3 ms·
A pretty good list of rules to go by. Also I think it's important to have a look at the system which enabled the person to make the mistake. One story a forme
by mattm 16y ago
A pretty good list of rules to go by.
Also I think it's important to have a look at the system which enabled the person to make the mistake.
One story a former colleague told me about a former workplace. The company would issue commission checks every month to their sales people. For some reason, they were using a spreadsheet to calculate the totals. A new hire in charge of the spreadsheet to issue checks did a sort on the names but didn't include the other columns to be sorted together. As a result, some people who just started working there got issued checks for thousands of dollars and some of them took off with the money. It resulted in months of headaches as the company attempted to sort everything out.
The person who accidentally sorted the spreadsheet got fired. However, no one else got disciplined. IMO, the people who allowed this system to be setup and used are the people who should have been responsible.
- skowmunk 16y agoI would agree, that the people who set up the system should have atleast reviewed the work of the newbie, if they don't have a proper process documentation for managing it. (I often found, that excel based worksheets, though used extensively and sometimes for some really big stuff, are not accompanied by decent documentation) I like to think, that when an employee doesn't perform well, there are three major sources of factors contributing towards that bad performance: 1) the employee 2) the management immediately above him/her 3) The top management which consiously or otherwise sets up the prevalent culture, which often can be an enabler or a disabler of performances. In reality though, it could be a mix of factors from any one or more sources, in varying proportion.