Workplace rant: I spend a lot more time doing unnecessary "admin" work vs. 25 years ago

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

Crafter_Man doesn’t need me answering questions put to him. But you raise a point that vexes me sorely.

These tools often work so badly that I can’t make them work, and spend lots of time trying to only because I’m supposed to enter the information. I’ll click some Category and get an error message. I’ll hit Save and the whole thing crashes. Our systems are very picky about which browser you have to use to access them – some Chrome, some Edge, sometimes using an incognito window, and it changes and there’s no place to look up which browser to use for which software. There are too many questions with obvious answers that are wrong, too many things to enter that make no sense like “B400” for the building I work in which has no “B400” written on it anyplace, too many interfaces with no button to Submit and no feedback about whether it’s been submitted, on and on and on.

Sometimes I wind up having to call our IT department’s help desk, which these days is so overloaded that I spend a while on hold. Is this going to take ten seconds, or thirty minutes? Not easy to put the time to best use.

I mostly remember how to do the ones I do frequently, but some – for example submitting travel expenses when I hardly travel – are hopelessly difficult when I haven’t done it for a while. So many times I have to track down the administrator of that particular system and get them to handhold while I use it, and they tell me to click someplace that doesn’t look like a control, as if they use magic mushrooms.

Then the systems will go down while I’m using them. They’re somewhat complex forms that require gathering together lots of stray bits of seemingly unrelated information, which I can’t assemble together in a text editor and save en masse, I have to click around and get the different bits in here and there. Thus, there’s no way to save everything I scrounged together, and when it crashes I have to start over.

There’s just so much wrong with all of this that I wind up choosing things to work on partly on the basis of avoiding as many of these as I can. Or establishing relationships with individuals who got good at this or that particular tool, who enter information for me, and I do something else helpful for them. We’re using a black market bartering system. And I’m typing out all the information to send them, with metadata about where I expect each fact to go, etc.

This is such a disheartening mess to deal with that it makes me look forward to leaving my job soon.

42

I’ll echo all of that but add that because they were intended to be used by people who do this every day, they are not configured in a way that makes them particularly user friendly, so when something isn’t obvious figuring it out can be a nightmare. For instance, our system is supposed to autopopulate expenses that are charged on an itinerary like flights, hotels, and rental cars. Now, that works great (mostly) when you are flying major carriers, using chain hotels, and renting cars that are “within policy”. However, when you have to get some puddle jumper that will fly out to Kodiak Island, or are going to some ass-end-of-nowhere test site where the only hotel within two hours is Jolene’s Motel (“Color TV and Cable!”), or have to rent a special vehicle to carry a bunch of tools and Pelican boxes, the system starts throwing up all kinds of exceptions, warnings, and errors, and clearing those out is a nightmare of obfuscated issues and obscure settings.

And I fucking swear that some of the real people who are somewhere in the backroom processing all of this crap get their job satisfaction out of making this process as difficult as possible because when the report gets pushed back with minimal explanation or over stupid shit like, “A photographic image of the receipt is no acceptable; it must be scanned into a signed PDF and accompanied by Form XX.XXX signed by your direct manager, project manager, finance manager, and division director,” as if that somehow validates a receipt for $20 worth of gas that I only expensed separately because they make such a raging stink about prebuying gas from the rental company at a $0.50/gal premium even though the time it took me to find a gas station, fuel up, scan the receipt, and add it to the report is more than the extra ten bucks it would have cost to just let the rental company take care of it.

Stranger

43

Not in finance if he’s spending that long doing expense reports. The reason expense reports in so many workplaces are harder to fill out is that it means you don’t have to employ as many people in finance.

44

What has happened with automation, and no administrative assistance is that the work has been pushed up. Not down.

About time.

45

My last company used SAP / Concur for expenses. Some people here on the boards have said they like it, but to me it seemed terrible. Partly, this was due to the company doing precisely zero training on it. Actually, it’s worse than that - I was issued a binder full of instructions for the web site, not the app, which what we actually used. Turns out they’re quite different. I asked for help, got directed to the accounting department, and it turned out they didn’t know how to use it.

After repetition I was able to make it work for me some of the time, but was continually astonished at how badly it seemed to be designed. Some expenses had data fields that only appeared after saving and opening a second time. It defaulted to cash reimbursements (which we rarely ever did), and wouldn’t match credit card expenditures until days after the fact. No way to change that, and if you made a mistake the system would suddenly send you a check you didn’t ask for or merit.

Seemed so much easier to use the Expensify app, as I did at two other companies. But I was just shocked at how shoddy Concur was, and how the company didn’t give a thought to helping anyone do it right. I finally said this directly to one of the execs in a meeting, who seemed unaware that this was an issue, while everyone else nodded in agreement.

46

This was a real time killer for me when trying to see patients and document everything that “needed” documenting. So frustrating.

47

I think I know what you are working on. It takes a full time person to manage it. And this is a small company.

48

Don’t get me started on Teams and shared, group documents in Ms Office.

I write twice as many reports from the database.

49

I won’t start on Teams, but will finish here. Had a meeting today with Three other people. I was sent a link to Zoom and one to Teams.

Uhhhh…

50

I very much agree with you. But respect for the Admins and Secretaries for handling this kind of mind-numbing stuff for years. I do think workplaces have gone about changing this to the detriment of teamwork. It was much easier before all the software came about to “make your life easier” and all it did was increase the amount of headache each person has to deal with instead of a specialized admin. Meanwhile, little work is getting done on the project because we’re all about accountability now.

I understand the need for accountability. But I do agree the pendulum has swung a little too far on this stuff. Either you hire reliable people, or you don’t.

51

I’m not sure what you intend to say here but at my company all the director and above positions have administrative assistants who do this work for them, while worker bees have to do this for themselves, and line managers not only have to do their own reports but troubleshoot those of their direct reports when they get rejected. Which means even if I can avoid traveling more than once every month or two, I’m having to figure out and fix problems for a dozen other people with absolutely zero assistance from anyone who actually knows how this system is supposed to work, including who to contact to approve adding an employee to a particular non-standard charge number that isn’t in any list I could find.

When we had admins, I made sure that they knew they were appreciated for everything they did to make the machinery run smoothly and keep engineers from spinning their wheels with this stuff. Not every manager did and I took every opportunity to correct those attitudes. Now that we don’t have them and I have to seen an engineer out to pick up food for a meeting or order office supplies through our overly complex acquisition system, I’m losing their time and focus on doing their core work. You’re right it is “about time”, and specifically the time wasted by sending expensive people to go do tasks that they don’t know how to do quickly or correctly.

Stranger

52

18 person IS/GIS department. Including the head honchoes managing all computers and networking for 500 employees. It was/Is nuts. It still is really. We need ~ 4 more people. And that would still be nuts. Five satellite offices that we manage and do all the hardware for as well.

We FINALLY got an administrative assistant to at LEAST take care of ordering new printers and stuff.

We are all really busy. In 50 minutes, I need to do a Zoom call to colleagues.

Gonna be a long night. But I’m on deck. No one else in the dug out. And I’m the only hitter for this. It’s the way it goes.

I’m really trying to change that.

In my meeting, I’m going to start off with a Steven Write joke.

53

Oh, I know the answer to why this happened. Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, decided during the summer or early fall to by default add a Teams meeting link to all meetings put onto your calendar. Even if you created a Zoom meeting with the plugin in Outlook.

We’ve had to painstakingly coach almost everyone on 2 different teams who ever schedule meetings on how to disable this “feature” and still occasionally have someone waiting for us in Teams while we’re on Zoom.

54

You can tell that Stranger is enraged, not when he uses “fucking”, but when the 10-line sentence is missing a consequent. :wink:

55

So once you figure out which browser works with whatever system you’re accessing, why don’t you write it down?

Developing your own list (while far from perfect) would be a tremendous help in such a situation.

56

I do have lots of notes on how to work around various problems in our software tools. It’s become another category of information I need to do my job. I just think it shouldn’t be.

Well, that, and sometimes (especially when the rules change as they frequently do) these “cheat sheets” wind up in my “Cynical Humor Source Materials” file. Which has grown surprisingly thick.

The cheat sheet for how to requisition things is written in about 6 different kinds of ink on top of the original typed page. Then they replaced the system. I don’t try to requisition things any more. It’s actually partly determining the kind of project I choose to work on.

57

:imp: :man_facepalming: :roll_eyes:

I guess I’ll schedule a meeting about this. Or… maybe not.

58

Yup, we have the same issue at our agency, with our Teams/Outlook. We use Teams, by default, for all of our internal calls, but we have some clients who either (a) can’t use Teams, or (b) have a strong preference for Zoom or WebEx. When we set up meetings/calendar invites for meetings with them, we include a meeting link for their preferred platform, but Outlook now insists on also putting in a Teams link, and invariably, when the meeting starts, someone winds up going to the Teams call.

59

This is supported by research. A colleague just the other day posted a link to an article of his:

…which, while nominally about cryptography (which is what “crypto” means, thank you very much, not “cryptocurrency”–don’t be lazy when it reduces meaning!), goes into this at some length.

60

In an odd benefit of being hard of hearing, and working from home now. 90% of my communication to coworkers is through the written word.

It’s great. I like all of them a lot, but really, I’ve got work to do, send me an email or a slack. I’ll get to it.