People that don’t get back to you. Right now we have a :
real estate agent
Monash health
wilson security
a broker
a planning permit
a building surveyor
an SEO
who haven’t (or aren’t) getting back to us. It’s chronic. We are constantly chasing and rechasing everyone up. No one does their job, they just want to get rid of you, kick the can down the road.
It sure is frustrating.
Until recently I worked at a university. Much as I would like to, I could not keep up with the emails. One of the issues is that I would not answer until I had the complete story and/or some proposals towards a complete solution of whatever was happening. But I recall some years ago when I worked in a different part of the organisation that my inbox would sit at around 1,000 all the time, the sheer volume was astounding.
Part of the reason I took a redundancy was that the restructure led to a new position which basically had BS added to the job. I know the BS would not likely happen because dealing with running the show was more than a full time job, the amount of unpaid overtime everyone at unis does is astounding and I was general staff, academics easily work 60-80 hours a week.
Someone I worked with had previously worked in the main student facing part of the uni. They were measured on the number of emails or walk ins they dealt with. This meant they were admonished when they took too long on one query. What was not measured was whether taking longer on a query meant less follow up visits or emails.
Added to this was the woeful systems which are astoundingly slow and clunky. You would sit there with a student and wait while the system pulled up the relevant record and then try to convince the system to allow you to fix issues.
The funny thing is that when I attended uni, back in the stone age before the internet, we had far less admin staff and things worked better. Yes, students had to deal with their issues with a lot less help, but things got done.
Email has some responsibility here, the volume of emails is beyond ridiculous and you can't justify the staffing to deal with them all. Online systems also have a responsibility here, they just don't work (someone needs to talk to the tax department, lodging a tax return is remarkably simple, lots of things already pre-filled, and even though my tax is a little complicated, I get it done in about 30 minutes - decent online systems are possible, just incredibly rare). We were sold the lie that "self-serve" online systems would mean we needed less staff, and then spent a massive amount of our time wrangling these systems so the students and academic staff could do what they needed to do.
It is a mess. I can't imagine what it would be like to deal with Centrelink, probably even worse to work there.
A lot of this stuff just needs to be simplified. The number of clunky and slow systems you face when dealing with any organisation just wastes a lot of time for those accessing the organisation and for the staff. The number of times you go to a website to do something simple like pay a bill and end up clicking through 20 screens to get anywhere is ridiculous. Thankfully our power company has the best bill paying site I have seen - one click from their main page to the bill paying page, then put everything (credit card, bill reference, amount paid etc) in on a very simple page and pay, all done in 2 screens - this is so rare. Our council is the opposite and takes quite an effort to pay the rates.
There must be a better way.
DS