Your dumbest workplace rules/policies here

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

They do things differently there.

You have to wonder how much of this un- or counterproductive stuff is motivated by the norms of the toxic workplace: not to treat people rationally or as human beings like yourself, but as simple instruments of your (or the front office’s) will.

Every management meatball ought to ask themselves: Do we hire people first and foremost for good work, helpful service, and building business in the long run? Or simply to follow orders, carry out policy, and make the numbers look good for people they will never see?

The policy makers mentioned herein have either never questioned the norm of toxic workplaces, or come down squarely in favor of it for personal reasons - ie: they need the power over others, or need to please those with power over them. In any case, building a solid business is far from their minds.

42

Yeah. That sucks. I would definitely express the problem to your manager without blaming your co worker.

“I find that I am tied up with several clients that are not mine and I am getting concerned that my other work may suffer. Can you look into this?”

The next question SHOULD be? Well, why isn’t Joe Shmoe talking to Mr. Client?

Of course you have no earthly idea.

43

It sounds like the Nuns are running your company

Many years ago, I attended Catholic High School that had a rule addressing this problem. At any given time, a teacher could demand that a girl kneel, and if her skirt did not touch the floor, she would get a detention and a fifty cent fine for a uniform viloation. In my case, it could cost me a detention and half a dollar if the knot of my tie did not cover the top button of my shirt, a detention and a dollar for an untucked shirt, and so on.

44

But you see, my job is not to spend substantial amounts of company time cleaning up the messes of an incompetant co-worker. If I have to spend X hours a week (in my case, generally about 5) clearing up bullshit messes left behind by (for example) the lady who subs for me on weekends, then that’s 5 hours I’m not spending performing my own work - a net loss to the firm. If I have to spend 5 hours a week cleaning up stupid bullshit mistakes she made because she refuses to learn how to perform basic tasks, then that’s a little more than 10% of my work-week lost to preventable error.

Why would you not want to know one of your employees is incompetant?

Other people’s incompetancy frequently affects my job performance.

Let me give you an example: My boss works 6 days a week. Therefore, he has three assistants on a rotating schedule. The main person (me) working weekdays, a second person (C) working weekday evenings, and a third person (S) working only Sundays (usually a 4 - 5 hour shift).

S is fundamentally incompetant. She refuses to learn (or use) any of the procedures in place. She won’t use document styles, can’t file documents properly, and fucks up financial monitoring tasks with a regularity that’s positively astounding. Any work she performs must be redone. Quite often, it takes exponentially more time to redo the work than it took her to perform it in the first place. As an addition, she regularly renders office equipment unusable (she’s killed three PCs this year alone - largely through particularly boneheaded downloading that infected them with malware sufficiently virulent to kill the machine - only purest luck has prevented it from bombing our servers according to my Help Desk guys).

S performs 5 hours of “work” every other week (on average). It takes me a an average minimum of 5 hours per week to clean up her messes (in three years at this position it’s never taken me less than 3 and often more than 10 hours to do triage and clean up).*

Hence, mathematically, it’s sucking up twice as many manhours to repair her incompetance as she even works. And, the hours her incompetance sucks up are peak hours, as opposed to her own hours, which are not peak. By “peak”, I mean regular business hours when my boss, his clients, the other departments of the firm, and various regulatory agencies can expect to have my full attention on my actual tasks - as opposed to having to blow those hours cleaning up stupid bullshit messes that wouldn’t exsist if S had anything resembling “competance”.

Why in hell would you not want to know about a situation like that?** As a professional person, I’m operating under the assumption that part of being a professional person is bringing issues to the attention of my supervisor - in case he or she isn’t aware of them. If I see something going really wrong, how is it not incumbent upon me to point it the hell out to someone who might be able to fix it? There are a host of reasons a supervisor might not have noticed an incompetant person - and one of them, to be blunt, is that their co-workers might be covering up for them in the name of being professional. If I’m repairing S’s fuck-ups before they become sufficiently critical as to cause a major malfunction (as I am), if I don’t speak up, how will my boss ever know there’s a problem? My boss has no idea really what I do - or how I do it. If everything appears to be functioning normally (because I’ve fixed the gross negligence of S), how would he know something’s wrong if nobody tells him because of a short-sighted policy like yours? You’d really rather your employees just let the house burn down without shouting fire?
*I’m averaging over the week, naturally - quite often her fubars are of such nature as to be uncovered some time other than first thing Monday morning. They crop up throughout the week. Even on weeks when she wasn’t in on the Sunday beginning the week, I inevitably find (and correct) something. I’ve never gone a full week without something cropping up.

**I have pointed out the situation with S to various persons. Frequently, and with increasing vigor. The reasons she hasn’t been replaced have largely to do with the nature of her position (extremely part-time hours, and my boss is highly difficult to work for) and the fact that my boss is a fucking loon.

45

I used to work for a Subway-style sandwich company that was run with military efficiency. People would come in randomly twice a month to test the employees and survey the store. Some guy would stand behind you with a stop watch and you had to make a sandwich of his choosing in 30 seconds or less–or you’d be marked down. The jars on the shelves all had to have their labels facing the same way, or you’d be marked down. I figured that was okay–it was the cleanest restaurant I’ve ever worked in, after all-- but they actually took out a ruler and measured the cucumber slices. If they were not approximately 4mm in width (or whatever), you’d get marked down.

I mean, come on.

The same place also had a stupid-ass policy of never refunding anyone’s money. In all the years I have ever worked as a cashier, I have never seen this. On my first day this angry customer asked for his money back, I gave it to him, then asked the manager how to void the order. My manager REAMED me for it, and turned to the customer and screamed at him to get the fuck out of the store. The cash drawers have no room for error, and if a mistake is made, the manager has to stay after and write all the shit out by hand, including a written explanation for why each error was made, even if it’s ‘‘Guy asked for medium soda and then changed his mind and decided he wanted a large.’’

Dumbest fucking thing I ever heard of in my life.
My local bank has a dumb-ass employee policy that requires the tellers to use your first name three times in every customer interaction, or else the customer gets something (I don’t remember what.)

This is annoying on two levels. One, it’s completely and utterly fake.

‘‘How can I help you today… looks at bank account info Christina?’’
‘‘Can you please enter your pin, Christina?’’
‘‘Have a lovely day, Christina.’’

Two, it seems kind of rude to address someone by their first name if you don’t even know them and they haven’t instructed you to do so. When I worked at a restaurant we were asked to do this whenever someone used a credit card–address the customer by their first name. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. My elders have always been ‘‘Mr./Mrs./Ms.’’ unless I was given explicit permission to call them otherwise.

46

This is an old one, but it was still dumb. It also illustrates how far we’ve come.

Back in 1987 or so, I was working at a place where we were all excited because we would be getting e-mail. (See, I told you it was old.) It wasn’t Internet e-mail; this was only in our office. But even with this limited capability, e-mail would hopefully put a stop to all the paper memos flying around, would be good for the environment, etc. The Big Boss was solidly behind it–until she learned that one employee could e-mail another, or indeed, a whole group of others, without her knowing.

So she implemented a policy that all e-mails had to be copied to her. That wasn’t enough; she spoke with the network guys and had them twiddle something such that every e-mail message generated was automatically copied to her, and directed to her printer. She would review the paper copies at her leisure and have her secretary file them. Kind of negated the whole"stop using paper" argument.

End result? After a couple of messages just to try things out, nobody used e-mail. We simply phoned each other.

47

My company does not allow employees to go outside on breaks. It’s not enforced very well, as evidenced by the many smokers who sneak out the back door, but come ON. No wonder the place feels like a prison.

48

I look forward to your inevitable pitting.

49

I encountered the same thing at the Christian school I attended - try finding a dress (we weren’t required to wear a uniform) that was less than 3" from the ground while you were kneeling - circa 1972 (mini skirt mania in full swing).

No one, to my knowledge, has ever enforced our company’s rule.

VCNJ~

50

I find that few people actually listen to the spiel, but I say it anyway because higher-ups often call in on their days off to ask another higher-up about something. Every job where I’ve had to answer phones, I’ve gotten a “Is this [insert name of company]?” several times immediately after telling them what company I’m answering for. I even get people who interrupt my spiel just to ask me what company they’re calling; they’re not the only ones who interrupt, though. [sub]::grumbles about the rude people::[/sub] The worst ones are the morons who are either convinced that my name is the name of the company (they’d be pretty strange names, even for “ethnic” names) or think it’s really “cute” to go “Oh, hi [insert name of company]!” enthusiastically in response to a spiel. It’s not cute or funny and it’s really damned annoying.

When the work I receive depends on another person’s completed work, you better be damned sure that I’m going to make sure that their work is not only being done on time, but is completed properly. It’s not my job to fix their mistakes, but it is my job to continue along the track of whatever they were doing. If I am finished with my things on the proper timeline and my coworker cannot finish theirs so that I can continue along on the timeline (thus making their work late), I have every right to make sure they know that they’re not doing what they’re supposed to. If it’s because of slacking and they don’t respond to a nice chat about how I need them to get things done in a timely manner, I have every right to bring it up to my boss. I don’t currently work under a system where other coworkers’ actions really affect me, but I have dealt with the “incompetence spoils my work” issues in the past. Even in work situations, there are times when groups compile reports and if the person harvesting data is slacking, the person who compiles the data into a professional report is the one who’s going to get shafted both by the data harvester and their boss. Your system doesn’t really work in certain situations and puts undue pressure on the person in the middle of the chain.

51

Have pity on the poor wage slave who is required to say, 6000 times a day:

“Will you be saving blah-dee-blah percent today with your blah-dee-blah membership card?”

Cause Og help her if she forgets.

52

Ah, but sadly, Borborygmi has not created a fictionalized Performance Management process. Either Borborygmi works with me or has suffered the effects of a poorly designed eAppraisal software.

If the steps he’d outlined weren’t in and of themselves ridiculous, add an entirely confused organization that has changed the deadlines for designing those goals five times because they “forgot” they have employees who are away for a significant period and can’t meet the deadlines.

If only my compensation were not so tightly tied to completion of the eAppraisal. :frowning:

53

We just found out that even when callers are not booking travel we have to mention that we have a team of hotel specialists who can assist travelers with their hotel accomodations. It doesn’t matter why they are calling (to change an existing flight, to inquire about the programs we service, inquire about point balances, etc.) If not, and it’s on a call that is being evaulated, we get marked off big points for it. Everyone’s scores have taken a hit because of this senseless crap. It’s the travel agency equivalent of “You want fries with that?”

Oh, and we can’t just mention that we have a team of hotel specialists, we have to sound enthusiastic about it, too or it doesn’t count. What if every McDonald’s employee told you, “and while you are enjoying one of our delicious Big Macs would you like to enhance your McDonald’s dining experience by savoring the rich flavor of our hot golden french fries?”

54

I’d love that because it would make me laugh my ass off.

55

Thank-you-for-calling-Suncoast-where-you-can-now-subscribe-to-Dish-network-this-is-Zsofia-how-can-I-help-you? <GASP>

56

One truck firm always had the same response. This is Gross. May I help you.

I feel for Little Debbie employees if they have to spout the company selling point. Good morning. Little Debbie has a snack cake for you.

57

I had a friend who worked at Chik-fil-a, where they had to say “It’s a great day at Chik-fil-a!” The reason being that “you can’t say that without smiling!” with the vowel sounds and all. I assure you, you most certainly can if you put your mind to it.

58

My husband worked for a financial institution, where one of their rules was that all employees had to disclose all financial holdings of themselves and their spouses. It may even be some federal rule, I don’t know.

So I had the great conversation where his boss called me and said I had to tell them all this stuff. WTF? I don’t live in a community property state, which means I don’t even have to tell MY SPOUSE what “holdings” I have, and if I don’t have to tell him, why should I have to tell his employer?

Really annoyed me.

59

Oh yes. They hire Press Gainey who also does the same “customer satisfaction” crap for every other hospital or health care facility acroos the U.S.

We got it as well :rolleyes: . We’re supposed to “strive for 5”. 5 meaning “excellent care” . Good is not good enough. When the surveys go out we darn well better get all 5’s ( they can rate from 1-5).
I refuse to say any of that scripted spew as well. It sounds stiff and phony and pt’s can spot it a mile away.

60

A while back, a cow-orker complained that my boss was violating the federal fair wage (or whatever it is called) act. She complained that we should be getting overtime (we were classified as salaried forever). So my boss had to hire a lawyer to look into it, and eventually my boss made us all hourly (even though some of us clearly should be salaried) and she had to pay us back overtime pay.

Well, to get revenge on everyone by making being hourly as painful as possible with quadruple-redundant “timesheet” requirements:

(1) We have to send an e-mail cc’ed to everyone when we arrive, whenever we go to lunch or a break & come back, and when we leave. This would be the equivalent of punching a timeclock. Fair enough.

(2) At the end of each day we have to fill out an Access form with our in and out times, plus a detailed accounting of all the activities we did that day (even though we do basically the same thing every day).

(3) At the end of each week, we output to a Word document the past week’s entries from that Access form and e-mail it to our payroll person.

(4) We then have to print out the sheet, sign it, and submit it.

So basically, there’s four levels of reporting here - the e-mails (punching the time clock); the Access database; the Word doc sent in an e-mail, and the Word doc printed and signed.

And what’s funny is no one every looks at any of it. Most of it is completely pointless and could easily be streamlined, but it seems like boss likes making everything as complicated as possible just to make us miserable.