I’m glad you guys don’t see that I don’t really care much about this place anymore. That means I can keep doing it and that makes my days much easier.
Oh, and thanks for forgetting completely about a laptop you loaned out to another office. If I wasn’t here keeping tabs on all of our inventory, you’d be costing the firm a few thousand each year in lost equipment.
Oh yeah, I did say that!
Okay this is slightly cheating because I said it a fortnight ago. Next Tuesday (Monday being a holiday) I start on my HGV training. And now at least one of you will have “Convoy” by CW McCall stuck in your head. Muahaha!
I had to look up that a HGV was a CDL here.
And yes, now it’s stuck. I must youtube to purge.
Not here. I’ve already got ‘Convoy’ and ‘Wolf Creek Pass’ on my iPad. 
(yeah I know, Long time no see)
I understand we are shifting to a new procedure where all reviews for all staff are done at the beginning of the year. I do understand it is starting next year.
What I do not understand is why right now I have to write a review for my minion, full narrative etc, then have to do it again for the same person 1 month later! (you sent the paperwork to start both reviews on the same day) Especially because they are a stellar employee and we are not even dreaming of a) not passing their probation b) suggesting a work plan, which in itself would give us 3 months before the second review, and would only focus on the areas needing improvement.
Copy and paste… 
Do you think they’d notice if they got the exact same review twice?
Good to see you!
Not sure. I asked my supervisor, and she said she would look into it for me.
I am just happy that I don’t have to ask our internal accounting/HR division about it. Last time I asked a question concerning a policy, they just quoted the policy right back at me instead of you know, interpreting it. I had to suggest to them a possible solution (which was not written within the policy) in order to have them answer whether my solution would be an acceptable according to the policy.
Policy: Money is to be locked up in immobile safe onsite while Library is closed and thus have no need to utilize the register. We didn’t have immobile safe onsite (we were in the process of moving) and thus, where was the money to go while we were closed? Answer they gave me., “Money is to be locked up in immobile safe onsite while we were closed.”
Hell, I had a manager who would do that when we had a year between reviews. Also, we later realized that she did this for all of her employees. She’d just cut out Minion A’s name and replace with Minion B. I only know this because she forgot to change one of the names in my review. I talked to a friend/coworker of mine and she told me she’d seen the same with a different person’s name before. We compared phrases and had a larf when we found out they were identical. $SheepLady was incapable of being a manager, right down to the reviews even. So glad I don’t work for her anymore.
That’s… awful. There’s no point to a review if it doesn’t give real feedback!
Sometimes there is no point to a review even if you get real feedback. I was once fired (without cause) three weeks after getting a raise, a promotion and a superior result on my review.
Wow, that’s bad. These days it’s illegal (except under certain circumstances) to fire someone in Australia without three written warnings and/or divulging the reason for termination.
Same here, completely illegal after the following conditions are met:
The 18 months thing is a recent addition to help job turnover, and thus “reduce” the unemployment figures when in actual fact it’s the same jobs being passed round every 12 months or so. Yay, progress.
When I worked for the cellphone company, the turnover was a lot worse than that. Half the trainees didn’t make it through the three weeks of classroom training. Some of the survivors didn’t show up for their first day of work following training. There were also those who never returned after their first weekend and those who did not return after picking up their first “real” paycheck.
I also saw people fired for no rational reason their first day on the floor. Managers deleted people from the schedule often. I don’t think we ever had a payday where someone’s paycheck wasn’t completely FUBARed (and not in a, “honest mistake” way). We had people whose passwords (each of us had at least 8 different ones we had to use) were suddenly de-activated for no reason - one guy spent a week just sitting on his butt because he couldn’t take calls without being able to bring up the systems we used, and then they tried to fire him for “refusing” to work.
Murphy’s Peter Principle: If there exists a way to screw things up, a manger will find it, and defend the decision as being in line with policy and required by law - while blaming it on somebody else.
Ohio is an ‘at will’ state, so they didn’t really need a reason. The excuse I was given was that my employment ‘just wasn’t working out’. Which I thought was rather odd given the circumstances of the recent promotion and the fact they waited until Sunday when I was the only person in the shop before the HR guys came to can me. Heard later and through unofficial sources that one of the managers, was ‘scared of you’.
That manager transferred out of my old department within six months.
And a law like that in the US would be another reason useless people are held on to. Any business that can’t let people go here ends up with artificial methods to “employ” people in positions that do no damage and encourage them to leave of their own free will.
OTOH, an employ at will state ends up with some odd things as well. Protected classes you have to have a reason at least on file to prevent law suits. So while they could fire me without notice, anyone else in my department they’d at least have to have a fake reason. Which means if they need to reduce by one, all other factors aside, I’d be the initial choice.
If you have to advertise an “apply now” on a billboard, it’s time to look at why your organization has difficulty attracting and keeping good employees, as well as why the applications you are getting right now are such crap.
This is especially bad if you are an effing sheriff’s department. (I’m not kidding)
Honestly, @Woodman, I disagree with you here. Not on the fact that companies would have no course against holding onto useless people, but because they fail to fire useless people today. In all seriousness, at $company, we have had people who produce way below the bar, but because they’ve been with us for years, $managers get sentimental about it. Even worse, they’re not invested in making them better employees to at least improve them somewhat. It’s just accepted as, “Oh, that’s just how so-and-so works”. In the 10 years I’ve been with $company, they’ve only fired 1 person, and it was on grounds of some ill-done business. The only turnover we have is from people jumping ship, and they tend to be the good ones who knew their shit.
I’d be in favor of
But then I’d expect $managers to have the cajones to enforce it. If people aren’t pulling their weight, guide them. If they still can’t cut the mustard, warn them. Repeatedly, if necessary. If you reach a 3rd warning and performance hasn’t improved, then it should be no surprise when they’re fired. But maybe I’m just old school. There are so many people out there who want to work hard for their paycheck, not just show up to collect one every two weeks.
And any time a group of investors starts waffling, the company decides to cull the people who are actually producing the company’s goods and services, so they can spare upper management the trauma of having to look for new jobs.
Dear $Manglement
Your greatest assets aren’t the clever beancounters, nor the sexeh HR ladies, nor the Support team… or the Development team. Those people you can replace with others easily. Training is not so difficult for them.
Your greatest assets are ---- your Systems Administrator and your Installations Team. Since we’re in a vertical market niche, the installation team guys need to be trained on how to work with specific hardware as you can’t expect every Tom Dick and Harry to be able to jump in and install said equipment, not to speak about security concerns either.
Right now, at this moment, your installations team are very, very negative as they perceive that Manglement doesn’t care about them at all. Lose your installations team, and you’ll expect a cock-up of epic proportions during site installs and upgrades as the new guys will NOT know what to do and what to expect.
As for your Systems Administrator - simply put, by adding more and more responsibilities on his workload also makes for a very grumpy and sour, negative SysAdmin… and that you wouldn’t want, would you?
So, wake up, smell the coffee, and realize that it will be better for you in the long term, to take care of your employees.
Otherwise the company will derp.
Most people don’t work for companies that have investors though. Think of this rule applying to a 150 employee company. Or a 50 employee one.