What to do if you don't feel listened to at work?
What to do if you don't feel listened to at work?
I'm a man myself, but I'm a foreigner where I live and work, so I sometimes get the impression that my intelligence is a bit underestimated by employers and coworkers. I'm a sous chef, so in a management position, and I often get this feeling like the chef de cuisine, the owner, and sometimes some of the cooks aren't listening to me. Like I'll have to reiterate my point two or even three times at a meeting before I get a relevant answer, or I'll send a memo out and the changes I've instated aren't being adopted after the fact, or someone I'm talking to might vacantly say "yes" as if they're occupied with something else.
Yesterday I asked the chef a question about a recipe that only he could answer and he said I could google it. I'd already googled it just to be sure, wouldn't you know. The day before, the owner told a cook, who then told me, that we all together were planning to put all delivery receipts in a neat little box and adopt a system to check they're correct, but I'd already done it alone a week earlier, and told them all about it, with photos and everything. I feel like I'm going mad.
I hear that this is a (more) common experience for women, so I wonder if any of you have any tips or tricks or whatever to make yourself heard, or to at least cope with not being heard, or even just a bit of commiseration is fine. Cheers!
This is a common, everyday experience for women in all our relationships including our personal ones. Not much you can do about it except keep repeating yourself until someone hears or just shut down on the subject and walk away. It's always infuriating but after a while the shutting down numbs you out so it doesn't feel like it cuts as deep even though it really does. Tell yourself it's a them problem, you tried your best but they don't care to listen, and go on with your day.
I hear it a lot, yes. It brings a tear to my eye to think about it. Sorry to read it.
Be confident and Get to the point first, don't build up with a lot of talking, hook them first to catch their ears and spit it out.
Example:
"We can save time and reduce mistakes if we keep the papers together in a box so we can find them and check them"
Vs
"What I'm thinking is we get a box, it doesn't have to be a big box, any size really and what we can do is like, put the papers in it, and we can all put the papers in it and that way, if we need to when we want to find them, we can look through and check to make sure that it's there and everything is right, that way we won't have as many errors and we won't have customers yelling at us that we forgot things"
Unfortunately, people have short attention span, they are busy multi tasking and don't have time for a long story.
At least that seems to help me. Sometimes you have to be dramatic or funny too.
Also, some people are just jerks and don't have enough respect for others
I don't think that's the problem most of the time but I'll keep your advice in mind, especially next time I send a memo. I have made them a bit long in the past and just apologised at the bottom for the length.