more a wwyd, issue with co-worker

[Windinthewoods]

I work as part of a small team. myself, and another colleague work very hard and deal with a certain amount of cases (it a sort of data entry). the third colleague has been doing very little which massively increased the work load for my colleague and myself increased as a result. I have provided reports which clearly who who does what, and evidenced the work load discrepancy.

our manager called a meeting with all of us to discuss a better share of the case load. However, lazy colleague, instead of admitting that she does not do much and agreeing to take up more, entered the meeting and said she did in fact 4x as much as the data shows but somehow, the system deleted her entries. Our line manager took her word (she has been working there many more years than me and my colleague) and clearly I and the other newer colleague are somewhat slow and we have been instructed to carry on as we did and to support lazy co-worker more since her work load is so much higher than presumed.

We are not sure what to do. Line manager will believe whatever lazy co-worker is saying and we feel really stupid for raising this issue. any thoughts? If I raise it again and point the fabricated numbers out, I will just look petty.

I would suggest to your manager that if the system is that poor you need a manual audit / check of all cases to actually keep track. Then you will have the absence to rebut when your colleague says. You can phrase it very neutrally.

Do you have a technical department or someone in HR which keeps track of the statistics on who produced what? You need concrete figures.

Many years ago I worked in a call center where the team leader told me I was "the slowest of all the new people". There were published figures each week of how many calls we had dealt with and out average time per call. The figures showed that in terms of productivity I was a good average. I took these figures to her and asked her to either retract what she had claimed or should I take them to the manager for verification. That certainly took the wind out of her sails.

As above. You need an audit, then it's no one being petty. It's possible that the system is faulty so they need to find out where the fault is occurring. I've worked and still work with systems that log what you're doing , one week the system lost a whole week's work overnight, senior colleague wouldn't believe that was possible accused me of not doing the work, the audit proved that it was a system fault.
Also, if she's been there a long time it's possible to find work arounds that you or your other colleague don't know about (also known as how to fiddle the systems) so ask for support in maintaining these high levels of work that are 'unfortunately' unrecorded and the line management will soon see what's happening

We have the figures which are clear. Colleague is saying she did a lot more but figures cannot be retrieved as the system deleted them for a reason. but they cannot be retrieved, as these figures are a complete fabrication. You cannot extract something which was never there.

auditing will cost money and resources, they will never do that.

She really is not doing the work. The department she works for does only generate about 1/4 of the workload she is claiming to do. We have the figures. she just lies about them. She is very sly.

can you somehow keep a manual list?

impossible given the volume and the nature. We do not need it. we can extract all the data. it's all there.

When I say audit I don’t mean a formal external one. You just need to work out how to track it manually and then cross-check with the system and then present that evidence.

Then they need to monitor the co worker to see how she's imputing these figures which always mysteriously get deleted, perhaps shes fallen into a habit of using the wrong bit, one day would prove that they are fictional. It's either that or you just accept what shes doing and stick to your own workload religiously

If you can’t do that then there is no obvious solution, and like many posts on mumsnet the behaviour is frustrating but little we can suggest to help.

ok but presumably you can, at the press of a button, get daily/weekly/monthly stats to back up your case?

yes and I did. And co-worker said the system deleted her (many) entries, hence they are not showing. Bit it's not the case, she never did the work in the first place. It's the lamest excuse ever and she got away with it.

Can the work be allocated to a user and you each have 1/3 allocated. What she does or doesn't do with her allocation is up to her - and easily monitored.

If she's saying she's doing more because she's entering the data multiple times, rather than she's doing it and then it's deleted and you are picking it up resulting in you doing more, that's more difficult. But if she's the only one having that 'problem' then it rather suggests user error, which I'm sure is not the look she's going for! 😂

Run the ‘who did what’ report weekly and send to your manager. She surely can’t keep claiming her stuff doesn’t get logged without it raising suspicion like triggering some sort of IT audit or it being asked whether she’s committing some sort of error that means it’s taking her a lot longer than it should.

Is there a way of showing that the data she says she entered but got deleted never got generated in the first place, or that you or your non-lazy colleage handled the data?
So if she says ‘I worked on case A and it all got deleted’ can you say ‘the records show that there was no case A from that department, or, all the data for case A has actually been entered and it also shows that I or n-l colleague entered it’?

I’d keep producing reports and flag up that there must be something persistently wrong with her methods or there is a software glitch that needs investigating.

Suggest to your manager that the system is also deleting the same proportionate amount of your own work.

If she says 25% of hers is missing say yes so is 25% of mine and other colleagues. So proportionately we are still doing more than you. She cant surely argue that the system can differentiate just her and delete.

BTW I suspect an IT department would be able to confirm that her work isn't beibg entered and deleted. Indeed they could set up a keyboard Monitor.

Being petty, I'd be tempted to go back and (with your other colleague) say something along the lines of: "I hadn't realised but loads of ours have been deleted too. We'd done <insert enough to look like it's similar amounts to lazy colleague>. We must keep a manual entry."

Lazy colleague can't dispute this without giving away they've made it up too.

I (I work in IT on very large database systems), would suggest that you raise and then escalate an issue to the development team or vendor that supports the system on the basis that it is deleting significant amounts of data and is not fit for purpose. You can point out in the technical details that they will undoubtedly request that this only happens to the data input by one individual.

Actually, expressing (faux) concern about missing data and the impact that could have and the urgent need for the system to be investigated could be a way of getting to the truth of it - colleague is bullshitting.

Don’t do this!! What if they audit it or go back to the development team or whatever? OP would look no better than the lazy colleague if it all came out and would be risking her job.

Don't lie. Do insist they keep tracking the numbers. If yours don't improve (as we expect,) and she claims hers are still being deleted, then you need to ask why. IT need to check. If she's the only one with vanishing records, her process needs checking, because either she is failing to save them or is making some other error thst deletes them - if you were all following the same process, then you shoukd experience the same errors.

Also, I don't know what your work is, but if we had records/tickets being deleted from the system, it would be an issue, because it would be removing a record of what is being done to deal with customer problems. So they need to establish whether it's system error, human processing error (or human lieing), and deal with it appropriately.

If they really won't look further, if you have an internal whistleblowing process, I might look at that. And I'd be updating my CV and looking around elsewhere.