TLDR at bottom.
I do administrative work at a relatively small, private healthcare practice. I am the only person in the office who does the work I do, or knows basically anything about it. The work I do is relatively new in the field. It used to be rare that it was required, but now it is commonplace for a majority of companies. Even the healthcare providers don’t know much about it.
When I was hired 2 years ago, I was a receptionist. I started doing the work of some SEVERELY underperforming departments because it was negatively impacting patients/the practice & climbed the ranks. This underperformance has still never been addressed because the majority of “culprits” are friends/family of the office manager/CEO. In general management is shady; we have multiple employees who “WFH” but do not do their jobs (1 of them even had ALL of their responsibilities reassigned to other people & they’re still on the payroll!) but that’s another discussion.
I took over some responsibilities from ~7 employees (who were/are not part of the underperformance) & a new position was made from that. They briefly hired another person who helped me do the work but she quit after ~6mo & they never replaced her. I’ve been solely responsible for it since then.
Over the past 2yrs, the original staff whose work I took on has quit. The new staff was never trained to do this work. I’ve had to teach myself almost everything. Like I said, the work I do is relatively new. So even though there were people doing it before me, they barely knew the basics. From what I’ve gathered, most other practices struggle with this work.
Cut to ~1.5mo ago. The office manager calls me into her office and tells me that my work is being outsourced. No indication as to why. I’ve never been reprimanded or even talked to about my performance. They told me it would be starting 2wks from that point, but we are just now even MEETING with the company that my work is being outsourced to. We have the meeting this afternoon. My office manager messaged me today & asked me to bring “all of my ‘how to’ notes”.
So, basically, my job is having me teach A WHOLE SEPARATE COMPANY how to do what I do, and haven’t even told me WHY they’re doing this. The only thing I can figure is that I’ve started working part time as I restarted uni, but they okayed this (& many other employees do it), & haven’t communicated any issues with me.
I’m going to bring the bare minimum. I wasn’t really given “notes” in the first place, & what I do have is mostly informal since it was just for myself. I’m bringing the “how to” notes of another employee who is a friend of the office manager & does adjacent work, because it technically falls under the umbrella of what is being outsourced & she honestly sucks at her job. Might as well be petty & see if they’ll outsource her work too, or if she’s immune because she’s friends with management.
I have a few jobs lined up so I’m not terribly stressed but this is still such a weird, shitty situation. I really wanted to vent because, WTF?! Have any of you ever had something similar happen?
TLDR; I worked hard to become an essential, difficult to replace employee. No one else knows how to do what I do. Literally wrote the proverbial book on what I do & how to do it. Now, 2yrs later, my employer wants to outsource my job. I’ve never received negative feedback on my performance from anyone & haven’t been told why they’re outsourcing MY job instead of other positions that are underperforming/costing the practice a LOT of wasted money, and would be easier to outsource. We’re meeting with the company (in person, they are in our same damn town) this afternoon. My manager asked me to bring the “instructions” I had to make for myself from scratch to give to the company during this meeting; I am essentially training the other company to do my job.