Two Orders of Magnitude.

Here's a neat little tool for your HR surveys.

www.surveymonkey.com

For approximately 200 bucks a year you can design your own surveys and it does a decent job of collecting, analyzing and providing data. Even EHRIS guy was able to sell this to my penurious management.

I designed a quick 360 feedback that our department heads wanted and had it ready in a day (the wait for "executive final approval" could take weeks, but at least my part is done. ).

Our outsourced provider of eval software gave us a quote of 20,000 to do essentially the same process, but with less flexibility and restricted access to data for further analysis..

Beware the groupthink that says outsourcing always saves money.

100 Articles Every Human Resources Pro Should Read

interesting stuff from Bootstrapper here.

Please Try to Understand This Before One of us DIES

I just went through the last three days explaining the same thing about our eval system to the same person at least 15 times. This person is an officer and should know better, but apparently, power and authority results in brain damage so I guess we should grant her some slack.

In consideration of the ADA I did not say to her "please try to understand this before one of us dies"*.
Instead I explained it yet again and then participated in some team building group mocking exercises with some HR coworkers.

I did actually get to use this phrase at a previous job (along with "I could spend the rest of my life having this conversation". )

So the outsourced payroll service we used had a minor snafu which messed up some of the fields in the payroll data. Everyone was paid correctly and on time (whew).
However, some reports which use those fields were not quite correct.
Normally, I wouldn't have cared or even noticed since we had a payroll department to handle such things, but one department head insisted on getting this payroll information from HR.
We ran and sent these reports for the monthly pay period and I get the inevitable email.
----------------------
To Evil,
Please review the payroll information on this report1, it seems to be missing information.
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From Evil
Can you give me an example what is missing, I do not process the payroll and the info looks pretty similar to previous reports so I wouldnt know what to look for.
Is it possible that there was an issue with payroll?
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To Evil,Who would I check with?
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From Evil,
I would start with payroll, they are the experts. Ive copied them on this reply and perhaps they can assist.
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From Payroll to all,
There was an issue with the dates on the last check run, and it should even out on the next month's run. The individual checks were ok, but some accumulators will be off, the next months run will have the correct ytd totals
----------------------
To Evil
What can you do about this.
----------------------
From Evil
Run it again next month with the updated totals
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To Evil
Ok thanks.
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the next day
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To EvilPlease review report2, some of the numbers do not seem right.
----------------------
From Evil
See attached message from PAYROLL that was sent to us yesterday
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To Evil
Ok, Thanks.
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Day 3
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To Evil
There seems to be an issue with the reports we have been getting for several months, these employees are missing from the reports
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Evil checks back several months
From Evil
Hi, Ive attached excerpts from the reports going back a few months, as you can see, that cost center with the employees is on there, but I would not consider recent reports because of the problem with the payroll files.
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To Evil
As you can see from the last report, that cost center is not on there!!!!!!!
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Evil leaves his office and pays a visit; brings a printout of the definition of "recent" and some choice quotes.


The next month's run brought other issues, but my VP told our dept to "ignore the f'ng idiot and refer him to me from now on" (I miss that VP) Actually, I miss that entire company, but it's resting in pieces and that is another tale.




*an official evilHRISguy pat on the back to anyone who can identify the source of that phrase without google.