Employee Corrective Action Form: Fill & Download for Free

You are not respected:Your preferences are used but assumed, not polled, and occasionally explained to you with no room for correction.Your broader personality and identity are prescribed by others.You are poorly managed:Multiple managers/superiors with conflicting demands.Work comes in lumps, so the only way to work at a constant pace is to guess what will be demanded of you next “emergency.”An individual is in a position to abuse their power over you.Your product is poorly planned:Expectations change multiple times inside deadlines.Decisions are made based upon the desired results, not the available paths to get to them.Never leaving “emergency mode” / “death march” on your product.Nobody making decisions talks to customers or to people who talk to customers.The following things are undervalued and under influence promotions/rewards:Prevention of emergencies.Increasing the efficiency of other people.Security.Automation.Maintenance.Usability.Fixing technical debt.Tracking and investigating reported issues.The following things are over valued and over influence promotions/rewards:Being loud/aggressive about your opinions/demands.Reinventing things without reducing technical debt.Reinventing things without integrating the new solution into the old system.Shiny proof of concepts which don’t get productized.Seniority.Social dynamics outside the workplace.Your environment is not conducive to bringing your superiors good results.You have no voice to escalate issues, but you will still face the consequences for them.Your environment (number of meetings, floorplan) is structured so you can only talk about your work and never do it.You can’t get the tools/resources you need to do your job.Deals you made with the company are not respectedYour job function is changed without your consent, giving you responsibilities in anything from being management to a secretary.Your boss can endlessly demand weekends and overtime.Your boss can cancel your vacation months after it was approved.Your boss lets you take your vacation but does not decrease your expected output during the time you are on vacation or plan deadlines around available person-hours.Your wages do not keep up with inflation.Personal employee incentives and company incentives are not alignedOffice politics dominate belief rather than results.It is not clear what sort of behavior/results will get you promoted.It does not seem that anybody’s else’s actions form any meaningful feedback loop for firing/promotion.There are no meaningful consequences for being terrible to your coworkers.

Before I started graduate school (which was always the plan) I worked for a major Indian software firm, that provides business consultancy services to big corporations mainly in the US, for about 2 years.Although I was only quitting to start school again I was not very pleased with the way their middle and lower-middle managements managed employees and projects. I had a thorough analysis of what was wrong. I told them the truth and explained in detail on what is the problem and what should be done to fix things. I explained these to the managers of those managing me. However, they were only interested in defending their middle management and not fixing their broken project management practices and personnel.Being someone who loved developing and managing software development it was sad to see them in denial. However, that was all I could do. They all appreciated my efforts and ability to manage people and run a project independently only after 1 year of experience in their company which I joined right after college. Despite their respect for my work they wouldn't want to change their ways.So, in a nutshell, usually it wouldn't matter even if you speak the truth, point out the problems and try to help them. They are unable to take any corrective action due to deeper problems in the organization's culture and perception of values.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Some of my other answers for your reading:Muthu's answer to How do you go from coding simple programs to coding advanced programs?Muthu's answer to Do entry-level software engineers usually do little work, which mostly are bug fixes and adding small functionality?Muthu's answer to What are real challenges for a software developer?Muthu's answer to What do I need to create an app that summarizes long form text to about 200 characters?

Problem solving requires both some skills, but especially a mindset.One thing you could do is to look at some of Paul Ackers YouTube contributions about “2 second LEAN”. His approach is not theoretical, but very practical. He tries to make his people aware of the small things that bother you and to come up with a simple hack. When you add up all these small improvements, they start to make an impact.If you really want to delve in deeper after that, you can look at how the Toyota A3 problem solving form works. This form asks questions like:What is the current state?What is your desired state?Are there comparable situations where the problem appears to be absent?What are the (root) causes of the problem? This requires the tenacity, not to stop at the first answer.Which possible corrective actions can you think of?What are the pros and cons of the suggested corrective actions?What (single) corrective action are you going to tryout?Who will do this by when?How are you going to MEASURE the results?When will we analyse the results and decide on next steps?Problem solving is a continuous process, also referred to as: PDCA.PLAN, analyse and select ONE next corrective action.DO, implement the selected corrective action.CHECK, measure the results, analyse the effects and decide on the next action.ACT, implement the new corrective action.You never do more than ONE corrective action at the time. If you implement 3 or 4 changes, you have no idea what was helpful and what not. The whole idea is to experiment. This means that some well intentioned corrective actions could prove to be a disaster. This method therefore only works if management understands the process and doesn't blame the people if an experiment provides poorer results. “Respect for people”, the core of Toyota's continuous improvement program, is often ignored in the Western world. This leads to improvements not being done by the employees who really know about the processes, but don't want to do it in fear of being blamed, so it is done by “Improvement departments”. This leads to implementation resistance.For really BIG problems it is obvious for most people that something needs to be done. It is the small problems and the enormous time wasters that are often not even noticed by people. Learning to see that, requires a different mindset.Teaching the managers and employees to even recognize these time wasters is often even more difficult. However, you NEED to get the people involved in order to solve this, as analysing the (unseen) problem yourself and then telling the employees how they should work from now on, will only create resistance. As soon as you leave the door, people will revert back to the old situation as they didn't buy in and it isn't their own solution.For that reason Toyota always asks the WORKERS to solve the problems. LEAN experts should never come up with solutions, they should train people and support the problem solving process which is DONE by the employees. Advantages are:Improvements have not been created in a board meeting, but on the floor. This way the improvements are practical and useful.People solve their own problems, no improvement resistance.