onetime2

So, my company has a system of awards for recognizing efforts of employees who go above and beyond the call of their job duty. There are three levels of award. One for relatively minor levels of help which make your job easier or to recognize something "nice" that someone has done (these can be redeemed for some random junk they throw in a supply cabinet like shirts, mugs, tool kits, umbrellas, etc). A second tier which provides monetary awards from $50 to $350 and are supposed to be awarded when someone has really put themselves out and helped to achieve something that benefits the company. The third level is a combination of money and stock well into the thousands of dollar range for really significant contributions over the long term which have helped the company to improve performance, retain quality people, or solved significant problems.

I've been in my new department for about 6 months or so and have seen only two examples of noteworthy achievement (that should say a lot about the department) that I felt should be recognized. The first was the consistent efforts by one individual to influence and change the way information is handled and used to drive sales. On several different projects (all of which were hamstrung by lack of communication between departments and no ability within the departments to gather critical information) this employee came up with and presented plans on how to improve the situation and even got people to buy into it without it being forced down their throats. Put him up for a $300 award and it was turned down by management because they felt that overall he wasn't performing in his specific job responsibilities to warrant it. Okay. I still stood up and said that his exceptional performance in these other areas should be recognized. But it was still shot down.

The next instance had me giving several presentations to my department about a salesforce automation system which gathers critical information from our field sales force and which analysts in my department need at least a basic understanding of. None of them had the first clue about it so I volunteered to teach them. I prepared classes that were done over the course of several weeks but had no way to access the system in the conference rooms since I've only got a desktop system. I made arrangements with a member of the sales administration department to borrow his laptop. He provided it on extremely short notice and was incredibly flexible since my department manager wouldn't set firm dates for the presentations. Some were accomplished on the dates we originally targeted while others were pushed all over the place. This guy had to install several different databases over the course of the class, make the laptop available on half a dozen different occasions, and he even delivered it to me in my building every time (his building is about ten miles away but he'd drop it off on his own time). Without his help there's no way these classes would ever have taken place. I put him up for a $250 award and would have liked to have put him up for more but figured I'd go lower in the hopes it would be approved. No luck. My manager's supervisor feels it was only borderline worth this level of award and decided a piece of crap from the closet would be more appropriate.

Sorry to bore you guys with this but I'm finding it difficult to believe how assinine this place is when you can't even use the systems they have in place to reward the behaviors that the company needs to continue to achieve their goals. I've got another coworker who spent 12 hours in a meeting (9 am to 9pm) to support a business unit that can't even point to one way they can improve their performance and she won't get shit in recognition. Unbelievable.

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