It’s difficult to pick topics to write about in a journal, especially when you are doing it on command. It seems like writing journal entries should be something you do because you feel the need to express yourself. I’ll try to come up with something in any case.
Last fall I took a business class, and in it we learned a lot about how businesses try to increase efficiency, motivate employees, and try to follow good business practices. All through the course I couldn’t help but notice how many ways my current employer follows poor business practices. In many ways it is the nature of the business, but ever since I began working there I felt that there were better ways to do things, and better ways to handle the employees.
Part of the problem is that there is a big division between the “classes” of people that work there. There are 3 groups, and they do not communicate very well, or try to help each other perform better. Everyone is very much focused on their own little piece of the job and don’t try to integrate with the rest of the company to make improvements. At the top level is management, which has its own business focus, trying to make the bottom line look good, and making decisions that affect everyone beneath them. In the middle are the account managers, who interface between the clients and the production area. At the bottom are the people that create the end product and send it out. Everyone has fairly distinct duties, but they do not have a good understanding of what anyone else does or how it is done. The lack of communication makes change difficult, even when it is clear that things could be better. In many instances the people at the bottom have ideas of what would be sensible changes, but cannot communicate with the management that could implement suggestions.
Another significant problem is that a large number of employees are temps. On one hand, because the workload changes almost daily, with large swings up and down, it is essentially impossible to have everyone work full time, so temps are a necessity. On the other hand, having such a large number of temps makes training difficult, and there is no sense of loyalty or commitment on the part of the people doing the work. If they do not maintain high standards, there is no consequence to the worker, even though it reflects poorly on the rest of the company. There is no incentive for good performance since they do not actually work for the company.
At the very least a number of current temps should be full time employees. There also needs to be a better compensation scheme based on performance. It is unfair for people who do excellent work to be compensated the same as people who do poor work. There is no incentive to perform well if the compensation and job security are the same regardless of the quality of work. There also needs to be better communication between the levels of employees. The people who make decisions needs to understand the needs, abilities, and concerns of the people who work for them, rather than making decisions based on what sounds like a good idea and is theoretically sound. The two rarely coincide with each other, and nobody reports back the true results because of the poor communication and apparent indifference from management.
Having taken a class on business it is especially clear how many things could be done better. Not only could the quality of work be improved, and be done in a more efficient manner, but the employees could be much more content with their job and feel like they truly belong to the company, rather than having no stake in what is being done.