Don’t Make Things Harder For Yourself

I work for an online retailer. One of my coworkers is, by and large, quite good at her job with a very low margin of error; the only issue is that she’s also very slow — “some days only does half of what any other individual does” slow.

One day, I offered to shadow her and figure out what she was doing differently that made her take so much longer than the rest of us. It didn’t take long to figure out why. Any time she processed an order, answered an email, or directed an inquiry, she “had” to “research” it. And by “research,” I mean she had to look up not just the history of that order but also whether any other orders were even similar, never mind duplicates, the customer’s payment history, whether any emails existed that might or might not be related, etc., etc. She jumped straight past “cautious” and into “paranoid” territory.

I had to say something when she spent ten minutes researching an order that should have taken about thirty seconds.

Me: “Let me ask you something. You know we have an accounting department to handle the financial side, yeah?”

Coworker: “Of course.”

Me: “And you know that the sales team are the ones that coordinate communication, and we just handle the order management?”

Coworker: “Yeeeaaahh?”

Me: “And the shipping department are the ones who confirm that the account they give us is correct and the products they picked are actually back there?”

Coworker: “Okay, what’s the point of all this?”

Me: “I’m just curious about when they all started giving you their paychecks to do their jobs for them.”

Coworker: “They don’t! But we need to get these orders processed and through the system!”

Me: “Yeah, but our job is to open a new order, hit the ‘address check’ button, and make sure that the shipping account is the right type for the company they choose. That is what we send emails about if there’s a problem and print the ticket to the warehouse if there isn’t.”

Coworker: “I know that!”

Me: “Okay. But. If there’s anything with pre-payments or overdue invoices, you set the status to ‘Accounting’ and they pull it up; if there’s anything wrong with the products, the warehouse will let us know when they get picked. You’re spending ten or fifteen minutes doing other people’s jobs for them — without the tools they have so they need to do them again anyway.”

Coworker: “Well, look, in all my other jobs, as soon as your name or number was on an order, that was your order, and as soon as anything went wrong with it, that was your fault, so you had to follow up on everything!”

Me: “I’m… sorry you used to work for jerks? We’re not jerks here, and the system shows who worked on it and when, so you don’t get blamed for someone else’s mistake!”

Coworker: “Okay, well, what about these?” *Grabs a stack of papers* “All of these are backorders I have to check every single day to see if they’re ready to ship!”

I stared at her for a few seconds, picked up the entire stack, and wordlessly dropped it into a box of papers to be recycled. She started freaking out. I held up a hand.

Me: “The purchasing group places orders every day based on what’s on backorder and how much has been sold. [Coworker #2] and I schedule backordered items when they come in, and part of our daily routine is also checking to make sure things aren’t lingering. You don’t have to check those.”

Coworker: “Okay, so you’re probably gonna tell me I don’t need to follow up on the pre-pay orders, either, then.”

Me: *Nods with a smile* “Not unless you’re in accounting or they tell us it’s reached the cut-off and items need to be removed to give to other orders.”

Coworker: “Then what are we even supposed to be doing?!”

Me: “Checking new orders for errors, processing the order change requests, and double-checking the shipping labels before orders go out. If you want to check the ‘revision’ bucket in the morning, go right ahead; that can be your job. Once you start focusing on the things that are actually our duties and get your speed up with that, we’ll start going over other reports and things to check.”

She’s better than she used to be, but she still tends to overthink things and assume that even asking for clarification will get her into “trouble” like at her old job. She literally starts almost every question with, “I know I’ll get in trouble, but—” despite never actually getting in trouble.

I’m starting to wonder whether her old job/s was/were actually that traumatizing or if she’s just naturally that paranoid and assumed day-to-day routine was her getting into trouble, while the other people there got away with letting her do all THEIR work for them!