To be at my wits end with colleague?

[pizzaissooverrated]

She’s not bad at her job, but she is careless and does not follow any of the mandatory safety protocols. So for e.g. (just an example of something similar this isn’t what happened) instead of paying someone £500 she’d pay them £5000 or £50 and incur a late payment fine and wouldn’t even send the invoices to a second colleague to double check like we’re supposed to.

It’s ok 90-95% of the time but when it goes wrong it means a lot more work and overtime and stress for the whole team.

Everyone has to tiptoe around her because she is not open to feedback at all. She cries and now everyone treats her with kid gloves!! No use complaining to management because apparently her family’s company is a major client and her dad wants her to have a job after some incident so the best we can do is “help as much as we can and hope she gets bored and quits”.

I’m not looking for another job because our industry has massive retrenchments left and right and frankly I can’t find anywhere else that pays even close to as well.

Not so much an AIBU but has anyone been in a similar situation? What do you do?

Check sheets for her to follow & check off.

I'd agree with the checklists but I'd also suggest that while she gets to grips with the checklists, someone mentors her to make sure that she understands why she has to check items off and how to do it.

Perhaps it might be time to put together some job aid documentation (step by step guides) on how to do daily tasks. Make it so that it's done as a training for everyone type thing and so that any new starters have helpful guides to refer to when they take on these roles (so that she can't twist it around to say that anyone is being unkind or mean or bullying her by telling her to refer to the job aids).

I would also get her to run through the checklists with her mentor/manager/team leader on a daily basis to begin with. If there are accounts being paid, and if she isn't great with numbers, then perhaps she does have strengths in other areas that could be used and she would be moved to those areas?

Perhaps she is struggling
Tell her what she is doing wrong
Ask her why she thought she made the mistakes and what she thinks the consequences of such mistakes there may be
No one client is worth the bollocky mess she occasionally makes. Nor is the fact that others have to clean up her mess good for moral

We do have this. We have step by step guides presented during her orientation, in hardcopy, and on a pdf on her computer that is actually a list of what has to be done but she sees them all as suggestions and will skip steps to save time/effort. My manager has explained how each step is important but her way “works fine” according to her so she’ll say she’ll follow all the steps but she doesn’t.

It does “work fine” most of the time to be fair but when it doesn’t (like now!!) I’m stuck having to clean up the mess and sort things out with various people.

She’s not bad at her job and it’s not a weak point for her. Her degree is actually very relevant to what she does and she does most of it well enough. The issue is that she’s careless and will take the path of least resistance which is quicker and takes less effort, yes, but doesn’t have the safety and accuracy of our usual system.

Are you senior or responsible for checking her work, if not then suggest the manager double checks and sorts out any problems or errors.

Why doesn't she have to clean the mess up? That way it would be a sufficient pain in the arse that doing it properly would be the easy option.

Agree she should be fixing her mistakes. Might motivate her to make less of them

I’ll have to be a bit vague but the way it works is that her job doesn’t involve any communication with any external parties. When she does something wrong, I’m the one who has to deal with external parties and other departments.

To build on my first e.g. let’s say we order £500 of something. She messes up and they withhold our delivery or they don’t send the full quantity. Now down the line there’s a shortage and I have to rearrange things, find alternatives, consult the other departments etc. If she keys in the wrong quantity then now we’re left with a shortage or surplus and I have to email/call everyone again, wait for everyone to reply, and then find a solution. It’s not something she can fix sadly.

Is she doing ten things at once?