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Since our numbers have been down ever since we started working from home (they think this is because the staff are lazy and not working, it couldn't possibly be related to the ongoing pandemic), my boss has asked me to conduct a four hour evaluation of every one of my staff every month. She then asked me if this was taking up too much of my time, and when I said yes she helpfully tallied up the total number of hours it would take every month and said that's not that much.
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Jan 29, 2021 20:05
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Imagine 70 people simultaneously singing happy birthday over Zoom.
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Feb 23, 2021 19:07
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HR sent me a passive aggressive e-mail about how it looks like one my staff "isn't working out" because of how much time off they've been taking. This person has been with the company for at least a few years, but made the apparently unforgivable mistake of using most of their accrued sick time (Oh they also have over 60 hours of vacation time in the bank).
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Apr 19, 2021 18:35
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boar guy posted:ah, the ultimate weasel phrase. you've worked here for two years with nothing but glowing reviews from everyone but you didnt come to the christmas party and it pissed off the CEO? sorry, it just wasn't working out Bingo, HR also CCed the executive in that e-mail which means this is 1000% on their orders. This executive disagrees with all suggestions on general principle so it's pointless to argue this one, I'm just going to send a short response that I'm looking into it and hopefully it's forgotten when someone else gets targeted.
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Apr 19, 2021 18:45
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The Zombie Guy posted:We had a guy in upper management who would shoot down any suggestions that weren't his. I'm in this situation right now as middle management and it's the most demoralizing thing. Especially coming from previous jobs where the relationships I had with upper management allowed me to debate policy changes and either convince them it was a good idea or have them legitimately convince me my idea was dumb. I would almost prefer the flat out "No" though, because I get the fake follow up to any suggestion. If I suggest a course of action I will be immediately tasked with something like creating an analysis of the effect of this decision, or putting together a training for our staff on the change. Once that task is complete another one is assigned, and once several of the tasks are done only then is the idea shot down. This is for insanely basic stuff too. Like I found a way to use our work software to filter information in a way that would help my staff complete a specific task much more quickly. Now I could conduct a training walking everyone through the process of using these filters which I've done before, but I work in a non-tech field and I know that would be a painstaking process for some of my people. I was able to save the filters I used in the list and the software has the capability to share this list with others, but I don't have that level of authorization. I asked for permission to share this list, or perhaps permission to ask our IT guy if there was a way to export the filter settings that the staff could plug in. By this point I'm wise enough to the bosses tricks to know suggesting policy changes results in extra work, but I figured this one was benign enough to sneak by. Instead I was instructed to create a list of guidelines on how the staff would use this information and once that was done a training plan proposal. This is all information the staff already has access to, it's just organizing it in a slightly more efficient way. It's like creating a policy around using Excel to sort by column B. Actually the staff can already sort this information themselves manually, so it's more like creating a policy around telling staff a keyboard shortcut to sort by column B. ClothHat fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Apr 20, 2021 |
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Apr 20, 2021 20:26
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I had a bizarre e-mail exchange with my boss where I'm not sure if they're intentionally loving with me, completely incapable of admitting fault, or only semi-literate. I shared a letter with my boss to get their approval before sending it off. I included a comment asking my boss if we should request X units or Y units in the letter, they said ask for Y. Ok great, I make the change and send the letter out only to then get an e-mail a few days later. Boss: I was looking at the letter again, I know we discussed asking for Y, but I don't see the actual request for Y in the letter. Please add that so they know to give us Y. Me: The request is at the end of the first paragraph, "Quote from the letter asking for Y". Boss: Per the template, the request for Y should be in the first paragraph for the benefit of people who don't read to the end. Me: The request was in the first paragraph, it's the third sentence. In any case the letter has already been sent out, but I'll keep an eye out for that in the future. Boss: I added it myself, but please follow the template. This is a shared document. I look at the version history and see they made a couple of superfluous word changes, but the request for Y has been in there before the start of this exchange. This person is a C suite executive and can't just say "oops I missed that".
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Apr 27, 2021 19:38
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I was also tasked a week ago with preparing a training presentation for our all staff meeting today. I met with my boss on Friday to discuss some of the content and how much time I would need to present everything. I stupidly spent a bunch of time putting together handouts and practicing the presentation, only to go to the meeting today and realize it's not on the agenda. This one is on me though because this is not the first I've fallen for this exact scheme. I have an interview with another agency today in a few hours, and if I don't get that job I think I have no choice but to become the Joker.
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Apr 27, 2021 20:31
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SkyeAuroline posted:They've apparently already reached a decision, so rip there. Issues are that whoever is vetting these candidates is doing a dogshit job of it. Last one walked off at the end of the day day 1 and never came back I'm guessing whoever is doing the interviewing only has a vague idea what the actual job entails, and the job description posted for the opening is just full of generic oatmeal about being a team player, and a go-getter who can hit the ground running instead of talking about what the job is.
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May 3, 2021 23:18
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Barudak posted:Im probably a poo poo manager but my philosophy is "if all our goals are met/exceeded and we don't sound like we don't know what we're doing in meetings with higher ups, I do not give a single solitary poo poo if all of you go into the bathroom at the office and do black tar heroin 4 days a week until you pass out, just don't tell me about it or get caught because then I have to address that" Being a manager is odd because the ceiling for being a high performer feels unattainably high a lot of the time, but passing the bar to not be absolute poo poo is easy as hell. Just don't be a petty tyrant about dumb bullshit, admit fault occasionally, and have some patience with people and you soar above a sea of shithead managers. Being a great boss is hard, but being a mediocre one is a piece of cake.
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May 4, 2021 18:55
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(Two weeks ago) Boss: I want you to implement changes to the way you do this thing, either do it as A or do it as B. I go ahead and implement option B. (Today) Boss: How is it going implementing the thing? Me: Good, I've implemented option B across the board. Boss: I wanted you to do option A. Me: I thought you said option A or B. Boss: I don't think B is enough, I think it needs to be A. Me: Ok if you want A I'll implement that instead. Boss: Well it's not about what I want, I would like you to poll the team and see if that's what they want. You need to look at what are the outcomes of doing B and if that's sufficient or if we need option A. Me: Ok just to be clear, do you want me to go to the team and ask their opinion, or stick with B for now and evaluate how it's working, or just switch to A now? Boss: I want you to do A.
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May 5, 2021 18:00
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Also options A and B were about having more frequent meetings with my staff and giving more documented feedback to them. Every meeting I have with my people is already extensively documented and I share it with the staff with To Do items marked in bold to help them keep track of things. All of these meetings with my boss where I'm told something only to be informed I was told something completely different weeks later are done over zoom and entirely undocumented of course.
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May 5, 2021 18:51
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Outrail posted:BOM? BOM! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG1qKzIsisU&t=18s
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May 13, 2021 21:59
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Dang that sounds bad. After we had been working from home for a year my boss wanted additional feedback from the staff on how it was going. They sent out surveys to our teams with very obvious push questions like: "What is more important to you: A: being able to continue working from home or B: being able to provide high quality service while maintaining positive relationships with your boss, co-workers, and clients?" When staff still said they preferred working from home they just ignored that and said that they have had higher turnover this year and the reason must be because of working from home so get ready to come back 3 days a week. My team of course has had historically low turnover this last year and also works in a tiny satellite office that was too small pre-pandemic, and we have added a significant number of people to the team. I should bring all this up, but my boss has outright told me that they don't like it when I challenge their decisions.
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Jun 1, 2021 21:44
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GORDON posted:Many large corporations have incentive programs. If you suggest a change that will save the company money, you are entitled to 10% of the amount saved. A good idea, but it's not going to fly for multiple reasons: - I work at dinky non-profits who receive mostly fixed funding from the state, no such incentives exist because there is no money for them. - This boss habitually rejects any ideas that are not their own, I've posted about them a bunch of times before. - The useless middle manager in this case is me. I'm supervising a small team and mostly just trying to get upper management to leave them alone.
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Jun 1, 2021 23:24
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Solkanar512 posted:So what happened when this was pointed out to HR? My agency acknowledged everyone wanted to continue working from home but their excuse was that an unnamed partner agency complained about WFH and we had turnover over the last year so 
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Jun 2, 2021 22:17
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I was told the administrative assistant/office manager for our satellite office quit and we have no plans to replace them, but fear not because we've found a way to take care of task X. It's very important that task X doesn't fall by the wayside because that impacts our billing. Fortunately the administrative assistants in the main office can do that remotely. Task X is maybe 10% of their job, and when I asked what was the plan for the other 90% of their job, the little poo poo like answering the phones, maintaining the equipment, organizing the cleaning rota (only the satellite office has this, the main office has professional cleaners of course), archiving paperwork, etc. I just get dead silence.
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Jun 21, 2021 17:56
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Cthulu Carl posted:During a lull in the re-opening 'festivities' (mostly giving out headphones then telling people we're out of headphones), the boss said that senior leadership has been having emergency meetings attrition is apparently approaching Verdun levels. We're all shocked that telling a few hundred people who have been doing their jobs remote they have a couple weeks before they'll probably have to start coming back in, and oh yeah, you now have to book a desk in advance if you want a place to sit might... Lead to people loving off to other companies? Cool man, enjoy your upcoming pizza party!
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Jun 22, 2021 00:53
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LeninVS posted:Literally all of this matches my experience at the very very large military tech company I work for. Are you hiring?
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Jun 22, 2021 19:11
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Oxxidation posted:i've been looking for work for the past five months and i don't know how many more marketing/advertising/finance postings i can take before i put my head through my monitor. none of these companies seem to do anything Jesus gently caress I feel you on this one. I had about a five month gap in 2019 too and had almost the exact same reaction as you. I've mostly only worked in social services where the pay is poo poo and when I get frustrated with work those empty calorie jobs look mighty tempting. Keep plugging away man, that search is super demoralizing. Oh also we've been back at the office for less than a week and someone (7+ year veteran, our most experienced staff on the team) already quit, citing the commute. One of the other managers and I directly appealed to the top boss a couple weeks ago saying we had universal feedback from our teams that absolutely no one wanted to return to the office. We got immediately shut down hard and the bosses primary excuse was that we needed to end WFH because it was causing too much turnover.
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Jun 24, 2021 21:38
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Lazyfire posted:We're missing a shipment that the vendor swears was delivered to our 3 city block sized facility last week. I was in a meeting about this when they sent me the tracking number, which is helpful because we can usually figure out who signed for it and track stuff down from there. 
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Jun 25, 2021 20:57
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Outrail posted:7 on 7 off 13-14 hr shifts was kind of good for a while but in the end you're just a zombie. I did something like this for around 5 years when I first started working. This was in a group home for juvenile delinquents where they only had two daytime staff to cover the entire work week. I worked Saturday - Wednesday and the other guy Wednesday to Saturday. The work shifts were 6AM-10PM, and from 10PM-6AM you could sleep in the staff office but had to remain on-site and on-call from 10PM-6AM and you were not paid for those hours unless they woke you up (in retrospect probably insanely illegal). So a normal work week would have you on site for 84 hours straight (you got MAYBE 1-2 hour long breaks during the week). From 10PM-6AM there was a night watchman who was ostensibly keeping an eye on things, but in practice they were usually asleep by 11, maybe 12 if they were really good. They also weren't authorized to do any actual work with the kids and their only real job was to wake me up if something happened. This meant I got regularly woken up at 2AM because my kids decided to sneak out and rob the 7-11 or something. That wasn't too bad though because I was at least paid for the time worked in the middle of the night and since the "normal" work week was already 50-60 hours that meant everything else was at X2 pay. So a normal work week was already pretty grueling, but a handful of times I decided to cover for the guy working the opposite shift and work triple shifts for a week and half. Now that turned you into an absolutely feral animal. I would see other normal adults for only a handful of hours a week so by the end I was mostly indistinguishable from the clients in the way I spoke. ClothHat fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Jul 7, 2021 |
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Jul 7, 2021 21:27
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ultrafilter posted:A few ESL people have told me that one of the hardest parts of learning English is the phrasal verbs. It's not something a lot of other languages have, and there's really no way to get them down other than memorization. I used to work with a guy from the Philippines, and I always thought he had trouble with tenses, but that link has EXACTLY the kind of errors he struggled with. I was curious if it had to do with his original language, but it sounds like it's English in general.
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Jul 23, 2021 22:57
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Got a new boss who can be a buffer between me and the awful CEO. I've worked with them in the past and good lord what a huge relief not having to report to the CEO anymore. We had a preexisting relationship so they've also shared that most of the other managers and all the other directors were similarly burnt out/on the verge of quitting so it also feels great to be vindicated that it wasn't just me not being able to work with this person.
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Aug 2, 2021 22:07
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Roumba posted:Theoretically, is there anyway an an anonymous employee survey (filled out on company computers connected to the company network) could ever actually be anonymous? Not necessarily. I did these every once in a while when I worked C-Suite and they were legitimately about gathering information about broad trends so you don't fall into the trap of just listening to the small cohort of staff that whine the most. Always assume people are lazy, and creating a trap survey is a whole lot of work to just randomly fish for staff to say something that would get them in trouble.
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Aug 12, 2021 21:42
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One of my staff dropped their laptop and broke the screen and now some of the corporate dipshits are trying to send them a bill for repairs. I tried explaining to HR that you can't do that in CA, but they just kept saying that's the company policy. My staff is super meek and is probably just going to pay the bill to avoid getting in trouble and I'm so furious at all of this.
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Sep 7, 2021 23:16
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I got a new boss who is above me, but below the CEO who was my previous acting supervisor for over a year. Now I only have to interact with the CEO around 30 minutes a week max, and I've started to realize I actually kind of like my job. Best of all is that my check-in meetings with my new boss involve her spending about half the time kvetching about what a nightmare the CEO is to deal with and how 90% of the other staff in my position were on the verge of quitting because the CEO is so horrible. So now I get the absolute psychic balm of knowing that I wasn't crazy and this person actually is just a huge jerk. edit: just realized I've already made this post
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Sep 16, 2021 23:32
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Several people have quit recently specifically citing toxic behavior from upper management, and then wrote nasty Indeed reviews very specifically calling out individual directors behavior. Upper management has put together a crack team to address turnover, and their solution was to ask our existing staff to write positive reviews on Indeed to help us with hiring new people.
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Oct 18, 2021 21:36
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ClothHat posted:One of my staff dropped their laptop and broke the screen and now some of the corporate dipshits are trying to send them a bill for repairs. I tried explaining to HR that you can't do that in CA, but they just kept saying that's the company policy. My staff is super meek and is probably just going to pay the bill to avoid getting in trouble and I'm so furious at all of this. A month and a half of asking my bosses to replace the laptop while the staff has been using their personal computer for work. Their solution is to provide the staff with a desktop (in theory of course, it will take another 2 months of bitching to get the desktop delivered) since we "can't afford" to replace a laptop. I tried bringing up that this is effectively retaliating by singling out this one staff who is now the only person in the office who will be unable to work from home (we're on a 3-2 hybrid schedule), it prevents them from doing work or meeting clients in the field, and they can't even bring it into an office or conference room for a private call; but none of that matters when the CEO is making decisions out of spite and refuses to listen to others on principle.
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Oct 21, 2021 22:32
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Fleta Mcgurn posted:
I haven't had much exposure to him since the mid 2000's, so all I remember is the sum total of his contributions being yelling "DJ Khaled" or "We the best" over other people's songs and putting his name on them which is a decent metaphor for being someone's boss.
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Oct 25, 2021 19:19
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Everett False posted:My job is in local government, and as far as I can tell the software we use for accounting was chosen like twenty years ago because it was cheap and capable of fund accounting, and they've just never picked new software. The enter key on the numpad is the only one that works. Passwords aren't case-sensitive. Checks are generated as reports and their layout is automatically determined by the default printer, so if your default printer is set to a virtual printer you will ruin A Lot Of Checks. Some reports use crystal reports and need to be previewed before printing, but others use some kind of plaintext report generator and if you try to preview instead of printing directly it will completely gently caress it up and try to print every line of the report on a new page. Payroll almost got hosed up the first time I did it because it turns out most of the essential features of this software only work with admin access, which they did not think to give me. Everett False hard at work: 
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Nov 9, 2021 23:02
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My boss quit with no notice because the CEO is too horrible to work with and now she's my direct supervisor again ugggggggghhhh 
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Dec 10, 2021 19:21
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I really wish we could change our interview process to get away from stupid filler questions like "Tell us about a time you were able to support your team by contributing as a team member who is a member of a team", and just ask people to write 1-2 paragraphs documenting a short conversation between them and another person. Our entry level positions require a four year degree but it still feels like half of our new hires are only semi-literate.
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Mar 21, 2022 22:55
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Batterypowered7 posted:Is it IT? 'cause STEMlords are notoriously bad at writing things above a third grade level. No I'm in social services, I suspect it's an issue in just about every industry though. Edit: Was just now auditing my staff's case notes and had to make a note to myself to remind this person not to use emoticons in their documentation. I feel very old. ClothHat fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Mar 22, 2022 |
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Mar 22, 2022 21:16
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Probably bring it up now, as it'll give you a good gauge on how they treat their employees in general. If they make a fuss about it now, they would've gotten upset about it in a few months when you actually need to take that time off anyway. It's not like you're gonna disappear altogether after your kid's born after all (congrats btw). There's no way in hell I would bring that up during the interview process until I was given a formal offer. I think you drastically increase the chance someone in hiring discriminates against you and you don't get the job. They're probably not going to be stupid enough to send you an e-mail saying we don't want to hire someone expecting a child, they'll just quietly decide to choose another candidate. Also check your state's laws on paternity leave. I know in some states you have to work at a place for at least a year to be entitled to full leave.
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Mar 31, 2022 18:59
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I emailed my boss that my wife is in the early stages of labor and I wouldn’t be working today but I would try to check in Monday to do some final prep for my replacement while I’m out on leave. She responded asking if I would have time to run my staff’s time cards either today or over the weekend.
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Apr 1, 2022 19:21
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