Ok, so I posted about this in another subreddit but ended up deleting it because I work in government and I was afraid of getting fired. This post is about the imposition of yet another misery being forced on us right now, but I need to give the background first:
I work in a state government agency running programs and helping with a huge variety of other projects/tasks on an ad hoc basis.
The Secretary of our agency is horrible. Infamously horrible. I have about 13 years of professional experience in the nonprofit and public sectors and this is far and away the most toxic work environment I've ever experienced. It's an open secret among staff that we all fear/despise the Secretary of our Agency. Not only are they incompetent and force all of us to waste our time on unproductive tasks that go nowhere and are obviously bad ideas from the get-go, but they berate and insult all of us on a regular basis. I had a meeting with the Secretary of a different agency at one point and was told, verbatim, “Oh, you work for -NAME-? They scare me.”
Okay, so that's the backdrop. Our Department has always had poor retention as long as I've been here, because most people can't stand working in this Agency for very long and dealing with the Secretary. One of the first things I was told when I started was that the Secretary didn't have an Executive Assistant at the moment because she treated the last one very poorly and eventually fired them. My own boss when I started told me that she woke up in the middle of the night sometimes in a cold sweat because she was anxious about having to interact with the Secretary the next day, knowing that she would be berated and insulted yet again. This boss of mine ended up quitting because she couldn't handle it anymore after I was there for just a few months. I could go on and on, there are too many examples to list and it's exhausting thinking about it.
Over the past 4 weeks, 3 more staff members have quit. We're always short-staffed in the Department, because they refuse to staff us appropriately and they can't retain people, but with 3 people quitting in such a short window of time I expect this to only get worse.
Now, on top of all of that, just when I thought “surely things can't get worse,” I was informed on Friday that starting tomorrow I'm going to be included in a “Desk Audit.” This is what a “Desk Audit” apparently means.
I am to keep a spreadsheet open at all times throughout the work day. Every 15 minutes, I am to stop what I'm doing, go to the spreadsheet, and describe how I spent those 15 minutes. I am not allowed to say something as simple as “took a phone call” or “reviewed emails.” The specific example I was given, was that if I was reviewing emails during that time, I need to include the number of emails I read and the number of replies I sent. E.g. “10:00 AM – 10:15 AM. Read 16 emails, sent 7 replies.”
I am to do this all day, every day, for the next two weeks, so the Secretary can “track my productivity.” Between the video call where I was first informed of this, and the follow-up email, I was told exactly four separate times that “this is not punitive.”
To make matters even, even worse, I also have to simultaneously track and submit a “Daily Telework Log.” I happen to work from home, and in addition to the 15 minute tracking of how I'm spending all of my time in real time, I'm going to be required to fill out an entirely separate spreadsheet where I log everything I'm doing and when I'm doing it, just not in 15 minute increments. For example, if I'm in a meeting from 11 AM – 12 PM, I'd enter the start and end time and who I met with.
This is all going to be so confusing and such a massive waste of time and productivity that I'm legitimately stunned that the Secretary is making us do this right now, again, in the midst of multiple staff members quitting.
I am of course job hunting as quickly as possible.