As a consultant you get to see lots of interesting things in companies.
One of them is the experience of watching the employees of a company mentally check out. They do as little as possible, just enough to keep their jobs.
How can you tell? In group chats who are the people contributing and pushing things forward? If its you as the consultant, there is a problem. If their status in teams/email always show red or when you dm them directly to work on something you both had ownership with, they don’t respond for hours? Well its clear they are doing the least possible.
Which then is interesting. As a consultant you have to show that you are providing value, so you try to work around the obstacles that the full-time staff are giving you. They may not respond to simple request for information, or fail to share critical details with you. They may choose to passively aggressively not help you, even when they could help you. Which happens on most if not all of the consulting assignments that I have been on. They fear for their jobs, so if you look bad they feel they look good.
Which is fine. If they want to play games like that I know how to deal with bullies. The simple fact is that you can’t treat your staff with overwork and burnout and not expect a response. Companies waste I think 95% of their time because people don’t know how to manage others. They rely on things like Jira which doesn’t help IT and isn’t really understood by the administrative people who manage it. You have non technical people trying to manage technical people and it just doesn’t work.
Its amazing how companies are run. I sit back and work with whatever culture they have, and try to address getting the work done. At times you are setup to fail, and that is unfortunate but just life. You roll with the punches in life.