Manager abdicating their responsibilities.
It is different to a collabaritive table.
This is by far the best way to deal with this, IMO. Make it clear that this is a waste of time, yet by showing ‘hey we are only doing what you asked us to do’. I guess there isn’t any freeform text, which is good. That’s an easy way for everyone to say “Mr. EvilTOJ has such godlike powers he burned through all his work with ease” and just substitute names for everyone.
A
Amen to this. It sounds like a roundabout QA process. My call center wouldn’t be doing such a good job if the CSRs QA’d each other. That’s why I’m there.
I agree, but this is technically impossible.
:D:D
I think (hope) so. Thanks.
Another good suggestion, but unfortunately, also technically impossible.
Were it me, I would simply complete anything the others overlooked and then, justly, give them each a sparkling review. They missed a question? Just pick an answer! Failed to complete part of the form? Fill in the blanks. If concerned that you’re always giving sparkling reviews will reflect badly on you, choose the best positioned person, and cite them for a small oversight from time to time. Tell no one of your evil plan.
They are trying to produce fireworks that will make it easier to can people, ( for their consciences), I’d wager. Don’t give them any. Let your fellow workers provide that.
Lay low, keep your head down, have confidence in your own work, and hope for the best. Resistance is futile, as you’ve probably realized, stick with, “As you wish.”
If the test is for completeness, and it is unambiguos whether something is complete or not, then it would be far more efficient to run a completeness check at the point where the paperwork gets filed. Preferably via some automated system that doesn’t let the filing occur unless the forms are complete.
If this isn’t technically possible, then it’s highly unlikely that complete paperwork will ever be an issue anyway. If it is, detect and correct when the incompletions cause problems, not at the source.
I agree with the post that said that the matching of reviewers / reviewees should be randomized. Beyond that, the policy may seen a bit odd but I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with it.
Let’s make it possible. Talk to us. Give us the setup, and we’ll break it down. The point here is.
A: unified stance on the behalf of your co-workers.
B: that you will do this as requested.
C: while making it clear that doing this places you all further behind.
D: but all of you are falling behind equally and working to the best of your ability.
E: and that it is your manager’s idea that is making you less efficient.
F: because he is abdicating his responsibility as a manager.
This should become clear, not because you brought it to the supervisor of the manager, but as a natural outcome of events.
Squirrel, the problem is not with the policy, but in the additional overhead it creates on an already overworked group. It will create more effort and result in less efficiency and less performance.
When I worked at the Mega Whopper Engineering Company, we used to check each others’ calculations. We’d swap our work with each other and check for math errors as well as errors in using the correct formulas, approach, etc. That never bothered me - I reckon because we were all subject to it, and I felt good that my calculations were checked before “going out the door”.
I don’t know if this is the same thing or not. I also like E-Sabbath’s suggestion of picking one day a month to do it.
I actually worked in a job for about a year where this was a standard part of the job. It wasn’t the funnest job in the world, but cross-auditing was far from the end of civilization.
They did have full-time QA people, but they did samples, and evaluated both the original paperwork and the audit.
Management time is more expensive than employee time. It is less of a waste of time (money) for employees to cross-audit than for management to audit everything. Even dedicated QA person time is probably more expensive than employee time (although MMV on this if the employees are high-skill and the QA is routine).
I do agree that people should not be picking their auditors. Auditors should be assigned by management and rotated occasionally, to prevent collusion. If they don’t assign people, I recommend you pick the coworkers you know do the best job. The time it sucked the most for me was when they assigned me someone to audit who averaged about a 50% success rate. That was a long couple of weeks.
A mature person should be able to point out to a coworker that they forgot to sign a TPS report. A mature person should also be able to accept this kind of information from a coworker. This goes double if you describe yourself as professionals.
There were a few benefits to the process. One is that for many people, they will be more careful if they know someone will be looking. Performance improves, more errors get caught before they gum up the works later on. The other is that it highlights systemic problems, like policies no one follows because they’re impossible. It can be better than dedicated QA folks because there is no need to constantly explain the realities of the job to them. It also gives you insight into which coworkers you can trust are doing a conscientious job and which ones you probably shouldn’t trust when they say they took care of something. With a small office you probably already know that, but in a large one it can be useful info.
Is there going to be any checking to see how accurately these review forms are filled out?
My recommendation is to just fill out the forms indicating that everyone you reviewed did everything they were supposed to just fine - without looking at a thing they did. And I’d encourage as many of my co-workers as I could convince to do the same.
If management happens to conduct an audit (doubtful) and catch you having approved something that was lacking, just play dumb and say, “Wow, don’t know how I missed that. Were there any problems with my performance on the substantive work I did?”
When I did cross-auditing, the QA folks did audit a sample of our audits. Also, management probably knows something about the baseline error rate. Presumably they knew about my coworker with the 50% hit rate. I didn’t particularly want to look like an idiot by pretending I couldn’t detect that.
Why would you intentionally let errors go through, when they are just going to cause problems later? That can be a big reason why people are overworked in the first place–fixing mistakes that could have been avoided by doing it right the first time.
I have heard of some dumb ideas, but this must be about the dumbest!
Sounds like someone has heard of STOPs or a similar invention, not understood a thing, and thought the same thing can be applied to anything and anybody.
I don’t remember what does STOP stand for, it’s something which IIRC was invented at Dow and the S is for Safety. The idea is that someone at work (initially, supervisors, but eventually everybody can be trained) who has been trained on how to do it sees someone doing something… strange, or just doing something but not looking very harried. They ask whether the someone would be ok with getting a STOP. They can say “sorry but I’m up to here, can we do it tomorrow?” - this is acceptable. They can say “sure, let me wrap this up” - this is also acceptable. They can say “sure, fire away” - this is acceptable if and only if it won’t interfere with their work.
The person being stopped explains what he’s doing and why. “I use thin gloves to prepare the samples, then I peel them off and get the thick insulating gloves on before putting the samples in the oven - if I didn’t peel the thin gloves off, I could contaminate the thick ones.”
The “point” is not to find things that are wrong; it’s a combination of everybody having a decent understanding of other people’s work (yes, someone from Production could run a STOP on someone from the sales office), plus finding anything in the procedures which needs to be clarified, plus making sure that people know why they do what they do the way they do it.
The way described in the OP… it’s just not going to work. It will mean more paperwork, it will mean that any time anybody actually points a mistake out he’ll be the Big Bad Wolf, it means that instead of seeing something and being able to point it out in a friendly way there’s now this antagonistic procedure; it’s highly likely that the questionnary will have been written for one department and then copied over for everybody without any review.
An example of the last was this Personnel Review form that was used in a company where I used to work: initially it had been developed for the Sales Department, so there were a lot of questions about customer interaction. People who were familiar with the concept of “internal customer” would give us in Production, Maintenance, Safety or Quality very high grades in customer interaction; people who thought customers had to be external wouldn’t choose “N/A” - they’d give us zeros! Ehm… if, according to you, I never speak with a customer, why do you say that my skills at speaking with customers are “extremely poor”?
My job is all about peer review - my reports have to be peer reviewed, and since my only peers are in Europe, that’s who reviews my reports. There are considerable differences between how legal documents are approached in the US vs. Europe, so I am constantly getting suggestions for how they would do things over there, that make everyone on this side of the pond crazy.
Its not just “is the full form filled out” its also a qualitative review. It sucks, but what can you do about it? I suspect that you will all find yourselves giving a cursory review, except for 1 jerk that decides to live by the spirit of the policy and everyone will hate it when that 1 person reviews their work. Plus, you will find depths of politics in your conversations with each other, because you don’t want to be the hard-ass (and neither does anyone else, except 1 jerk) and make it all personal.