Weakness: I can’t update my resume fast enough.
Seriously, it looks like you and your team are being set up for failure and termination. Start looking elsewhere. I know times are tough, and editor friends of mine tell me times are really tough, but get yourself out there while you still have a job.
Ayup. Publishing is not having a good decade; let’s leave it at that. As it is, I’m the primary (not quite sole) earner in the family, we have a toddler, and we live thousands of miles from any family. If I could find reasonable-paying work within 500 miles of where my parents live, we’d go there.
As to what we’re being set up for, that’s really the unknown here. I’m fairly sure A doesn’t want to terminate me or B, because she’d lose our headcount under the parent company’s hiring freeze. It looks like she wants to redeploy us. Neither B nor I can figure out what she wants to redeploy us to, though. I will get redeployed willingly if I don’t have to take a substantial pay cut, even if I question the logic behind it.
Poor B supervised six people up until a month or two ago; now he has two left. Of the other four, three were re-assigned to different departments and thus different supervisors – though doing exactly the same tasks. One is leaving, which she’s been planning to do for a year, and we had all thought her seat would be refilled, but apparently not. This leaves B, me, and one other person; call her C.
Apparently A said something to B yesterday in their strengths-and-weaknesses meeting to the effect that C is being “fully utilized” in a way that “directly impacts the revenue stream,” but B and I are not, and that this must change. :rolleyes: So my best guess is that I’ll be assigned additional duties, told to take less time doing “non-revenue-impacting” tasks, and start reporting to… someone else, maybe Marketing, maybe Customer Service, maybe someone else I haven’t thought of. What she has in mind for B, I honestly cannot imagine.
Mind you, what C does is in fact essential – she maintains the company website, adds stuff to it, changes it when needed, does most of the routine HTML, though she doesn’t touch the servers/backend nest of snakes and can’t substantially revise the site because of technical roadblocks. It’s the sort of thing our parent company would outsource to a contractor in Bangalore, but no one wants to see that happen. (Their own website seriously sucks. No, worse than what you’re thinking. *Serious *suckitude.) But I don’t really buy the explanation that since B and I are farther removed from the taking in of money than C is, that means it’s time to mess with us. We’re support staff. We support the tech needs of other departments. Nobody ever expected us to be, asked us to be, or imagined us being “closer to the revenue stream,” least of all A, so while A may have good reasons to redeploy us, she’s apparently keeping her real rationalization to herself. So far. I just hope it isn’t simple technophobia, because this is not the decade to cling to old-fashioned publishing.
Every place I’ve been had forced buckets for that very reason. The problem is when you have to put someone in the unsatisfactory bucket - even a bigger problem if you just had a RIF.
When I was at Bell Labs, I was on my Center’s performance appraisal committee for a couple of years, and for the most part people did want it to work. I took a two week management class, taught by a bunch of Harvard Business School profs. I had lunch with the expert on appraisals - he said he consulted all over the industry and found that companies tended to cycle through different systems, and no on was ever happy with the process.
There are benefits. It is a truism that no one should be surprised at his rating, but as we all know lots of managers never give feedback during the year. And while rating buckets are mostly pointless, you still have to administer salary. Well, usually - I’ve noted that in bad times, with no raises, no one pays a lot of attention to performance reviews.
I’ve worked at places that don’t do evaluations, places that do and take it seriously, and places that do them only to tick a box. I’ve worked for box-ticking places with managers that don’t need to do formal evaluations because they let you know how you’re doing as a matter of working with you, but I’ve also had one or two managers that couldn’t give out honest, constructive feedback if it came on a free CD-ROM in the mail. Those folks would’ve benefited from being forced to do 'em.
Nobody likes doing evaluations. They are no fun, what with the judging and the corporate-speak and the templates you have to fill up. But I have certainly seen them used effectively. And their inherent un-funitude doesn’t invalidate the idea.
“Weaknesses? Well, I work too hard, because I love my job so much. Sometimes I work so hard that I forget to eat and eventually starve to death.”
Brilliant! I laughed so hard at how good these are.
Some more:
I spend a bit too much time tidying up common work areas.
I like to cook and bake too much and always have to share with the office.
I plan and organize things too far in advance sometimes.
I often correct other people’s mistakes without seeking praise or recognition.
I tend to focus more on goals and deadlines than friends and family.
“I have the tendancy to put the company’s needs above my own, creating great results, but perhaps threatening other jobs, in a word, I’m a nymphomaniac”