(And you should expect nothing less and advocate endlessly for so much more)
edit: TLDR Lack of communication and absence of organizational hierarchy leads to failing your employees at every step of your business.
I have been working for a company for the past 14 weeks, doing mainly accounting duties, working in excel and about 3 or 4 other in-house programs that all actively work against each other and make my reporting take multiple hours or days when some of these processes should take less than 30 minutes max. On top of that all of these reporting programs round numbers differently so that we have 4 different ending numbers after I am complete with my processes. As someone in ACCOUNTING, where all numbers should be accurate and matching, this is mind-numbing.
When it comes to heirarchy in this company, nobody really knows anyone else's duties, supervisors, processes, or anything else almost at all. Because of this, entire DEPARTMENTS have issues with communication as they have a certain process in place that they do not know why they report things the way they do, they have been told by someone else to do it that way. Now multiply this by however many departments we have (this is unknown to me because we dont even have an org chart) and you have a web of unnecessary and irrelevant processes that further contaminate data at every point being handkeyed in or written down, scanned, and emailed to someone else.
I reached out to someone in IT that I had been told to reach out to before if I had any issues with one of my programs, and I asked if there was any way for me to import my data from spreadsheet to program instead of hand-keying in 103 entries one at a time. This email was forwarded to my boss's boss, who then emailed me and cc'd my boss and told me that this was not going to happen and they were working on a new way to do this part of my reporting but hadn't told me yet because they hadn't worked out all the details.
I would assume this all stems from an insane (probably unintentional) disconnect from greedy money hungry executives and willfully and blindly ignorant supervisors and that gets further disconnected from employees because of a lack of groundwork for successful communication and expectations across the company. Intentional or not, it’s been built this way from the start.
This also isn't the first company that I have worked for that has had this sort of problem, in fact, it is the 3RD company that I have worked for after/during college and ALL of them fall short in this area and I assume many more do as well in corporate America. I do not know where this will lead these companies in the future but right now in my mind, there is no possible way that this can end well for anyone other than the executives who have as much money as I will make in a lifetime who have no idea about anything other than “chart go up, money good” that will be fine if the company goes under because they can run to another company to rinse and repeat.