish to anyone in another department?

2)

If you need to talk to your supervisor's supervisor, aka manager about something related to budgeting or anything else, do you like having to go through your superior?

OR

Do you like having the option to send a direct email to any person of authority about any question above you?

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Main question is do you like work channels, or not.. If you do, please say why, if you don't.. please say why..

 

[Bambi]

id rather go to a person directly, its more personal, and theres no danger of them getting the wrong questions etc if you do it directly, though i guess sometimes thats not always practical especially if whoever it is is like, way out of the way, i suppose a manager or wahtever would take x amount of peoples queries and deal with it all in one go rather than folk wandering about all over the show

if it was by email though, dont see why you couldnt just do it yoursef

eh, id still prefer the direct approach regardless

 

[Ilyena]

I experienced this a great deal when working at Michaels and at IBM. Honestly, I hated it. It would take days and sometimes even weeks to get an answer back from the person you needed to be asked. Whenever we would get our inquiries back, you could see the entire email chain and it was absurd. Just one person passing it along to another and to another until it finally got to the person you needed to ask.

At Michaels, I was working in customer service so this tended to really be annoying. We'd have customers waiting two to three weeks for a simple yes or no answer. It was ridiculous. Eventually, I started bypassing my supervisor and just contacting the buyers directly. And I would get an answer back within a day and sometimes within hours. Sure it wasn't proper procedure but the customers were certainly happier.

So yeah, the whole work channels thing is just annoying, drawn out and completely unnecessary in my opinion.

 

[blakstang98]

Well, in my job, we have a total of 16 employees, so the management for us is the President and VP of the company. And we always have to make sure to copy either of them, if not both on any e-mail that we send out, just so they're in the loop of what's going on. Nothing we do goes out without their approval anyways. So it's pretty simple for us because there is no middle management or channels we have to go through. Everything hits the top level before it goes out.

Back in my retail days at PetSmart and Budget, there was always this layer of channels to go through. The District Manager wasn't at our store/building, so you'd have to go through the managers on the premisis to get anything to go that far. Naturally in those kinds of jobs, not being office jobs, that was never needed really. But getting to the higher management was always hard to do regardless.