Conversation: “If I ran a company” — a view from data-entry
Tuesday, July 31st, 2007This is from a recent conversation with a guy who works at a big company in Manhattan. He was angry and exasperated. I liked it when he started to talk about what would happen if he ran a company.
Me: “So you told them, ‘I’m taking a long vacation.’”
Him: “Yeah. And I got back, and I missed it, I’m glad I did, but they had a whole mess while I was away. Something was being done wrong with data entry and I get back and I hear the supervisors talking with the management in the other room, and they’re blaming us. The supervisors are blaming us for doing what they told us to do in the first place.”
Me: “Yeah, that’s what I do with team-building, I get people working together in the same room on the same thing, playing together, so there isn’t all this extra communication.”
Him: “OK. And they’re hiring people, my supervisor trained someone new recently. And she asked me to show how to do this procedure. I was showing this procedure, and she comes back, and she says, ‘That’s not how you do it.’ And I’ve been doing data entry for two years. Two people have showed me how to do it. She says, ‘That’s not how you do it.’ She shows the new person all these steps, a lot more than the way I’ve been doing it.
“I say, ‘I’ve been doing it this way for two years and no one ever showed me how to do it that way.’
“She’s mad at me because I’m not doing it her way. But her way takes longer. The way I’ve been doing it is easier. She doesn’t know what I’ve been doing for two and a half years?
“And I ask her, ‘Is that what the head office was complaining about this weekend?’ She says, ‘No, it was something else.’
“So I’m going to do it her way now, it takes longer, but whatever.”
Me: “Yeah, I worked at a company where the president of the company not only said he knew what people who worked ‘under’ him should be doing, but what everyone actually was doing. Tens of people. And he thinks he knows what everyone is doing each day? He didn’t know. And whenever something came up where he didn’t know, he’d ignore it. He’d tell people how to do their jobs, and they’d be like, ‘A- you can’t do it this way. When you do it this way, these problems happen. We’ve been doing it this other way.’”
Him: “I don’t buy this whole ‘hierarchy’ thing. Just because someone’s a supervisor doesn’t mean she’s ‘better’ than you are. If I ran a company, I wouldn’t have all these levels. I’d get everyone together and say, ‘We’re all a team. We have these goals.’ And people would do it. We’d get it done.
“I’ve been doing this job for two years. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t train the new people coming in. I know how it’s done, not the supervisors. The supervisors don’t know everything I do.
“Companies don’t run like that, without levels.”
Me: “Most companies don’t yet, but I’ve worked with some.”
Him: “But I’ve never worked at a company like that.”
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