I'm quite surprised I haven't seen more NHS stories so far this week...
...as I'm sure stories of our beloved health service could fill a qotw on their own.

However - I'm just going to focus on appraisals. What a complete, utter, hopeless waste of time and effort. I have to prove to my manager that I'm doing my job. The one he sees me doing every day, and never has cause to discipline me for not doing.

The analogy I always use is that it's like me having to prove to you that I've made you a cup of tea by showing you that there's a teabag missing, and the kettle's hot, and the milk's been opened... rather than you just looking at the cup of tea I've just made you.

Massive cuts to save the NHS? A little common sense would be a big help...
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Sat 25 Feb 2012, 15:01, 6 replies)

I work for a healthcare company, who have all kinds of stupid rules, like:
You can't go out in the garden unless a patient is with you. Even if loads of litter has blown into the garden and I want to gather it up and bin it for health and safety reasons, I have to either take a patient out into the freezing cold with me, or leave it.

You can't drive a vehicle anywhere unless a disabled patient is a passenger in it. So when we needed to take loads of broken stuff to the tip, we had to load a wheelchair in the vehicle first, pile crap around the patient, then make two trips to the tip, instead of just one.
...etc. ...
(IHateSprouts is baking a huge pie shaped like an enormous pie, Sat 25 Feb 2012, 18:44, closed)

Uncommon sense, sadly.

(Victor Mildew going apeshit again, (aka, nightprowleroftheweb), Sat 25 Feb 2012, 23:42, closed)

On the other hand
I was general manager of small company, about 30 people.

I used to get regular complaints that the company had no coherent policy of appraising, and 'communication' with staff - despite the fact we all worked in an open plan office together.

So one day, heeding their requests I knocked up a form, cribbed from the Internet, with various 'are you happy / are you sad' questions, and a space for 'any other comments', etc. I also arranged 2 days where each of the staff could arrange a meetiing with me and another manager, to discuss anything at all they wanted to discuss.

Good. Of the 30 odd forms we gave out, 5 were returned. Of these, 2 people requested a meeting. One of them just wanted to say he liked working there. The other asked if we could get a new coffee machine for the kitchen.
(username failed moderation, Mon 27 Feb 2012, 11:12, closed)

Haha, oh dear :D
I'm not against appraisals as such, I think they're a good way of making sure everything/everyone is okay. I just can't see what's wrong with you telling your manager how you feel and your manager telling you how you're doing. All this "proving that you can do your job" is just nonsense - I have to present things like minutes of meetings to show that I attended meetings and took part, when my manager was chairing the meeting. It's total bullshit O_o

...aaaand relax :)
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Mon 27 Feb 2012, 11:52, closed)

I can understand it in a 15,000 employee mega corp,
but 30 of us, in one office . . .

If someone had had any kind of problem, I'd have known.

I think probably a few of them had a megacorp background, and not getting the form once a year (regardless of whether they filled it in) made them think we weren't doing it properly.

But fair's fair - we did buy a new coffee machine, so it was all worth the effort.
(username failed moderation, Mon 27 Feb 2012, 12:37, closed)

Wow - a company that actually cares about its employees!
O_o
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Mon 27 Feb 2012, 14:19, closed)