| > To start out with – sometimes the people asking you questions don’t respect your time, and that sucks. I’m assuming here throughout that that’s not what happening. I'm curious, how do others handle interactions with people who don't respect your time? I'm talking about coworkers who do not improve in their question asking ability after you've gone through the processes the article describes multiple times in good faith. People who Slack or email several people in parallel, waiting for the first reply to come back. I've found that being honest with problematic coworkers - i.e. asking them face to face to invest more effort - is a risky thing to do. Even as an authority figure on the team, it's easy to develop a reputation for being an asshole, even if you're as polite as possible. Instead, I save the feedback for my manager with concrete examples, and have them deliver the bad news. A lot of managers need to receive overwhelming feedback that the offender is doing this, so you may need to prompt them to ask other members of the team to solicit feedback. Some people are too nice to bring it up. Even then, it's notoriously hard to correct behavior in these individuals and even harder to get them off your team. So when everything else has failed, I ignore messages from them for maybe 2-3 days, and then reply back with "sorry, did you still need help?" and continue stonewalling them until they give up. It's most effective when you can get everyone on the team to participate so that the person is forced to pull their own weight. |
If the documentation doesn't exist, consider creating it.
If they ask same questions again and again, suggest them to take better notes.
I think complaining about it is counter-productive. Force them to do the legwork, explain that it is primarily their task to do research on a topic.