Hooray for corporate policies!

There are things about working for a giant corporation that are just maddeningly absurd!

Basically, the company requires all employees to submit their goals for the year to their boss. Then the employee review and rating at the end of the year will depend partly on whether we are able to accomplish these goals. It sounds logical enough but the system is horrible.

First of all, we don’t get to customize our goals based on what we actually do… oh no. Our leaders send us our goals and we pretty much put our names on them and send them right back. The idea is supposed to be that we can do some revisions and even add some personal goals of your own but I’m convinced that the horrible form we use for this makes people just give up on attempting to make changes of any kind. To illustrate, the form was created in MS Word and has boxes where you fill the information in. The goals and descriptions that are already there fit the boxes perfectly. But here’s the fantastic part—these boxes DON’T get any bigger or smaller when you modify the data. In fact, if you add text to a box it will push all of the text from the whole column down so that it starts a huge trainwreck of overlapping boxes. Want to add new rows of goals? Good luck unless you are an MS Word expert and can manually insert extra text boxes to the form.

But it gets far worse than just the form. Our goals are basically the same for all employees with the same title in the department. This is fine for other teams that handle the normal workload, but I’m on the SPECIAL team. The truth is we often don’t have a single clue what we will be doing day in and day out. We might have no special projects that need to be completed in a day (rare) and can help with the regular workload or we might be losing our minds from all the work that is popping up. And everyone on our team specializes in a certain area so we are almost never actually working on the same project. Yet, here’s the kicker… the company requires everyone on the same team to have the same goals! And mind you these aren’t general “Complete all necessary work quickly and efficiently” goals… they have to be very specific about the quantity of work being done. For the teams handling the regular workload, this is fine. They do pretty much the same thing all day every day.
But of course they attempt to come up with a list of the same goals for our team as well, an IMPOSSIBILITY. It’s like trying to base the performance of cops, firefighters, security guards, and medics on the exact same criteria. Yes, they all serve the public but in completely different ways. So in order to get the best rating for the year, one of my goals from the geniuses at the top is to work an average of 3 files per day. The regular teams can do that… no problem; their files aren’t nearly as complex and time consuming as ours. People on my team might even manage that if they get lucky and get small, simple files and don’t have any special projects they are working on. But the fact is, we rarely even GET that many special files per day let alone work them! I’m so busy with my special projects that I’m lucky if I complete 3 files in a WEEK! Of course we complain to our leaders about this and they complain to their leaders, who complain to their leaders but it all comes down to “our goals are due now so just turn them in as is.” So I just sent goals stating the equivalent of “I am a doctor who will treat 300 random patients this year and my goals for the year are to cure 900 patients of salmonella.” Fantastic…