Too nice at work?

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I think I have to change my whole attitude at work. At the moment the office numbers have increase and I'm just getting overloaded with work. Last two weeks have been hell.
Someone said to me 'you take too much on, its because you are too nice, you need to say no'. I find this to be a bit of a conflict being in tech support as I thought the goal was to help as much as poss. However, saying that, it seems that being too nice and helpful is starting to have a negative effect, i.e people start treating you like a doormat...!

I was wondering if anyone else has had experiences like this ? How, in a support role, do you get a good balance between being nice and saying no.

Any thoughts

 

Sometimes, you have to say "No" to be nice. Simply take on what you CAN take on, and promise only what you CAN promise. Then you don't have to worry about ever being a doormat.

I don't think you should ever try to not be nice... always be pleasant until there's a justifiable reason to not be.

 

Cheers guys. Sometimes its tough being the only techy on site!! there are now about 140 people over 5 floors Vs me and a helpdesk down the phone.

Cheers JK for the idea about the fact if the people can avoid the red tape i.e putting in a ticket/calling the helpdesk they will. It just hit the nail on the head for me. Gonna try some of these ideas out tomorrow morning. I know I have to do something about this situation, as what is getting logged is not what is really happening in the office.

Thanks again

 

We have a guy like this at work, and we are slowly changing him lol

Its good to see people realise the reasons why we are in IT, which is to keep users productive, however there are reasons for helpdesks, job logging, and having a procedure to get a problem resolved.

One of the main reason's is to keep records of where the issues are occuring, so that management can be proactive and address them at the source either through training, or improving the technology.

Another one is to stop people becoming overloaded with work, and thus their performance drops, case in point, a job failed its resolution target due to this engineer being on an ad hoc job (unlogged), so basically another client suffered because someone else didnt follow the procedures, ask yourself does this seem fair?

 

Maybe a weekend bit of overtime installing some remote support software may be in order (Would be Stress, and shoe leather saving)

 

Been here too myself, I managed to get by making 1 liner jobs in peoples names but still its hard. I found being the IT Tech easy compared to the fine art of being assertive whilst keeping people sweet. People need to know their boundaries with you, I mean if someone from Payroll came upto you and asked for their password resetting and you did it there and then, what you think would happen if the tables were turned and you were at their desk asking for a form to be processed there and then. You would see a dramatic change of attuide and be asked to log a job no doubt. Keep your relationship with your coworkers a professional one, after all your not there to be "mates" and your managers only look at stats have the time and won't thankyou if they think your curcumventing processes.

 

if he's running an AD domain and say XP boxes, all he'd need to do is enable a few GPO settings to get his remote environment support setup.