I got this email yesterday. It was to my boss.
A year and some months ago, our president retired after 45 years with the company. The new president has been involved with non-profits before, but he definitely comes from a different culture. The impression in our three-person department is that he doesn’t really know what we do. I know he’s looking for ways to cut costs.
Months ago, we had to write job descriptions. The coworker’s primary job is to enter manual data. Some of the businesses that send us data haven’t figured out how to do it electronically, and they send pages or reams of paper with their data on it. My coworker has to type it into the AS400. She also works on Excel files. The JD she wrote was half a page.
My data is all electronic. Some of the ‘legacy’ contributors’ data are sent to the database partners as Excel files. They’ll do what they need to to get them into the right format. Almost all of the data needs to be ‘cleaned’ – address formats standardised, names and addresses put into the proper columns, missing data elements put in where possible, etc. I’ve written programs to do much of the work for me. Some large files can take days to clean up manually. I can get the large ones done in an hour or less. My boss once told the old president that I can get the work done ten times faster than she and my coworker can. In addition to the clean-up, all data from new members must be in a particular format. The data entered manually into the AS400 comes out in the old format. The new format is much more involved. It would be impossible to put the data into this format without my reformat programs. Well, not ‘impossible’, but it would require a larger staff and more time. Aside from the programming and data processing, there are other things I do. My JD ran two pages.
Anyway. I don’t know what an ‘internal control manual’ is, but we really should have a manual describing what the departments do. This meeting might simply be a step toward that.
But I’ve worked for enough corporations to be suspicious. It seems like whenever a new management type comes aboard, they like to cut costs by laying people off. (This place has had a nice non-corporate feel, which I like a lot.) I’m told that once upon a time, our entire section of the office was full of people. Now there are only my boss, my coworker, and myself processing a larger amount of data. There’s not much meat on the bone to trim off. But I’m gun-shy.
Instead of going to Seattle today, I’m going down tomorrow for this meeting. In an email to my boss, I jokingly called it the ‘Let’s see who we can get rid of’ meeting. She said, ‘Don’t worry. It won’t be you!’
I hope nobody is laid off. I have a mortgage, and I have to pay for it! My coworker is 63, and plans to retire from there. At her age, she might be hard-pressed to find work for the next two to five years. Especially since she’s not especially adept technically (e.g., she doesn’t know how to do things in Excel that are pretty basic – not that I’m an Excel guru). We need her there to do the manual data. We need me there, since there are about 200 files each month that either can’t be processed without my programs, or (the smaller percentage of them) would take forever to work. Fortunately, I’m allowed to telecommute. If I couldn’t work nine to ten hours a day (usually nine) it wouldn’t all get done.
So I’m hoping that this meeting is just ‘housekeeping’ – getting the job descriptions into a manual, and giving the president some idea of what we do. But I fear it might really be a ‘Let’s see who we don’t need’ meeting, and I still have 12 more years on the mortgage.
