No, I'm not going to be forced to do anything truly evil or illegal.
Basically, the data entry side of our work (reporting data on international imports to U.S. Customs) is being heavily audited. Every entry is completely reviewed. And the compliance manager is extremely harsh and unsympathetic towards a majority of employees in the office who are doing that type of work, with a couple notable exceptions. She keeps going to the office manager, trying to portray our employees as a bunch of idiots who aren't paying any attention to what they're doing, and she loosely backs it up by throwing up a bunch of unorganized data with no context on a screen and going "Look at this!!!". Said office manager is not a critical thinker and tends to leap into drastic actions based on initial emotional reactions to things.
So I've been protecting my people, gathering my own data to counter the compliance manager's story. When you actually apply some critical analysis to the numbers, everyone actually looks pretty damn awesome. The state of things in our department is really good, as far as employee attitudes. Everyone gets along and is very dedicated. The management over this department (myself and 2 others) do not want to jeopardize this. I actually took the initiative to put together a google spreadsheet that feeds in audit data 100% automated and real-time as it's generated, and turns it into a full suite of statistics on error types, and accuracy rates, with a weighted scoring that takes into account work volumes.
The major issue is the compliance team grades our entries on a strict pass or fail basis per entry. But there's one team in the office whose entries are 4x as large on average as everyone else's. To put this in perspective a "1 line" entry, the minimum size, contains about 40 manually entered data points. A typo or misunderstanding on any of those points results in a fail. So when an entry is over 100 lines (which certain employees see routinely and others don't), it is overwhelmingly unfair to grade that on the same strict pass/fail basis as a 1 line entry. One employee could do 20 small entries in a day, make a mistake, and have a 95% pass rate, while another employee could spend an entire day on one massive entry, make a mistake, and get 0%. So the way the compliance department is grading, certain employees are looking really bad. But if you account for how accurate they really are in relation to the amount of data they're handling, they look just as good as everyone else, or better.
I put a ton of work into putting together comprehensive data that shows this indisputably, and put forth a prototype weighted scoring system. All the managers agreed it looks really good, the way I put the numbers together is much more fair, and I got all kinds of highly visible pats on the back for it... but in talks behind closed doors, nothing's changing. The compliance manager just keeps pushing harder for people to be written up based on flawed data and seriously unfair standards.
And this is exactly the kind of shit that had me horribly depressed for 7 years at my last job. I feel very strongly about it. It is absolutely miserable to spend the majority of your waking life in a place where your actions are put under a microscope, and you're held to higher standards than everyone else in reality just to be seen as equal to everyone else under the guise of "fairness." Because someone arbitrarily decides "this is the standard" without any consideration for how everyone's circumstances relate to that standard. It's a life of anxiety and resentment, and I absolutely will not be a part of putting that on someone else. If I'm told I have to take action on someone because of this stuff, I'll straight up tell them that whatever the consequences, I'm not doing it.
And it's just the most disgusting icing on this cake of bullshit that any attempt to characterize this situation as hostile towards employees is countered with "Oh no don't take it that way. We're just trying to find out where out opportunities are for improvement and determine where we need to have discussions with employees to see how we can help them do better." Everyone knows full well that "having a discussion" is current HR jargon for embarking on a path of disciplinary action, and that the "performance improvement plan" is just a new presentation for the same old 3 strikes/you're out. It's so shallowly two-faced it makes me sick.
I'm really not cut out to be a manager personality-wise. The way everyone conducts themselves in manager-only meetings and talks about the employees makes me feel like a fucking gilded age robber-baron lounging in a smoke-filled study with a bunch of other bearded old white men. I just have no willful suspension of disbelief for the way corporate bullshit is shamelessly spun to put a shallow facade of friendliness on callous exploitation and nepotism, and it drives me insane how easily people lose sight of the experience of being a bottom level employee, dealing with the consequences of decisions made by people who stubbornly disconnect and deny reality.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9466297 times)