Furious!

Dyr

My employer today ran an online survey for all staff relating to work conditions etc, sounds like a good idea doesnt it? Thats what i thought until i got halfway through the questions and found one of the questions directly asked how staff felt the dept. i work for performed. Then, later, asked in a very prejudicial manner how they rated one of our services. Which, as and from, two weeks ago I am primarily responsible for. No other dept was mentioned in this survey and all the other questions were generic types which made no specific reference to services etc. I feel like my dept (which consists of five people ) and myself have been discriminated against massively.

Essentially the entire workplace have been asked to sit in judgement on our dept alone, and we have to go about our daily jobs with these people knowing this. I've already made my feelings known and will be in touch with the union but i cant see how they could have done this without contravening employment laws in some way, im having a browse through the irish statute book but its heavy going. Anyone have any idea if they have indeed crossed a line in the view of irish law? Or a good resource to find out??

cheers

Dyr

And apologies for excessive use of "which" in the above post. Im not meself right now

colincarnate

Bambi wrote:

And apologies for excessive use of "which" in the above post. Im not meself right now

no it's fine

Spacedog

what's the result, maybe they're happy with you guys so far?

bandraoi

ok you've been treated in a ****ty manner but I wouldn't say going to the unions is the way to go about it.

I'd try to one up him by making them look bad for doing that to you while simultaneously making yourselves look good.

If I were you I'd come up with my own questionnaire specifically relating to your own department but in a much more positive and attaching a covering letter explaining that you've taken over in the last month and want to know how you can improve your relationships with each of the other departments.

koneko

Does your daily job affect other people in the company more than other departments? Such as for instance if you're (just an example) helpdesk staff working for the IT department, your job would relate directly to how other people find your service.

If it isn't anything like that it does seem a bit unfair, and I would inquire with the HR department.

Dyr

We are one of the internal services depts (yeah its IT, the universal whipping boys ) but we are just one in a number of internal services dept and we're the only one thats being singled out for individual attention which smacks of an agenda (inter-departmental politics is a full contact sport in here).

Results really arent the issue to me, We could get a 100% rating here and i'd still feel aggrieved. We (and then more specifically, me) as employees have been held up for judgement by every other employee in here, because, i suspect, one of the people who devised this survey had an axe to grind. They might as well circulate our yearly reviews to all staff for appraisal.

I feel some of my rights in the workplace have been abused. I've taken some **** in jobs but the fact that this is in black and white really makes me want to hang someone out to dry for it.

seamus

TBH, it would have to be a context thing.

If such a thing happened in our company, and there were two questions, such as, "How do you find the IT dept", and then a second one, "How do you find the IT Helpdesk", it wouldn't phase me that much.

IT is an expensive department for most companies - and it's one that business types don't see as a money generator, more a business expense, so the reason they would query it directly is to ensure that they're getting their money's worth.
A helpdesk is usually front line - most of the time, it's the only part of IT that users will deal with. As such, if a helpdesk isn't performing to standard, then users aren't going to use it, and the company isn't getting its money's worth.

Dyr

seamus wrote:

TBH, it would have to be a context thing.
IT is an expensive department for most companies - and it's one that business types don't see as a money generator, more a business expense, so the reason they would query it directly is to ensure that they're getting their money's worth.

QUOTE]

if they wanted to query our business procedures thats not the way to go about it, this was a survey to ascertain the good and bad factors of working for our employer. Both of the questions i refer to could be viewed as prejudicial as they are weighed negatively ie the the phrase "out of order" is used in regards to a service and a question on the performance of "IT personnel" (note: not dept) is included.

but as I said its not the questions, its the fact. We/I alone being singled out in this survey and as far as im concerned the implication in that is clear. The dog is being given a bad name. I/we intend making our feelings known to those responsible in strong terms and if i find a line has been crossed legally then i intend to act on it. So my questions remains: does anyone know of good resources to check employment laws in regard to this, ive tried the irish statute site but its somewhat long and unwieldy

cheers

Gillo

I've no idea who you work for or how good you (and your department) are. I don't really care and am not judging you or your dept, but in response...

I know it might sound like a stage comparision but, your job is baiscally to provide a "service" to the other dept's by providign IT support. How efficently you deal with a problem when it arises can directly affect how someone else works, eg one of the sales reps laptops goes down, it's alot harder for him/her to make sales and bring in revenue. How efficently you deal with the problem will directly effect how soon the rep can start to generate revenue again. Therefore if the way your dept works can be streamlined or "speeded up" the better a company can run as a whole.

Hope that makes sense, so it's possible that the questionaire was done simply to improve the companies operations. Having said that surely if teh questionaire was to be specific on your dept I'd of thought you should of at least been made aware of it beforehand if not actually involved in it.

RicardoSmith

Maybe people aren't happy with IT? Maybe they recieved a lot of complaints about it. Generally blaming IT for problems can be an easy out for many departments. I remember once my team got a email from a outside company, about some minor issue. The mail had been passed back and forwards between another department and the outside company about some problems with a project that they were both working on adn they our team had nothing to do with. I happened to scan down through the whole mail to see the message trail as it was, and discovered that the other department had been blaming their delays on our team to the outside company! There was a blazing row about it as our manager was furious, that the goodwill and reputation of the team was being smeared.

But it shows you what can happen.

A lot of the way to solve these kinda issues if you have a strict procedure to deal with all IT issues and these issues are tracked and logged along with the response and resolution in a database. Then pull stats from these for every meeting. Its the only way to fight this kinda rubbish. It quite amusing in a meeting when some manager is complaining about IT to pull out stats like you recieved 3 calls that month from that managers dept, all of which were caused by user stupidity, like dragging the task bar off screen and not being able to find it, or not saving their work for a month, then losing it when there was a power cut, or having their C drive full of MP3's and videos.

I remember once we managed to pull a report after a complaint about slow internet connections, that one department managed to spend 8 hours a day doing newspaper crosswords on the web. Very funny.

RuggieBear

RicardoSmith wrote:

Maybe people aren't happy with IT? Maybe they recieved a lot of complaints about it. Generally blaming IT for problems can be an easy out for many departments. I remember once my team got a email from a outside company, about some minor issue. The mail had been passed back and forwards between another department and the outside company about some problems with a project that they were both working on adn they our team had nothing to do with. I happened to scan down through the whole mail to see the message trail as it was, and discovered that the other department had been blaming their delays on our team to the outside company! There was a blazing row about it as our manager was furious, that the goodwill and reputation of the team was being smeared.

But it shows you what can happen.

A lot of the way to solve these kinda issues if you have a strict procedure to deal with all IT issues and these issues are tracked and logged along with the response and resolution in a database. Then pull stats from these for every meeting. Its the only way to fight this kinda rubbish. It quite amusing in a meeting when some manager is complaining about IT to pull out stats like you recieved 3 calls that month from that managers dept, all of which were caused by user stupidity, like dragging the task bar off screen and not being able to find it, or not saving their work for a month, then losing it when there was a power cut, or having their C drive full of MP3's and videos.

I remember once we managed to pull a report after a complaint about slow internet connections, that one department managed to spend 8 hours a day doing newspaper crosswords on the web. Very funny.

Apologies for going off topic a wee bit but I read a story the other day about the respect IT admins get....a network admin installed spyware on his supervisors computer because he was pissed off that his boss played solataire all day every day. Anyway it turned out the boss spent 75% of his working day playing solataire. the network admin was fired despite being a model worker for decades and proving his boss was a useless-card-playing-waster while the boss got a written warning...

Slightly more on topic....i've been attacked by superiors and made to look a fool in front of others because they wanted to get one over on my supervisor :mad: I hate office politics....there is no limit to how low people will stoop.

RicardoSmith

pekelly wrote:

Apologies for going off topic a wee bit but I read a story the other day about the respect IT admins get....a network admin installed spyware on his supervisors computer because he was pissed off that his boss played solataire all day every day. Anyway it turned out the boss spent 75% of his working day playing solataire. the network admin was fired despite being a model worker for decades and proving his boss was a useless-card-playing-waster while the boss got a written warning...

Installing spyware in the boss'es PC is an amazingly stupid thing to do. Thats just a lack of common sense.

pekelly wrote:

Slightly more on topic....i've been attacked by superiors and made to look a fool in front of others because they wanted to get one over on my supervisor :mad: I hate office politics....there is no limit to how low people will stoop

The only way to avoid office politics is not to work in an office. So either you learn to avoid it, or play the game. If you can't you'll get screwed over. Has happened to me a couple of times, when I ignored it.

seamus

RicardoSmith wrote:

Installing spyware in the boss'es PC is an amazingly stupid thing to do. Thats just a lack of common sense.

Indeed. The network admin may have been a model employee, but it sounds like he was lacking a backbone and decided to go the stupid route.

Dyr

gillo wrote:

I've no idea who you work for or how good you (and your department) are. I don't really care and am not judging you or your dept, but in response...

I know it might sound like a stage comparision but, your job is baiscally to provide a "service" to the other dept's by providign IT support. How efficently you deal with a problem when it arises can directly affect how someone else works, eg one of the sales reps laptops goes down, it's alot harder for him/her to make sales and bring in revenue. How efficently you deal with the problem will directly effect how soon the rep can start to generate revenue again. Therefore if the way your dept works can be streamlined or "speeded up" the better a company can run as a whole.

Hope that makes sense, so it's possible that the questionaire was done simply to improve the companies operations. Having said that surely if teh questionaire was to be specific on your dept I'd of thought you should of at least been made aware of it beforehand if not actually involved in it.

As ive mentioned before, if they want to review how we function, we can deal with it, theres a process for that . This had nothing to do with it. In an office with numerous internal services, we, not our department and not our processes alone were held up for
a) severe criticism that is pretty heavily implied by the questions, nature of the survey and our sole inclusion

b)for judgement by our fellow employees.

To me this is tantamount to public humiliation, which is why i would consider external action

As far as im concerned someone used this survey to play office politics, to get a cheap shot in for free, but they did it in such a way that consequences are now inevitable ahh ive explained all this folks, not much point running over old ground. feel free to take the debate off into areas you feel will be constructive

RicardoSmith

Do you know who drew up the survey, and do you know whose agenda is best served by this survey and by focusing on you and your team?

If the survey can be clearly seen as focusing on you alone, I'd say thats not allowed. But you'd have to be sure thats what its doing and that you haven't mis interpreted a badly worded question.