The Scarlet Letter Treatment

My bosses have a fantastic new way to motivate the team: public humiliation.

We have a 5-day close, meaning that we need to be ready to file financial statements five working days after the end of the month. Each of us has a task list with due dates. These tasks are all posted on our SharePoint site. Every day until we close, the list of incomplete tasks is mailed out to the entire team and anyone with an overdue task is called out publicly.

Our bonuses are dependent upon making our deadlines. We already have incentive to stay on track.

Fun fact! I had one task overdue on day 2. The task is described in the list as "Receive, review, and post cash journal entries from EMEA." I did not receive the journal entries by the end of the day yesterday, the due date. I received them at 4:16 this morning. They were reviewed and posted by 8:00, but they were still technically late, and somehow this is MY fault.

Let me rephrase this in case you missed anything pertinent. The Controller of Europe, the Middle East and Asia did not send me his six journal entries from his office in London. And I got bitched out for it.

"Golly gee, Jen, it's only day 2 and you're already behind? What can we do to help you get your job done on time?"

Um... what?

First of all, why is it not on their task list to send me the journal entries on time? Wouldn't that be the proactive way to put it?

Second, how is the behavior of the EMEA controller my responsibility? I have no authority over anything at all, so how am I supposed to tell someone 8 time zones away to get off his ass and send me his cash entries?

Third, and I think most importantly, I closed more than a dozen of my tasks early and the rest of them on time, but nobody sees that, they only see that I was late waiting for EMEA to send me work, which was done 20 minutes after I booted up my computer.

The only thing that this tactic will accomplish is that it will give more ammunition to people who want to have issues with other "team" members.

Accounting and office politics.

Two people that I used to work with gave me the same warning when they left the company. Both told me that if a particular coworker gave me a journal entry to upload, not to do it. This coworker tries to hand off journal entries to other people if she isn't absolutely certain that they're correct. That way, if the entry is questioned, she's out of the loop.

So this very coworker has done exactly that twice this month. In both cases, I couldn't understand what exactly she was trying to do. Basically, she knew that a particular account balance was wrong and what it should be, but she didn't know why it was incorrect or how to fix it. She asked me both times to correct her account and post the offset to one of my accounts. That way, my account would be wrong and hers would be correct.

The first time, I took the entry to the controller and he asked what it was. I immediately pointed to the coworker and dragged her in to explain it. She couldn't do it, so the entry was changed to only what I needed to post to my accounts. 

The second time, I asked the assistant controller why this was being sent to me to post. My coworker can post her own entries, so there's no reason for me to post them for her. I pointed out that I couldn't see where she was getting the number that she was getting and I didn't know where the offset was. (That was a lie. I know exactly what the offset is. That's beside the point. I wanted this little drama to play out to see what she would say.) I told the assistant controller that I didn't want to be responsible for an entry that I didn't understand. He agreed and told me to ask the coworker for more information and if I still couldn't understand it to talk to him. I sent her email back to her, asking her what the entry was supposed to be and where she was getting her number. I even suggested the correct offset account. Several hours later, she replied that she didn't know the offset and suggested an account that was completely incorrect and would have thrown off my OCI account, which is a high profile account in audits.(The correct offset is actually an intercompany P&L account that gets eliminated in consolidation, and is NEVER looked at by the auditors.) 

What this says to me is that my coworker has twice tried to dump work on me that would have corrected her accounts and thrown mine off. I think she knows that. I'm wondering if she knows I know what she's up to. 

This could get unpleasant. Well, you know. More unpleasant.