We are to the point of holding our proverbial house of cards together with bubblegum and duct tape. Welcome to the sh-t show indeed! Wake up management! We are going to crash and burn hard.
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EMIT seems to be holding together with duct tape and zip ties these days, at best
It will take more than a Valdez incident to change the course. DW is not one to make data driven decisions. He will stay the course at all costs because he's made up his mind.
I hate to say it but it’s going to take something on the scale of Valdez (not necessarily safety/environmental) to force the company to focus on something other than the bottom dollar.
We are outsourcing our ‘cash collection’ and other auditable things to cheaper companies.
We don’t want to pay competitive wages in cheaper companies, so we pay mediocre wages. In return, we get mediocre employees or employees who are just resume-building. We know this.
In 6mo-1.5 years the cheap employees resign, so we have a constant knowledge drain and understaffing. Work quality is hit-and-miss at best. Outsourced work is unrewarding, and rarely encourages the employees to understand enough of the process to do the work well.
The systems that ‘check’ the outsourced employees have glitches and miss things. There are still portions that are highly exposed to human error.
The outsourced centers, that collect our cash, don’t report directly to the business functions they serve. Instead, they report to a very large silo within the outsourced organization. Therefore, any problems and concerns flagged by the business have to go through layer-upon-layer of managers within the outsourced organization. Each of these managers has a reward and remuneration system that rewards just ‘making the problem go away.’ They can do this in a number of ways: gaslighting the business-line employee, not responding, fixing the immediate problem but not the root cause, or actually addressing the issue. All 4 actively take place.
KPIs measure the wrong things and are reported by an outsourced organization who is rewarded when they look like they are providing good services….not when they flag actual issues.
Internal audits stop at boundaries between discrete functions or geographic locations. Internal audits are not following workflow from inception to completion.
When the business line directly addresses problems at outsourced centers, it takes 3x the time and effort. It also needs to be worked by very high pay-grade US supervisors/managers…..because lower pay employees usually cannot influence change. Therefore, the whole setup justifies a top-heavy manager organization in HC10 locations….which is the exact opposite of what the company and culture need. (But self-perpetrates plenty of management positions for managers to move into.)
Despite all this, we are doubling-down on outsourcing critical functions.
Please do the math here. No worker-level or lower-level manager actually thinks this is a good idea. But we keep being told outsourcing moves forward, regardless.