My aunt speaks English as a second language, and she sometimes asks me to help her with the writing she has to do for her self-evaluations at work, because she wants to have someone help her with written grammar. I'm looking over the amount of writing she has to do for this evaluation and it's insane. 200-300 words on how she met each of this corporation's arbitrary “cultural qualities” and how she's improved over last year. It's totaling to over 10 pages in a Word document because she has to reflect on last year's responses as well–basically the length of a college term paper, for an average office job in healthcare.
Is this not insane to anyone else? You just wind up repeating the same old stuff over and over again, making yourself sound like an idiot, because these “qualities” are so vague. The prompts make her job sound like it's a cult, and even I, a native English speaker, find it difficult to figure out how exactly to respond to some of them. I feel like I'm studying for the SAT again, only this time with absolutely no expectation of getting anything out of it. It's frustrating because I know my aunt works incredibly hard, and all of this writing is just busy work that makes her feel insecure, and what kind of manager even has time to read all this bullshit anyway? Only a manager who is not doing their job.