In today's workplace it appears that hard work and a job well done are rewarded with more work. A coworker once complained to me about "shit rolling down hill", but I believe it would be more accurately described as "shit is attracted to competence". My one friend sometimes refers to her job as the 'pooper scooper', and sadly it seems true. She's capable of cleaning up the mess, and so mess gets dumped on her.
It would seem corporations are organized to reward the incompetent and punish those who actually get the job done.
Organizational charts should look something like this:
In reality, most organizations look like this:
So how is it that mindless crap machines remain employed? To put it in corporate buzz lingo, these are employees that are 'non-value add'. Only, they are worse than that, they are drains on the company. I'm sure you know at least one of these people. Someone who is not just awful at their job, but that makes the jobs of others more difficult, time-consuming, stressful, and unforgiving. Or worse, they not only create useless chaos within the company, but waste the time and money of suppliers and customers as well.
Example time! Let's say someone in purchasing doesn't understand when he's asked to quote a change, and instead he runs off and has the supplier implement the change. The change was only being discussed and may not have been the final solution. Others were just looking for a cost estimate to evaluate this solution. Here the purchasing person has created extra work for the supplier, cost his company money, and frustrated coworkers who may have been evaluating other cheaper, quicker, better solutions.
The mistakes and piles of crap created by incompetent workers intensifies over vacation periods. For example, perhaps a competent employee takes a day off to attend a funeral. You'd think one day off wouldn't result in too much work to catch up on, but you'd be wrong. While that competent employee is grieving, someone with less ability is trying to cover for them and creating mountains out of mole hills.
Not that this is something I have any experience with. But, let's say a problem becomes well broadcast in that one day of absence and several people learn about it. It becomes something that requires weekly meetings and ends up taking 7 months to resolve because of who became involved. That same problem, which had an easy solution, which was implemented and working fine, could have been handled in 3 weeks with minimal pain.
Perhaps an illustration will help. The graph below represents the size of a problem based on who is working on the problem.
As you can see, the problem quickly becomes overgrown in the hands of the incompetent employee. This leaves the competent employee forced to resolve the problem, but it will take him more time and effort to do so.
Vacation is similarly a problem when the incompetent employee leaves for 2 weeks with all kinds of open issues in need of resolution. Someone else will be forced to clean up the mess, and the vacationer can return to find his problems resolved.
Actually, perhaps that is the strategy of the incompetent employees. "I don't know how to fix this, so I'll just let it sit until someone else takes care of it". I want to give adults more credit than that, but perhaps to do so would be foolish. Perhaps they are acting like a child asked to do a chore. "If I do this poorly, or wrong so mom has to do more work to fix it, then she'll never ask me to do this again!"
Which brings us back to the question of, WHY DO THESE PEOPLE HAVE JOBS?
I want to hang the real organizational chart on my cube wall. I feel your pain.
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