The Awful Truth About My Workplace Leadership, Part IV

These little rants are written as though addressed to elements of my company's leadership.  If you want to know more, look for the introduction to part I.

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I swear, I am going to get to some more interesting stuff, stuff about how you treat your people, the way you hire people, the "Muskogee Mafia," a certain kind of monitor that cost us about--oh, I think it was about half a million over ten years, even though it was utterly USELESS, most of them literally sitting in boxes for years and years, and was a huge waste of the money that little old people leave our organization in their wills.  I am going to get to all of that.  But you keep doing things on a day to day basis that make me say, "I can't leave that out. It's so bizarre.  Too 'good,' in a way, or 'bad,' in another way, not to mention."
 
Sooooooooo...let's talk about payroll.  Just for today.

I get paid by direct deposit.  For years, my "check" has hit the bank about five in the morning.  So I was a little surprised to see my balance basically unchanged by six a.m., but I didn't panic.  Maybe they just ran a little bit late this time, I thought.  But when I checked again about ten and didn't see it, I went to the boss.

Turned out you hadn't managed to get OVER NINETY HOURS OF MY TIME on that check!  All you had put on it was the pittance you pay for me being "on call" (and it is not industry standard, by the way, not by a long shot, hasn't changed in years and years and years)!  You didn't know what happened, you said, and you got right on it, and sure enough, by late afternoon, I was able to drive across town, pick up a check, and go deposit it. 

Good thing I didn't have anything on auto-draft, wasn't it?  Good thing neither the payroll place nor the bank had shut down early for Good Friday, wasn't it? But one of the reasons I don't have anything on auto-draft is that I've seen you characters in action for more than ten years.
 
How often you've screwed up my paychecks depends on how you count incidents.  Was the time where you forgot to put my raise on my checks for four solid months one incident, or eight (two-week pay periods)? (And by the way, you can see what a pittance the raise was--I hadn't noticed its absence from my checks!)  Was the time where you screwed up putting another raise on my checks for three successive pay periods (each time you said, "It'll  be on the next check!") one incident, or three?  And then there are the times where you just made it clear that you can't be counted on to add or subtract.  All of this has made me watch my checks very closely, believe you me!

Nor am I the only one.  I am not dealing with pay, per se, here, not in the sense of how much you pay.  I'll get to that in another post.  But you can take it to the bank: if you go to your long-term people, your key people, the people who have been around for a while, and ask them, "Have they ever screwed up your pay?" you will be astonished at the number of people that roll their eyes and say, "Yeah!  Duh!" I am not making this up.  Sometimes I think you people think I don't talk to anybody because I spend so little time talking to you.  But that's not the case.  I don't talk to you any more than I have to because I'm afraid what I really think will slip out.  I do talk to just about everyone else I meet across the system, and I hear a lot that you people think everyone's forgotten, or maybe never noticed in the first place.  I hear the outrageous stories.  I know what a deep-seated loathing there is for our leadership team throughout our system.  So, yeah, I've heard people talk about your payroll screwups.

You're infamous for it.  Everyone in the organization knows that getting people's paychecks right simply isn't a priority for you.  And that stinks on ice.  If there is one obligation pretty much everyone acknowledges bosses to have, it's getting people's checks to them right and on time.  I'm an old guy, see, and I have worked for a number of different companies.  And you know what?  None of them ever screwed up my pay.  Not once.  I worked for one firm for fourteen years and they never screwed up my pay.  I worked for another for four and they never screwed up my pay.  But you guys?  I think if I said you'd screwed up my pay ten times in ten years, I'd be giving you too much credit.

You outsourced your payroll recently.  I wonder if it was as the result of complaints?  If so, it took too long.  And furthermore, you're still not getting it right.  And lastly, think this kind of thing might contribute to people's "negative attitudes"?

Naaaaaaahh...couldn't be.  It's never the bosses' fault, is it?