Observations on what companies do wrong #2
Every job I have ever had needed the following sign hanging over the door:
But no office has needed it more than the place that I am presently employed at. Here is a rundown of some of the redundancy in my day…
1. I have to send out a letter to customers that have short paid an invoice, making a copy of the letter for the collector and for the files in my department.
2. I have to keep a spreadsheet, sorted by date and then customer name, of any customers that get short pay letters. I also have to put this same information as a ‘note’ on each account in Oracle.
3. Once a month I am supposed to go through the files of short pay letters to see if any of the accounts have been paid.
4. Once a month the collector is supposed to go through their files of copies of the letters to see if any of the accounts have been paid.
5. Once a month someone in my department must look at the spreadsheet to see if any of the accounts have been paid.
Hrm, wait a minute….that is 3 people doing the exact same thing. Nevermind the fact that no one is even looking at the notes on the accounts in Oracle. When I brought up this clearly inefficient way of doing things in my department meeting earlier this week, I was met with an eye roll and the explananation of “we’ve just always done it that way.” Yet, all of this time I spend doing redunant things is time that could be better spent blogging or running amuck.
There are 4 people in my department that have the same job title as me, and the boss wants to hire 2 more people as some other work is not getting done. If the redundancy was eliminated it would only take 2 people doing this job. For argument’s sake, let’s say that everyone is making $30,000. That is $120,000 a year right now, and they want to hire 2 more people bringing that to $180,000 a year. Not including the wasting of paper and other supplies as a result of this redundancy, they could save $60,000 right now, or $120,000 when they hire the other 2 people, just by eliminating all of the redundant activities. However, all 4 of us are temps, which means they are paying out the ass for us through the staffing agency, so their loss is even greater than the $60,000 in the example.
Companies are idiots. The only thing they are good at is running an inefficient business, which is why it is so easy to be a slacker right under their noses and never get caught doing it. I spent 6 months working at Nissan’s corporate office as a temp and all I did was play on the internet all day, every day. I was making $15/hr but they were paying the staffing agency $30/hr for me and the other 19 temps that were there. I know for a fact that they guy sitting beside me did as little as me. Assume that I worked 24 40-hour weeks, which cost them $30/hr – that means they paid almost $29,000 for me for 6 months and for the guy beside me. That is close to $60,000 in only 6 months – and we got away with it because they had an inefficient way of doing things which allowed us to do nothing without it being obvious. If you assume that half of the temps there were slackers like me, then that is almost $300,000 in only 6 months. Think about that when you are car shopping and complaining about the high price of the new Sentra.
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