Technology & MSG

It astounds me how often my coworkers and I are treated like children.

Fact: My time card is due at the end of the week. While the specifics of when are presently point of contention, the general time frame has never changed.

Fact: A day before my time card is due, I receive an email reminding me that my time card is due. This happens every week. Without fail. The email is always sent by a person, usually whom I’ve never met in person but is somehow responsible in some way for the completion and submission of time cards. I’m not being singled out for being late, either; the email is always sent to a large distribution list. A nagging reminder of what we all ought to know.

I’m an adult. So are all of my coworkers. When we all started with the company, the policies concerning time cards were explained in detail. We’re required to take annual training on the topic, which includes a test of the material. If you’re super late submitting your time card, you’ll get someone dropping you an email or calling you on the phone to ask you why you haven’t done it yet. There’s a untold number of reasons why you might not have submitted your time card, but I can’t conceive of a reason why you wouldn’t know when time cards are due.

I think about all the wasted manpower that my company must exert chasing down people who haven’t submitted their time cards. All of those reminder emails sent. All the phone calls. While a snap for someone to send an email to a large group, it takes a lot of additional effort across the board delete it. Think 2-3 seconds times tens of thousands of employees. Meanwhile, that’s drawing people’s attention away from their work.

Maybe the employees are busy. Maybe they’re out of town. Maybe the network is down. Maybe they forgot. Maybe they couldn’t get to a phone to tell their administrator to submit a time card for them. Maybe maybe maybe. I don’t really care.

The whole situation of wasted time and late time cards could be fixed with one simple change to policy: if you don’t submit a time card, you don’t get paid. Simple. Elegant. And I’d bet horrendously effective. Just like a child crawling across a hot stove top learns that it’s not something to repeat, going without a paycheck for two weeks would inspire most anyone to get it right in the future.

I’m a proponent of allowing people to make mistakes. Failure is part of life, yet at some point we — as a society — decided that failure is intolerable. It saddens me when I see kids that aren’t being allowed to learn from their mistakes, but it frustrates me when corporate bodies treat their employees the same way.

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Tags: learning, office, policies, time card