This is the time of year when I wish I had taken up another career. The summer brings a new level of tedium in the form of surveys. We now have a fancy survey data repository which takes a lot of the grind out of the task when it comes to compensation as most of our jobs have already been matched to the survey job matches. We also have a new person, Tina, dedicated to surveys in our corporate head office and when I ask Big Bad Boss about European surveys, he does one of his dismissive arm waves and tells me Tina will be doing all that. Great if that is true, but Big Bad Boss does not realise just how toxic Tina can be.
We have a Teams meeting about the survey submissions and Tina displays a long list of benefits surveys with my name against. Oh, I say, I thought they could be done centrally now we have all our benefits on a database and are using a new portal to submit to Mercenary Brokers. Tina does not show her teeth on the call, but afterwards calls me to tell me if I think I am going to get out of doing any surveys this year, I have another think coming. I tell you the woman is a harpy.
Tina sets up another call with all the regions to talk about Mercenary survey specifically. So, our new resource is just another person telling me what to do. Not helpful. She asks me if I have used the Mercenary portal. Well, I have been submitting data to it for years, I say. But have I actually used the portal, she demands. Well, no, obviously. I can see this is just her way of trying to make me look stupid in front of everyone. I do not know if I do look silly, but she is not coming across too well either.
Country submissions
I ask my colleague Lazy Susan to look at one of the country submissions. I mean how difficult can it be? It is too hard for Susan apparently, as she comes back to me with a load of questions. I should point her at Tina, but I do not want Tina crowing to herself that we do not know what we are doing in Europe. I have a look myself. We have a total of 15 countries to complete, but only three are due this month. I get started on Czech. I want to have them done before they are due because I am not giving Toxic Tina an opportunity to hassle us.
The benefits data part is simple. We do not have many benefits in Czech and what we have is recorded on a database, so it is just a matter of transferring data from one screen to another. It annoys me that we could not map the data centrally, but hey, I will just have to plod on and get it done. I worry about company car data, but luckily this survey only asks for policy data, and I know that off the top of my head. It is not what we do in practice in most countries, but i wi’ll have to do. Whenever we submit survey data, we end up making some assumptions. I am sure other companies do the same, I’m sure many submissions are much less accurate, and I often wonder about the quality of the data we get back.
Ridiculously, a difficult part of the survey is completing company data like revenue and headcount for the individual countries. Our financial reporting is set up by business unit rather than by country, so I have to run a particular report and create a pivot table to get data in the format I need. I send this to the other regions as they will have the same problem. I copy in Tina. In my opinion, this is the sort of thing Tina should have already done centrally.
Central data reporting?
I complete the next country, Poland, and find the fields are subtly different, not reflecting differences in typical benefits offering, but just asking for the same data in a completely different way. I have to admit that means that mapping centrally would have been harder than I thought, but I still think we should have done it. Huff.
By the time I have done three countries, I’m losing the will to live. Yawn. I decide to train Lazy Susan on the next one so she can do some of the rest. It stresses me a bit to think of the number of errors Susan will make; she really is not good with anything involving numbers despite her role in reward, but I refuse to do them all myself. Between us, we get all the countries submitted before the next call. Tina is snarky with the other regions about meeting the deadlines. She cannot hassle us as ours are all done, but she still tries to assert her authority by telling us we will have to deal with the data queries when they come through. Of course, I say, through gritted teeth.
I hear that my colleague in Asia has complained about Tina, as has my colleague in Latin America. I wonder what Tina’s US colleagues think as they must share an office with her too. I make sure that Big Bad Boss knows we had to spend as much time on the surveys this year as before, perhaps even more as there was little central coordination. Sometimes these little hints have an unexpected impact.
Later I hear that Tina has moved to our IT department. I can think of no better place.
Next time…Candid does battle with AI