It’s that time again. My annual review. It’s that special time of the year that I get to do my self appraisal (which I did two days ago) and await the verdict of my raise. Interestingly, I’m being reviewed by someone that doesn’t actually know me, isn’t familiar with my work, but does seem to like bunnies as much as I do. In fact, I believe he married one. I think I’ve done more of them than him though. ^_^
At any rate, I don’t like the review process. I do a self appraisal, which of course I rate myself high on because I’m comparing myself to other people that I see regularly fuck shit up and fail at their jobs on a pretty regular basis. Which reminds me of something I did last week. Last week, I had to fill out an employee satisfaction survey. There were multiple write in sections for specific attributes regarding my place of employment, which I overall enjoy. There are just a couple of areas that I am unhappy with; however, those areas are crucial to my fitting in with the corporate culture, and enjoying my job rather than loathing it.
I froze my twitter stream on the right to highlight my unhappiness. Regularly, I sit in the parking lot and rest my head against the steering wheel and ponder whether I should start the car aback up and drive home. It’s really just that terrible. And this goes back to my employee satisfaction survey (ESS). I mentioned these things were small and few, but critical to enjoying my job. What are those things? Correcting substandard behavior in employees/colleagues, and reward for hard work. They are small things in the grand scheme of things, but if let go they spiral into a very serious issue. Much like weeds in a garden, they are small but are a huge nuisance if you don’t take action when you notice things aren’t quite right. That’s where we’re at right now. I suppose I should say that’s where I’m at, because these issues have gotten out of hand.
I am doing clean up work for other people. My entire shift is, and although receiving unfinished work is part and parcel for the job and is completely acceptable to me and my colleagues, it’s the nature of the work and the way in which this work is given to us that is the problem. I don’t want to do work that is hours old, that could have been finished in 20 minutes. It does not motivate me to pick up your slack. Just to be clear, I am aware that there are often difficult things that may take precedence, and you get sucked up into handling those things because they are interesting or just plain necessary to get started on and make headway with. Yet, I find that most of these sorts of things are unsupported actions/applications which we are not obligated to perform in a timely manner, while these smaller easy to finish off tasks are just left behind. That annoys me to no end.
So then, how does that relate to my review? Well, I’m glad you asked. You see, my performance is based upon my morale, which is currently pretty low due to the failure of other people to do (what I consider to be) a good job at accomplishing their job. So my review may be an up hill battle as I seek to explain why I think I’m good at my job (which I am), but that isn’t always reflected in my performance due to (once again) the failure of my colleagues to properly complete tasks in a timely manner.
Le sigh.
I like silver better than gold, but not enough to let you keep it on.
